Director of Learning and Fellowships—Electric Sheep
Outreach and Fundraising Coordinator—Animal Ethics
Aditya_Karanam
Karma: 130
Conduct research to map the source of harms and pleasures that they go through, alongside the weight of their interests. Basically their life history.
Identify interventions to reduce the harms that they go through in a cost effective way.
If they are r strategists and intrinsically are prone to high juvenile mortality, identifying fertility management measures to decrease the harms that they go through.
Interesting post, curious if your motivation with this post is to promote that animal advocates eat animals? Anyway, I have a couple of objections here.
I’m not convinced that vegan diets are inherently less healthy. The evidence cited is mostly observational and confounded, while large cohort studies and position statements from bodies like the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics show that well-planned vegan diets can support good health at all stages of life. Poorly planned vegan diets can cause deficiencies, but a better direction to move towards is how to make them easier and safer. Robust supplementation, food fortification, cultivated meat, and clearer nutritional guidance/planning are some examples of better solutions.
Not eating sentient beings generally minimizes harm more effectively than eating some of them. That is true both in the direct sense, since fewer beings suffer and die, and in the indirect sense, since it avoids reinforcing speciesism. Those second-order effects could easily outweigh any claimed benefits of selectively eating animals. For that reason, I still think the principle of avoiding the consumption of sentient beings wherever possible and practicable is the stronger position.
Interesting question. Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies (CEERT) was recommended by Brian. This organisation focuses specifically on efficiency improvements and renewable energy, rather than habitat or biomass preservation. You can view more of his reasoning here . There are probably other effective charities out there that focuses on energy efficiency and renewable energy.
Upvoted! I liked the reasoning of your post, Highlighting the qualitative difference assuming non aggregationism , to show how they both need to be represented in their own seperate horrors. I think most animal activists use this analogy mainly to immediately communicate the badness of animal agriculture industry. Which is that since most of the audience is densensitized to animal torture, comparing it to holocaust, provokes the audience member to compare and justify how it is different from the holocaust. This might be net negative strategy but might occasionally cause a shift in the attitude. I am not sure of it’s effectiveness, however I think your article makes a good case.
Not that I know off , but this was a study published by Animal Ethics about Wildlfires in Madrid in case this could be helpful—https://www.animal-ethics.org/animal-ethics-is-funding-a-study-of-the-effects-of-fires-on-animals-in-the-wild/
Initial thoughts: Very much needed! Strong upvote. Also found the AA Africa study of Asia quite useful. Context sensitive country based research is the need of the hour. And once we have the problems/solutions, I also feel we currently fall short on the ability of operationalising the solutions within orga. Looking forward to more SER work in Animal advocacy especially in global South.
I find it hard to convince myself that acts that promote speciesist attitudes (harming animals and ignoring their interests) wilfully can cause the best consequences for animals in the long term. It is currently empirically hard to compare the suffering due to hobby fishing, large scale fishing, bottom trawling, where fishes are asphyxiated, pierced etc. with that of being eaten by predators/disease/other natural harms,. I think a better strategy is to raise concern about animal suffering (anti- speciesism) and the natural harms they suffer, while also researching what their welfare in the wild is and best ways to improve their wellbeing. Actively harming them in pursuit of saving them from wild harms seems to me sub optimal in terms of the overall consequences , at best we could promote sterilants or transform their ecosystemic factors to reduce suffering. It’s also important to consdier the flow through effects.
Is there a pdf version available for the Handbook?
Animal Ethics is looking to hire people from Asia and Africa.
”Are you concerned about the plight of domesticated and wild animals? Do you want to make a positive change for all sentient beings? So do we, and we are looking to make contact with people in Africa and Asia who are interested in working with us. We periodically have paid and volunteer positions. If you think you might be interested now or in the future, please get in touch. See more details at the bottom of this blog post or fill out our expression of interest form by August 15.”
+1 , it is stuck on the Captcha check stage for me.
I would be interested in the following
Theory of change for animal liberation/ animal rights/ animal advocacy- Tobias Baumann/ Jamie Harris or someone from Animal Think Tank/ Open Phil—Maybe a talk followed by discussion—I think we still lack clarity on what kind of milestones should the movement optimise for the collective progress and structural changes needed, I think the development of the EAA movement is still quite dispersed and needs more discussion and coherence.
Talks exploring different considerations on Wild Animal Suffering both regarding outreach and academic research- Maybe representatives of Animal Ethics- Oscar Horta based on the recent blog post they published, or Wild Animal Initiative.
Session on insect welfare policy- I think we are at the right time to have an influence over the insect farming industry. Given that it is at a nascent stage, and the stakes are high, my opinion is it is of high importance to invest more discussion into this area. Speakers—Maybe from Rethink Priorities new org on Insect welfare?
Also I think learning more about the animal welfare movement from less talked about regions would be valuable i.e South east Asia, South America, Africa
Recent developments in the cellular ag/ clean meat industry and discussion on their technological feasibility- folks from New Harvest and GFI?
Has the result analysis of the above survey been shared somewhere?
The authors cautiously conclude that “striving to eat a plant-based diet with lower intake of animal fats may be linked to better mental health” and express hope that, with further research, plant-based diets could one day be a considered as part of “front-line treatment for mood disorders.”-
https://faunalytics.org/veganism-help-reduce-stress-anxiety/
Thank you for writing this thought provoking post. I relate with a lot of your thoughts. I faced a similar situation with cockroaches and ants that had infested my home, it was quite easy to just kill them. But pondering upon it I realised it would be very bad for them, I also considered the fact that maybe it’s net positive to kill them now, because most future insects that’ll be born would have a negative life. I tried vinegar, bay leaves, traps, they didn’t work. Finally I bought a low power vaccum cleaner, sucked them out and relocated them to a park far away from my home. Most of them were unaffected by the suction however few did die. It was quite stressful decision. Maybe their life would be worse in the park than at my home, but I guessed it to be a better option than killing them myself. Fortunately, now I’ve found herbal non toxic vegan repellants to keep away cockroaches, ants and other insects which is working quite well. Just because the status quo of our society does not impose duties towards insects, does not mean that we shouldn’t do our best to try reduce the harm as much as feasible. But I agree that we should accept responsibility for the consequences of our actions irrespective of the size of the sentient being.
I think it’s also of noteworthy to include the trillions of sentient farmed animals that are and will be exploited and are being put through intense suffering for rest of the future as the demand for animal products continues to increase . Also the gigantic scale of suffering of the wild animals most of whom suffer and die in painful ways soon after coming into existence.
Interesting. I think it might be useful to have more studies on this. For example, one uncertainty is about net welfare across time, i.e if it decreases the net population or if some other group of animals fill in to consume the available resources. Also since it mentions that anthropogenic noise increases cortisol by 90-120x in fishes, I wonder how we should trade off against the stress this causes animals in short term vs the population reduction.