PhD student (in bioethics) in the National University of Singapore
Fai
Karma: 1,939
I have recently done a bit of research on the intensification of animal agriculture in Africa. I have a few comments to make in response to yours.
I am very confident that people in poor countries like Uganda eat way less animal products than the global average. But I am not sure that they all don’t eat factory farmed animal products. I think I have quite a high level of belief that your claim about the meat consumption patterns of the people in the areas in Uganda you work in. But I don’t think we should generalise to: “All people in very poor countries don’t eat factory farmed meat”.
I think a very important fact we should recognize is that factory farming clearly exist and is booming and intensifying quickly in Africa, including Uganda, or even poorer countries such as Burundi and South Sudan. This means that the meat-eating problem (convinced by JWS’s comment that we should change the wording, even though I don’t agree about all the things said in the comment), if it is a problem at all, is going to get worse in Africa and other parts in the world with many people in extreme poverty.
A very important note needs to be introduced here: I think we one species of farmed animals we should focus a lot on is the chicken (and also fish farming, maybe in 3-5 years time). Some facts about chicken farming in Africa:
It’s one of the cheapest type of meats poor people can afford, in a lot of regions.
Many aid providing foundations/agencies/charities are interested in, if not executing, using chicken farming as a poverty aid intervention. (1, 2, 3, 4)
While it’s hard to find a single broiler chicken farm in North America and Europe raising broiler chickesn in cages (with the exception of Russia and Ukraine—no intention to create drama), there seems to be currently a large wave of new broiler farms emerging in Africa that are going for caged broiler systems
For instance, chicken farming equipment producers in China are very actively trying to sell broiler cages to Africa, and according to my research, 10 broiler cage producers from China (out of 18 I found) are trying to do that.
(Sorry, I can’t share the links or details of my research on this topic here, as I worry about potential info hazards.)
The emergence of new technologies (such as modern caged broiler systems, digital gadgets, and eventually AI) and the popularization of both newer and older technologies (such as vaccines, drugs, feed formulas, and caged layer systems) will drive costs down further.
I think the rise of intensified, caged system raised chickens (both layers and broilers) in Africa (also some countries in Asia and Latin America) should alert and worry us that the “meat eating problem”, if it does not pose a huge problem now, could become much more severe in the future because of the rising per capita consumption of animal products coming from horrific systems. While there might be a lot of strategic/signalling/philosophical issues thinking and calling life-saving or poverty alleviating interventions as “saving meaters/people who harm animals”. I think we should definitely oppose to making things worse for animals in order to lift people out of poverty.
A less important response to your another point: I think it’s very unclear whether farmed animals raised in free range condittions in poor countries live net-positive lives. Firstly, many deadly diseases are very common among free-range (and intensive) chicken farming, such as Newcastle Disease. And awareness to use vaccines to reduce such diseases is nowhere near widespread. Secondly, debeaking of chickens is very common (including in Uganda), and presumably mostly without anesthesia/pain relieve. Thirdly, it seems very common to transport chickens like this (and in some cases kept tied like this even after arriving at the market, until they are sold) in Africa and poorer parts of Asia. Fourthly, I saw some nasty slaughters—let’s say they are at least as nasty as most chicken slaughters in the world. Finally, we have to consider that chickens raised for meat don’t live for many days in their life to compensate for these pretty intense suffering. IMO it’s more likely than not that most chickens raised in free range conditions in poor countries live net-negative lives.
(I weak upvoted your comment and chose “disagree”, even though I don’t 100% disagree with you.)
Thank you for writing the post! I hope more people in EA will pay more attention on this strategy.
For instance, I think it will be even more important to make use of story telling to advocate for wild animal welfare.
I also want to point out that story telling can be (and should be, IMO) combined with science. For example, these comics by Joan Chan are pretty effective..
written about my Richard Chappell
Minor stuff: Is this meant to be “written about by Richard Chappell ”?
Thank you for writing this! I will keep this in mind and add it to the list of important issues when I think about strategies to help animals in China.
Hi Michael. I think AI can reduce cost spent on feed. It can’t change the cost of the feed but it can change how much they need to use. For example, a lower mortality rate already means less feed per kg of product.
Second, feeding could be optimized by reducing wasted feed. For example, there are AI systems built for fish farming that uses image recognition to identify the number of uneaten pellets in the water as an indicator or whether the fish is overfed at the moment. If yes, the system lowers the number of pellets dispensed and this reduces the number of pellets uneaten and get dropped to the bottom of the pond of leak from the bottom of a cage in the case of fish farms on the sea. Another way of doing it is to tell from the activeness of the fish. Or combined.
AI could also improve the whole feeding scheme to improve the feed conversion ratio.
Hi Aashish, thank you for your reply!
Re: your first question, I think I am very concerned about the impact of PLF techs in the global north, but it’s kind of inevitable already—it will happen anyway. I think the question is how to make it develop into more animal friendly versions.
Re: your second question, I am starting to discuss with fellow advocates within the momvent on strategies to react to AI/PLF development in factory farming. I think I only have rough ideas that might be worth discussing further, but nothing worth actually implementing yet.
I think I don’t have good answers to your last question because I know close to nothing about factory farming (or anything) in Africa.
Congratulations!
I wonder if you have any official view/guidance on when and when not to do cross posting (AAF + EA forum), for people who want to post on the Animal Advocacy Forum?
I haven’t spent any meaningful time thinking about this question in the context of Africa. But I have a sense of worry that one of the major drivers of factory farming intensification in Africa in the future is going to be a series of technologies called precision livestock farming technologies, which include AI, robotics, cloud computing, cloud-connected electronic gadgets. In particular, AI is going to be the center of all these.
AI and robotics used in factory farming are largely still in their R&D to pilot testing stages in developed countries (U.S., Canada, Japan, EU) and China. I don’t see a reason why they will not get to a point where most factory farms in their countries can be, economically speaking (there might be political reasons against employing such technologies), largely run by AI and robots. And I think the costs of these AI systems and robots will go down and eventually be promoted to and sold to Africa. Their economic advantage might grow so huge that they will drive out the small holder farmers who cannot afford these systems.
Thank you for doing this!
I have a question about the translation of “utilitarianism” to “功利主義”. I have been thinking for very long that this is a bad translation in both the Japanese and Chinese contexts (for those who don’t know these languages: “功利主義” is the most popular translation for “utilitarianism” in both Japanese and Chinese). The bad thing seems to be that the words “功利” has a bad connotation, and one that is almost the reverse of utlitarianism, therefore causing people to misunderstand utilitarianism, or have bad impression against it.
My question is then: Do you think “功利主義” is a bad translation? (not bad as in it is bad that you, or any translator chose this as the translation. But bad that it was, historically speaking, chosen and established as the popular translation.)
I’m working on plans to do more to support a rigorous search for approaches to animal-inclusive AI (or approaches to advancing wild animal welfare science broadly) that would also rank among the most promising ways to reduce human extinction risk from AI.
Interesting! I am interesting in discussing this idea further with you.
Could it be the case that another way to think about it is to search within the best approaches to reduce human x-risk, for a subset that is aslo animal inclusive? For example, if working on AI alignment is one of the best ways to reduce human x-risk, then we try to look for the subset within these alignment strategies that are also animal friendly?
Apparently Microsoft was also blindsided by this and didn’t find out until moments before the announcement.
Not sure how important this is: Judging from the behavior of Satya Nadella during OpenAI’s dev day 12 days ago, Microsoft quite likely didn’t see that coming at that moment.
Thank you Ren. I want to say take your time, and please prioritize your own welfare on this.
Thank you for the post!
It seems to me that a lot of how important this is also depends on how the shrimps die. Are they already dead, or still alive, when they are “processed” (e.g. sundried)? I heard shrimp paste companies bragging that from “harvest” to “processing”, there were less than 3 hours.
Does anyone have information on this?
However, there are reasons to doubt this. The probabilities of different gambles add up only when the outcomes of those gambles are independent of one another. Are facts about honeybee sentience independent of facts about black soldier fly sentience? That is, do the prospects of their sentience rise and fall together?
In reply to my own comment above. I think it is important to recognize one further point: If one believes a species portofio approach to reduce risk of inefficacy doesn’t work because prospects of the concerned species’ sentience “rise and fall” together, one very likely also needs to, epistemologically speaking, put much less weight on the existence (and non-existence) of experimental evidence of sentience in their updating of views regarding animal sentience. The practical implication of this is that one might no longer be justified to say things like “the cleaner wrasse (the first fish purported to have passed the mirror test) is more likely to be sentient than other fish species.”
Thank you, so much, for the post! I would like to quote the passage that had the most impact (insight) on me:
someone who is concerned with minimizing the risk of futility may avoid single-shot bets with a low probability of success but accept combinations of bets that collectively make success probable. A hierarchicalist would not deem the combination of gambles to be any better than the gambles individually. For example, Shane might resist spending money on shrimp welfare because he thinks that there is a .1 chance that shrimp are sentient. However, he might accept distributing money among shrimp, honeybees, black soldier fly, mealworms, and silkworms; though he thinks each of these has a .9 chance of making no difference, he believes that the probability that the combination of bets will make a difference is .5.
Which leads to the conclusion:
If Shane’s reasoning is correct, then risk aversion about efficacy might not avoid the conclusion that we ought to help the many small. Instead, it might tell us that we should distribute our money across different species of dubious sentience in order to optimize the combined probability of making a difference and maximizing value.
And of course, the caveat they raised it also important:
However, there are reasons to doubt this. The probabilities of different gambles add up only when the outcomes of those gambles are independent of one another. Are facts about honeybee sentience independent of facts about black soldier fly sentience? That is, do the prospects of their sentience rise and fall together?
Thank you for the post!
What concerns me is that I suspect people rarely get deeply interested in the moral weight of animals unless they come in with an unusually high initial intuitive view.
I also suspect this, and have concerns about it, but in a very different way than you I speculate. More particularly, I am concerned by the “people rarely get deeply interested in the moral weight of animals ” part. This is problematic because for many actions humans do, there are consequences to animals (in many cases, huge consequences), and to act ethically, even for some non-conseuquentialists, it is essential to at least have some views about moral weights of animals.
But the issue isn’t only most people not being interested in investigating “moral weights” of animals, but that for people who don’t even bother to investigate, they don’t use the acknowledgement of uncertainty (and tools for dealing with uncertainty) to guide their actions—they assign, with complete confidence, 1 to each human and 0 to almost everyone else.
The above analysis, if I am only roughly correct, is crucial to our thinking about which direction to move people’s view is a correct one. If most people are already assigning animals with virtual 0s, where else can we go? Presumably moral weights can’t go negative, animals’ moral weights only have one place to go, unless most people were right—that all animals have moral weights of virtually 0.
“I would expect working as a junior person in a community of people who value animals highly would exert a large influence in that direction regardless of what the underlying truth.”
For the reasons above, I am extremely skeptical this is worthy of worry. I think unless it happens to be true that all animals have moral weights of virtually 0, it seems to me that “a community of people who value animals highly exerting a large influence in that direction regardless of what the underlying truth” is something that we should exactly hope for, rationally and ethically speaking. (emphasis on “regardless of what the underlying truth” is mine)
P.S. A potential pushback is that a very significant number of people clearly care about some animals, such as their companion animals. But I think we have to also look at actions with larger stakes. Most people, and even more so for a collection of people (such as famailies, companies, governments, charities, and movements), judging from their actions (eating animals, driving, animal experiments, large scale constructions) and reluctance to adjust their view regarding these actions, clearly assign a virtual 0 to the moral weights of most animals—they just chose a few species, maybe just a few individual animals, to rise to within one order of magnitude of difference in moral weight with humans. Also, even for common companion animals such as cats and dogs, many people are shown to assign much less moral weight to them when they are put into situations where they have to choose these animals against (sometimes trivial) human interests.
Ah, interesting! I like both the terminology and and idea of “adversarial collaboration”. For instance, I think incorporating debates into this research might actually move us closer to the truth.
But I am also wary that if we use a classical way of deciding who wins debate, the losing side would aljmost always be the group who assigned higher (even just slightly higher than average) “moral weights” to animals (not relative to humans, but relative to the debate opponent). So I think maybe if we use debate as a way to push closer to the truth, we probably use the classical ways of deciding debates.
There are a ton of judgement calls in coming up with moral weights.I’m worried about a dynamic where the people most interested in getting deep into these questions are people who already intuitively care pretty strongly about animals, and so the best weights available end up pretty biased
I agree there’s such a problem. But I think it is important to also point out that there is the same problem for people who tend to think they “do not make judgement calls about moral weights”, but have nonetheless effectively came up with their own judgement calls when they live their daily lives which “by the way” affect animals (eat animals, live in buildings that require constructions that kill millions of animals, gardening, which harms and give rise to many animals, etc).
Also, I think it is equally, maybe more, important to recognize those people who make such judgement calls without explicitly thinking about moral weights, let alone go into tedious research projects, are people who intuitively care pretty little about animals, and so their “effective intuition about moral weights” (intuitive because they didn’t want to use research to back it up) backing up their actions end up pretty biased.
I think I intuitively worry about the bias of those who do not particularly feel strongly about animals’ suffering (even those caused by them), than the bias of those who care pretty strongly about animals. And of course, disclaimer: I think I lie within the latter group.
Thank you for the post, and congratulations on the good work you are doing. I am excited to see your influence grow globally!
Thank you for your detailed reply! I admire your courage to raise this issue in front of your colleagues/the locals there—I am not sure I would find the courage to do so.
I have some hope that there might at least be ways to reduce the % of factory farming there will be in poor countries in the world in the future. Some EAs are working on it and I am trying to see what I can help there too.