Owen,
I appreciate that you’re thinking about flow-through/long-term effects and definitely agree we need more discussion and understanding in the area.
My “hostility” (although it isn’t that extreme =] really) is primarily due to the propagation of the assumption that “human-focused causes have positive significant flow-through effects while non-human animal-focused causes do not.” We have a lot more research to do into questions like this before we have that sort of confidence.
So the danger here is that impact-focused people might read the post and say “Wow, I should stop trying to support non-human animal-welfare since it doesn’t matter in the long-run!” I realize that your personal view is more nuanced, and I wish that came across more in your post. The possible flow-through effects: (i) promoting antispeciesism, (ii) scope sensitivity, (iii) reducing cognitive dissonance, and many more seem perfectly viable.
Hope that makes sense.
If that is your assertion, I feel the post is misrepresenting your view as something much stronger (i.e human-focused causes have significant positive impact that non-human animal-focused causes do not, therefore human-focused causes are better). This is disingenuous and caused our negative reactions.