Even amongst academic conferences, this seems quite outside of my personal experience. I’ve been to a small number of academic animal law conferences and—while there is plenty to complain about from an EA perspective—most people were there because they cared about animals and the food was all vegan.
ThomNorman
Karma: 468
Thanks—should be fixed now
Hi Ben, thanks for responding. I think you raise some valid points, we hope that we are avoiding being dishonest as we agree with you that we shouldn’t be.
What the standard donor gets is to control where the bonus fund goes. What the bonus donor gets is to help encourage more donations. We do explain this on our site.
One broader point I’d make is that there is a real tension between being very precise and transparent and being concise enough that we won’t switch most people off with too much information too soon. We’re trying to tread that line, but we welcome critical feedback where we might not be getting the right balance.
Hi Jeff—thanks very much for taking the time to comment. In the case of FarmKind, however, I think this specific critique is a little wide of the mark. We address this specific concern on our page about the matching fund (just click ‘More detail on how it works’ for a drop down with a detailed review). Link here.
In short, donating with us determines where the money in the bonus fund goes, including which favourite charity they choose, which super-effective charity they choose, and how much to allocate to each.
More broadly, we’ve tried to be as transparent as possible about how things work with our entire system. In an ideal world, we’d have loads of information right up front with plenty of footnotes, but we have to recognise that this is going to put off the majority of donors. So, we’ve had to strike a balance: all the info is there if for those who want to look for it.
But, we’re always listening and happy to take on board critiques :)
Congrats on the launch! Especially on getting up and at it so quickly :) The website looks great!
This is an interesting piece, Sam, thanks for writing it.
These are my almost entirely uninformed thoughts: based on a tiny bit of background knowledge of PLF and general observations of the animal movement.
It seems quite likely to me that PLF is coming to animal ag whether we like it or not. If this is the case, the important question isn’t so much “should we promote PLF or do some other campaign?” but rather “how should we respond to PLF?”
At the end of your piece, you say “our role (if any) must be strictly defensive and containment-focused”—I can get behind most of this sentence, apart from the “(if any)”. Surely, for many of the reasons you set out earlier in the article, to not engage with PLF at all would be borderline neglence on the part of our movement: the risks that this transforms the industry and locks in practices are just so high that we can’t afford to ignore this development.
So then the question is what should we do about it? I think I would favour a broader approach than you suggest which places multiple bets.
It seems plausible to me that some organisations should be trying to contain/prevent this new technology. I think such a campaign could bring animal advocates, smaller farmers and the general public together in quite a powerful way that would be able to get decent media/political traction at least in NA and Europe.
However, it still seems like there is a big risk that such a campaign would overall fail. This might be because, for example, the lure of big profits from allowing such practices outweighs any political pushback, or even simply because other countries (e.g. China) do adopt these practices and are then simply able to provide imports much more cheaply, effectively ‘offshoring’ the cruelty by displacing domestic production.
For this reason, I would favour some organisations also taking a much more ‘good cop’ role, working behind the scenes with PLF developers and regulators in a much more cooperative way in addition to campaigns opposing PLF. If PLF does become widespread, there are potentially very large wellbeing gains to be had by influencing the development of the technology at an early stage and maybe even locking in some welfare considerations.
I don’t think it is completely naive to think this is possible: For example:
the food industry doesn’t just compete on price alone, so including welfare could be a product differentiator for PLF creators and/or users;
the combination of some outside public pressure might convince PLF creators to introduce some welfare considerations voluntarily in an effort to head off the risk of more onerous regulations if they were seen as making no welfare concessions.
So, while I’d agree that we should be pretty suspicious about PLF and not welcome it with open arms. I think that we could be making a serious strategic error by either ignoring it (this seems the worst possible option) or providing only implacable opposition across the board.