EA Should Invest in Animal Liberation and Diet Change Advocacy

Bruce Friedrich 🔸

I want to start by noting that I am amazed and somewhat in awe of what's been accomplished by the EA animal welfare movement. I am enthusiastically supportive of all campaigns that make living and dying conditions less bad for farmed animals.

I worked on such campaigns for almost 20 years, and I'm proud of that work.

That said, I do think it's a strategic error that the EA animal movement has so thoroughly moved on from advocacy for animal liberation and diet change.

There are two central arguments for that decision that I hear in EA circles and that I think are worthy of reconsideration:

1) These efforts have been tried and failed. Let’s move on.

2) Everyone agrees with us on factory farming, so let’s focus there and stop talking about whether eating meat is unethical; that’s where we meet overwhelming pushback.

I don't agree with either of these statements, and I believe that some of the influx of money we’re expecting for animal protection should be spent on animal liberation and diet change advocacy.

Here are some thoughts and questions that I think support my point-of-view. I look forward to hearing what others think.

1) The value of saying what’s true, because it’s true

EA places a hefty premium on saying things that are true, noting that this free exchange of ideas tends to lead to the best outcomes. Most recently, that’s been one argument in favor of talking about animal suffering when we discuss the harms of factory farming.

It strikes me as obviously true that there’s no moral difference between eating a dog or a pig, a cat or a chicken; if anything, eating a well-treated dog or cat would be morally preferable to eating a factory farmed chicken or pig.

It’s also true that other animals have the same range of emotions and feel pain in the same way and to the same degree that we do. As slaughterhouse designer Temple Grandin has written, other animals may suffer much more than humans do, since for many (most?) non-human animals, the mental and physical anguish of confinement or mutilation is, in that moment, their entire world.

Finally, it’s simply true that eating animals entails paying for abuse so extreme that almost everyone is repulsed by it.

But as far as I'm aware, we have no one with an EA mindset focused on how we make these arguments most effectively. And it seems that none of the potential influx of AI funding is going to go toward changing societies in the direction of these observations.

Is that the right decision? I doubt it.

2) Are there other justice movements that ignored the fact that they were justice movements?

I understand that the abolition, suffrage, and other liberation movements took what they could get and didn't demand immediate and only liberation, of course. If all you can get is better laws around education, Sundays off, and so on -- then that's what you agitate to make happen.

But have other liberation movements owed some part of their success to focusing only on welfare improvements and the most extreme rights violations?

Did any of them avoid the intellectual and ethical foundations of their movements and their most fundamental demands for justice?

Because that’s what EAs are doing with regard to animals, or so it seems to me.

3) Might an aversion to liberation messaging be sending top talent to other cause areas?

In my new book Meat, chapter 5 is mostly about why I don’t think vegan and meat reduction advocacy will stop the upward trajectory of global meat consumption, at least until we have price and taste competitive alternative meats.

But I also point out that a belief in vegetarianism and/or animal liberation motivated many cultivated meat founders to start their companies. It's also why almost all of the sector’s early investors chose to fund them.

I'm pretty sure the cultivated meat industry would not exist if not for investors who believe in animal liberation.

(As an aside, rumors of cultivated meat's death have been greatly exaggerated -- see my inaugural "Meat Matters" substack essay on this topic, which I just posted; while you're there, I would be grateful if you would subscribe and recommend it.)

I think this observation is even more true where farm animal welfare is concerned: I don’t know everyone in the EA animal welfare movement, but I know all of the OGs, and I’m pretty sure they are all vegan. I’m also pretty sure all of them got involved in animal protection because of their belief in animal rights.

If we don’t tell the world why animals matter (i.e., that their suffering is not significantly less important than our suffering), will we attract people with the passion and focus on maximum impact that comes with knowing you’re in a liberation struggle?

ADDITION: After I posted this reflection, Aidan Kankyoku posted his reflection on "The Campaigner Crunch," and there are some insights in his post that I think may be relevant here. I haven't fully worked this out in my brain, but I'm thinking about where he talks about how hard it is to find great campaigners and leaders, because the best people came up as volunteers. Their motivation was, I think, animal liberation. He also talks about how DxE can turn out 50+ volunteers for a demonstration, where the more professional groups (which are also incrementalist) struggle to turn out a handful.

4) Did animal liberation advocacy make farm animal welfare improvements possible?

It seems to me quite possible that advocacy on behalf of animal liberation is what shifted the Overton Window with regard to farm animal welfare. If so, would continuing to push for animal liberation and diet change have a positive impact on what’s possible in the realm of farm animal welfare?

Put another way, if people don’t think animals have interests that matter, are they going to care what happens to them?

Or in more practical terms: Yes, we have the world on our side where factory farming is concerned, but it’s not a top issue for almost anyone — other than those of us who believe in animal liberation. Should this observation change how we think about our advocacy?

It’s all well and good to say “95% of Americans agree with us,” but if the issue is largely an afterthought with no impact on behavior (as it is for almost almost everyone), perhaps it's worth putting some resources into changing that.

As just one example, would our efforts on behalf of farm animal welfare be more successful if some part of our movement were focused on making sure that every single student who graduates from one of the world’s top 100 universities has spent 4 years saturated in animal liberation and diet change messaging?

Lawrence Tribe believes in animal liberation. So does Cass Sunstein. And Richard Dawkins. So did Charles Krauthammer. And Jane Goodall.

What would it look like to make sure everyone coming out of an elite university, anywhere in the world, is clear on the concept? Making that happen would not be expensive, relative to the influx of resources we’re expecting.

My guess: There are dozens of great ideas that could change the global zeitgeist in the direction of animal liberation and a plant-based diet (especially as alt meats get better and come down in price).

5) Might AI and a massive influx of funds change what animal liberation and veg advocacy can accomplish?

I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of EA animal welfare advocates see diet change and animal liberation advocacy as incapable of making much difference.

We tried. It failed.

This concept is captured by Aidan Kankyoku’s recent Sandcastles essay, where he says this: “In the decades since Animal Liberation, plenty of people have dared to dream of a world without animal farming. They’ve all failed to make that world a reality, or even bring it one step closer. And before you try to get clever with me, I promise you there isn’t some other magic word people haven’t sufficiently incanted. Whatever you think makes your abolitionist movement special … people have tried it before.”

Here’s my full response to his precise argument. The key points are these:

A failed attempt does not test an idea for all time. It tests one version of that idea, pursued by particular people, with particular methods and resources, under particular conditions. All aspects of those conditions change, and with them the potential for success.

Animal liberation and diet change advocacy have never operated at the scale that may soon be possible with 1) AI and 2) dramatically more resources.

Either one of those could be game-changing for their impact on past interventions that failed and, perhaps, for coming up with new ideas that have tremendous merit.

Plus, if “people have tried it before — it didn’t work” were a decisive objection, most or all previous successful movements would have been abandoned, since no movement was successful out of the gate and few (or no) tactics have been successful on their first iteration, I don't believe.

It's my understanding that most (perhaps all) social justice movements looked like failures for a really long time before they succeeded.

Conclusion: What I am not saying

I do want to be clear on one thing: I am also not suggesting that farm animal welfare groups should adopt animal rights or vegetarian talking points. I agree with the idea that each group should frame its work for maximum impact and focus on what its good at.

So GFI is not a diet change advocacy organization, and we’re not an animal rights organization; and I don't think we should be. We have no diet litmus tests. I open my book Meat with the line: “Let me get one thing out of the way right now: I don’t care what you eat.”

And for the purposes of both GFI and the book, I meant (and mean) it.

My concern is this: EA appears to have largely walked away from the moral foundation of our work on behalf of animals. So among the breadth of strategies that EA animal welfare supports, there appears to be scant (and in many cases zero) room for diet change advocacy and no room at all for animal liberation work.

That feels to me like it’s probably a mistake.

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LewisBollardSep 15184

Thanks for the post. I think this is an important strategic debate to have, so I'll reply in more length than usual.

I agree with you that we should be honest about what we believe, pursue a variety of strategies, and try to expand the moral circle. I also think you're right that animal liberation played an important role in recruiting many of the movement's current leaders. And I have immense respect for liberation-focused activists like Wayne Hsiung who do courageous work to help animals. None of the following is intended as a criticism of their work. That said, I disagree with you on a number of other points:

EA didn't just ignore diet change -- it deprioritized it based on evidence it wasn't working. You write that in EA, "there appears to be scant (and in many cases zero) room for diet change advocacy." But the EA Forum has a whole section on diet change with 198 posts. It includes numerous posts by EAs going deep into the evidence on dietary change -- and finding little evidence of impact. A post arguing for more resources to go to dietary change should at least engage with the evidence that suggests it doesn't work.
We've tried many versions of diet change. You write, "A failed

... (read more)

Vasile StanescuSep 1642

I would like to express my support for Bruce Friedrich’s post. And he has strong effective altruist support: Peter Singer and Jeff Sebo have raised the same concern about how effective animal advocacy evaluates different approaches to change (Sebo & Singer, 2018).

1. Difficulty measuring the benefits of activism should not lead us to discount it.

Sebo and Singer explicitly identify the risk of measurability bias. Their concern is that the methods we use to evaluate activism may favor interventions whose benefits are easier to count. An approach may have important benefits even when those benefits are difficult to measure. As they explain:

"It is rather an argument that, if one aspires to reduce animal suffering as much as possible and to use evidence and reason in the course of doing so, then one should take care not to focus disproportionately on the direct, individual impacts of particular interventions since doing so will lead to an incomplete, and probably incorrect, analysis of what animal activists should be doing individually and collectively."

This matters for dietary advocacy because changing social norms may help people adopt dietary changes even if the immediate effects ... (read more)

Seth Ariel Green 🔸Sep 1710

Four remarks.

Vasile gives the paper I worked on a fair overview, and indeed Maya's previous paper found very different results. Your milage may vary, data are inherently messy, etc. Personally I think that attitude/intention change is much easier than behavior change, and the core difference between the papers is that the more recent paper focuses exclusively on consumption. 9 of the 10 largest effects in the Mathur 2021 meta are attitudinal or intentional, if I recall. (This is a general problem in behavioral research.)
Kramer and Landry measure outcomes a week later. the context of this being a 'great' paper is that almost no one else has even accomplished that, at least not with an RCT with high implementation fidelity. But Peter and Lisa would be the first to say that a week is not the long-term measurement they want.
Like Lewis, I find it a lot easier to think about what should happen on the margin rather than what everyone everywhere should do. I think that evaluating diet change and persuasion efforts is a good use of my time because I think there are a bunch of interesting questions that have yet to be asked in a research context. The meta helped identify them.
I have never f

... (read more)

Vasile Stanescu

Sep 17

I think very highly of Seth Ariel Green and of his work. Nothing in my comment was meant to suggest any concern about his paper or his scholarship. What I especially appreciate about his work is that I agree with him that, before his meta-analysis, there were a large number of poorly designed studies that did not prove much. Researchers might conduct an intervention, such as giving a talk about animal welfare, and then immediately observe whether the people they had just spoken to ate less meat. But that does not tell us much. People often try to match what they perceive to be the expectations of the researcher. I have always agreed with Seth on this point and appreciated his work for addressing it. My concern is instead with the use of his research to support claims that the paper itself does not make and, to the best of my knowledge, Seth has never made. In particular, I sometimes see the meta-analysis cited as evidence that dietary-change interventions cannot work. That is simply not what the paper argues. Indeed, it argues that we need better, more rigorous studies. Seth has also been generous with his time in brainstorming with me about what those studies might look like. He has repeatedly offered to work, without compensation, as an outside observer on experiments to help make them more rigorous. I have always, without exception, found Seth open to discussion and critique. I think Seth has published two helpful and insightful papers that I encourage people to read. To the extent they have sometimes been misunderstood, that is through no fault of Seth or his lab. My understanding is that his argument is that the existing research is not strong enough to establish which dietary-change interventions work reliably, and that we therefore need better-designed studies. That is different from arguing that dietary change has been disproven or that effective dietary-change interventions are impossible.

Seth Ariel Green 🔸

Sep 17

Than you for your kind words, @Vasile Stanescu ! I look forward to discussing more at Reducetarian 😃 I can't recall anyone saying that the 2026 meta suggests that diet change is not viable. What remarks are you thinking of? Lewis, for instance, cites three papers I worked on as "finding little evidence of impact." That's a good high-level summary. James Ozden cites the same three papers in a Susbtack comment as evidence that "we haven’t figured out how to meaningfully reduce meat consumption." Also a good high-level summary. Who is saying otherwise and citing my/HSFL’s papers in support of that point?

Vasile Stanescu

Sep 20

Sure. Hal Herzog wrote that the results of your study point to the “starker conclusion” that it is “nearly impossible to motivate large numbers of people to reduce meat consumption.” There were also examples in the Reddit thread you started about the paper. One commenter summarized it as “vegan activism isnt very effective” and said there was now “proof.” You pushed back on that interpretation yourself. I also think it is a bit of a reach to claim that your study “suggests it [dietary change] doesn’t work,” or that dietary change is an approach that has “repeatedly failed.” If those claims are supported by your study, I would disagree with that characterization. Saying there is “little evidence of impact,” or “we haven’t figured out how to meaningfully reduce meat consumption,” seems closer to a summary of the evidence, but still a bit off. For example, your study identified five individual studies with estimated SMDs above 0.5, which you describe as candidates for further research and replication. This is evidence that some interventions had measurable effects. For example, Bianchi et al. (2022) found that, relative to controls, participants ate 63 g/day less meat at four weeks and 39 g/day less at eight weeks. That is evidence of impact. My overall concern is with the stronger move from “we had not yet demonstrated, as of the publication of your meta-analysis, a reliable method” to something closer to “nearly impossible to motivate large numbers of people to reduce meat consumption.” I agree with the first and disagree with the second. The basic misreading of your study, as I see it, is the classic “absence of proof is not proof of absence.” Not having demonstrated a reliably effective approach is not the same as demonstrating that dietary change does not work. If anything, I take your study as an argument for funding more rigorous studies on dietary change, not the opposite.

Seth Ariel Green 🔸

Sep 21

You are a careful attender to the things people say! I had forgotten both about Hal's piece and about the reddit thread.

-2

Lia Wilbourn

Sep 17

Thank you Vasile. How refreshing to see this on an EA forum, so many great points. There's certainly more money to be made in the short term by not rocking the boat and prioritizing "welfare". The boat needs to be rocked, as all justice movements have taught us.

Bruce Friedrich 🔸Sep 15*15

Thanks so much, Lewis — I appreciate you responding in such depth; I know you're busy and don't take that for granted.

Prefatory comment:
My post captured some of what I've been wondering about in recent weeks, based on the Substacks from Nan, Itsi, and you.

And then the thing that prompted me to move those thoughts from my brain to the Forum was Aidan’s dismissal of even trying to come up with something new, b/c it’s all been tried (quoted in my piece). It seems to me that we won’t come up with something new if we’re not trying to come up with something new…

While I’m delighted to offer some thoughts, I’m sure there are many EAs who would have better ideas than I do, and I’d really love to see lots of smart EAs who care about animals challenging one another to come up with new ideas (or twists on old ideas) that are focused on animal liberation and diet change.

If our messaging is laser focused on mitigating the myriad ways animals suffer, that’s what people will spend time on. I wonder if we might see some creative and high-impact proposals focused on diet change and animal liberation, if we actively challenged the community to come up with some.

Okay, from there:

My first four p... (read more)

LewisBollard

Sep 15

Thanks Bruce! Appreciate the engagement at length here. Thanks too for all you're doing to advance alternative proteins -- a strategy I'm much more optimistic about :)

robert_grillo

Sep 17

The best argument for food system (“dietary”) change activism would be studying and leveraging actual real-world case studies, specifically the playbook and track record of the tobacco and meat industry and their proven ability to increase market share through successful marketing campaigns. The documentary, The Real Mad Men of Chicago, shows us exactly how this was done over the last several decades. The important lesson here is that food industry powerholders hold the key to a major shift in the direction of a plant-based food system. Without a people-powered movement to influence their decisions, we don’t stand a chance to make meaningful change, and consumers will just continue to consume the animal-heavy diet that is marketed to them, despite all the consumer-facing outreach we have done and continue to do in the vegan movement (by default?). It sounds like EA testing has found this singular focus on consumer dietary change to be ineffective. If so, on that point, I would agree, it could never be enough on its own. But surely we were strategic enough to realize that much earlier on right? To further build a mass movement, we would also need to better leverage potential trigger events that reflect the pains and anxieties of everyday working people such as bird flu, food price inflation and extreme weather events and effectively use messaging to tie this into a plant-based foods solution. Lastly, I think we need to listen carefully to what the powerholders of the food system are telling us. For example, earlier this year, the leading spokesperson for the turkey industry John Zimmerman told Congress at a public hearing that if “we” don’t solve the bird flu problem, there will be no future for the chicken and egg industries. The industry is telling us what their greatest vulnerabilities are and we need to be leveraging them to our advantage. I don’t see that happening “at scale” or even on a micro level, yet. Obviously there is much more to say, but I prefer re

Alistair Currie

Sep 17

I'd like just to pick up a couple of points in this reply, numbers 4 and 7. I appreciate that Lewis was addressing specific points that Bruce made rather than making a comprehensive argument but it's what's in front of us. Firstly, characterising animal liberation activity as "liberationist activists chanting that cage-free is evil" is too narrow a definition at best, and unfair and inaccurate at worst. I entirely agree that that form of activism has shown almost no sign of creating lasting change and may well have been harmful, (although I accept that it may have contributed positively in some ways). Liberationist campaigning, however, encompasses a wide variety of different techniques and approaches. For every liberationist chanting "evil" there is another putting on a tie and talking to their adversaries (me, for instance, or indeed Bruce). If you define "activism" as "shouting at people that what they do is evil", then the case against it is watertight - but it's not a useful definition. Characterising activity intended to promote animal liberation in this way, with respect, is not helpful to an informed, evidence-based and open debate. Similarly, all the "recent corporate animal welfare wins" came "after the movement pivoted away from vegan outreach" is winning an argument by defining the terms so you can't lose. Well, there were corporate wins before that pivot, and legislative wins that arguably had deeper (if not wider) effects before it too. Defining success by "recent corporate wins" begs its own questions and doesn't help the wider analysis. (I'm also curious about the evidence that the only significant legislative wins for animals in the UK took place before liberation activism.) In regard to Point 7, I don't think it is helpful to include PETA's budget in the ledger of animal liberationist/diet change activity. When I worked at PETA, none of my work was liberationist or focussed on diet change. PETA does a proud job in both those areas but a very l

LewisBollard

Sep 18

Thanks for engaging -- appreciate your contribution to the debate. I just wanted to clarify that I didn't intend to characterize all animal liberation activity as "liberationist activists chanting that cage-free is evil." Instead I meant to refer just to liberationist anti-cage-free activism, of the kind that PETA and others have engaged in. I appreciate that liberationist activism is much broader than that. And as noted up top, I have immense respect for liberation-focused activists like Wayne Hsiung who are pursuing creative new approaches. For example, I thought both the Smithfield investigation / trial and Ridglan rescue were courageous acts of self-sacrifice that attracted international attention to the plight of animals.

Alistair Currie

Sep 19

Many thanks for engaging, Lewis, and for this clarification. On the overall principal, I just want to make two points. To precis Bruce's post in a sentence, the problem still feels to me to be that in the case of animal liberation campaigning, the EA movement has effectively gone, "that didn't work, let's do something else", rather than "that didn't work, let's do it better". There's room for both. Second, the one thing I wish Bruce's brilliant post had done a little more explicitly was differentiate diet change campaigning and animal liberation campaigning. One is, broadly, trying to change the world one person at a time and I entirely get the argument that that's too slow (though I think invaluable by other measures). The other is different, it's trying to reach a tipping point at which animal exploitation (all of it) is no longer culturally and legally acceptable, at which point the entire edifice collapses. EA welfare campaigning is about supply, animal liberation campaigning is about demand. As Prohibition and recreational drug policy tell us, as long as there is demand, supply will find a way. If there is no demand, it's over. Last, when it comes to the practical steps, can I also point you at this, if you haven't seen it already? https://projectphoenixuk.substack.com/p/what-should-the-ai-windfall-build

Ben Stevenson

Sep 17

Hi Alistair, I appreciate your engagement on this thread and think you're presenting an important perspective. Quick question: how would you define most of PETA's spending if not animal liberationist? I found this surprising!

Alistair Currie

Sep 18

Thanks, Ben. PETA spends plenty of money on things which don't directly promote animal liberation or diet change. For instance, my job was about promoting non-animal methods in regulatory toxicology (which PETA does very well). It ultimately served a liberationist goal but didn't seek to share or promote animal liberation messages. It was about what's effective and affordable and, for decisionmakers with no interest in animal rights, promoting animal welfare. Most of their work on entertainment, experimentation and fashion is similar. I admire PETA for blending very clear liberation messaging with practical, real world campaigns. No one is in any doubt about what PETA wants but in terms of actual expenditure on staff and programmes, much of it is not trying to change diets or directly influence views on animal rights.

Seth Ariel Green 🔸

Sep 24

Something else here. Bruce writes: > I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of EA animal welfare advocates see diet change and animal liberation advocacy as incapable of making much difference. No, this is not a fair characterization. I would never use the word 'incapable' in this context. I regularly speak to many "EA animal welfare advocates" and I think they would similarly not wish to be characterized this way. A problem can be very hard without being intractable.

RasaPetrauskaite

Sep 20

Animal Liberation and Diet Change are 2 different concepts. We can achieve Animal Liberation similarly to how the Civil Rights Movement, Gay Rights, and Women’s Rights movements have achieved success. We are already achieving legislative successes such as California banning the sale of fur and San Francisco requiring a minimum amount of food purchased with city funds to be vegan (50% minimum for jails). Also we passed legislation that would require a horse racing track to close, and it closed as we were working on the legislation. This has nothing to do with persuading people one by one to change what they eat, but this is incremental work towards Animal Liberation.

ElliotTepSep 1424

Thanks for the clear post Bruce. To add to your points, it also seems that campaigning and advocacy also created the conditions by which lots of passionate young advocates built up experience and became many of the leaders of the movement today, and that this is happening less today.

One point of disagreement I do have with this framing is that if you focus specifically on the justice movements that succeeded and then ask "Did any of them succeed by only focusing on welfare improvements?" You've made an artifically constrained reference class to compare it with, being reforms we remember as justice movements that famously won as justice movements.

I think the better reference class is all attempts to radically improve the wellbeing of others. Using this reference class there are many successes including that focused on technological solutions to problems that could be framed as liberation or justice issues: child mortality reduction via global health innovations, famine reduction via green revolution, extreme poverty alleviation via economic development, women's empowerment and family planning via oral contraceptives, etc.

There's also many liberation/justice movements that failed or stalled despite decades of intense effort and focus.

FWIW I think you do outline some of the reasons why this particular effort is promising. I think that's the most important part to flesh out. Not all liberation efforts are equal. Each needs to be argued on their merits.

Bruce Friedrich 🔸

Sep 14

That's a really good point w/r/t my second point/question, Elliot. Similar to your reference point expansion (all very good examples), the farm animal welfare endeavor is not striving for animal liberation or diet change, so it doesn't make sense for me to hold it to animal liberation or diet change as its end goal (i.e., what success looks like). Better welfare for farm animals stands on its own as an unequivocal good, a point I've made many times in response to the IMO wrongheaded argument that welfare reform delays liberation. I am struggling with this concept though, since I would like to see us keeping animal liberation as our north star... But that need not be the case for the welfare reforms, and fair enough.

Alistair Currie

Sep 14

This is an important argument, thanks, but I don't agree that the better reference class is attempting to improve the wellbeing of others. The examples you provide certainly could be framed as justice issues, as you say, but are also problems that were/are pretty universally recognised, which require practical solutions that are/were politically and economically acceptable to those with the power to implement them. The need to end the consumption of animals doesn't fall into that category. Most people, politicians and cultures don't think it's OK for women to die in childbirth but do think it's OK for animals to be slaughtered for consumption.

ElliotTep

Sep 15

Hmm, I'm not sure what I think about this. On the one hand the example of women dying in childbirth is a good point. On the other hand, minimum wage was raised by economic growth, and people in power would have been against raising the minimum wage if it was done without increases in productivity to go with it. I've heard here and there that the anti-slavery movement took root in parts of the world and US that were less economically dependent on slavery.

Anita KrajncSep 1614

Add deontology or philosophy of duty and a holistic, ecological systems approach, then diet change and plant-based food system change outperform animal welfare.

Thanks for this open dialogue Bruce and Lewis.

Lewis' (1) and (5): Diet change campaigns are good at developing movement capacity including volunteers, activists organizers and cadres who populate the movement, make up vegan influencers, start vegan businesses and hopefully enter politics with new groups focusing on this. Lewis you are right to not just focus on diet change. We also need to focus on plant-based food system change and many groups are doing that and deserve a massive influx of resources from city and national action plans for plant-based food, to plant based school meal replacement, to plant-based by default, to meat free days and changes in procurement at various institutions and food service providers, and public education campaigns like Project Slingshot. Coefficient Giving is already wisely pivoting here. My argument is we need a full on pivot, as explained below.

(2) Diet change approaches need more resources. Why do meat, dairy and egg companies outspend us so much in ads aimed at bad diet change? Do the... (read more)

Naman Dedhia

Sep 17

Absolutely, Anita! A holistic, systems-based approach grounded in a philosophy of duty and animal rights gives us a stronger foundation for meaningful, long-term change. Plant-based diet change and institutional food system transformation must go hand in hand if we are to address the interconnected polycrisis facing animals, climate, biodiversity, and much more. A full movement-wide pivot is both necessary and achievable. PS: I went vegan and joined the animal advocacy movement after attending the vigil. It transformed my life and my perspective towards animals.

Vanille Victoria Ashkanovna

Sep 17

Thank you Anita ! Animal Welfare campaigns keep normalizing the specisist ag system, not only the industries. Working together on refocusing funding on campaigns based on diet change and animal liberation is definitely a win-win for everyone: for us, for animals and for climate ! Thank you Anita and Bruce for being part of the open dialogue and for speaking up.

Soili Kasanen kasasenkootut

Sep 17

Well said.

NickLaingSep 13*16

I love this "Are there other justice movements that ignored the fact that they were justice movements?" and would perhaps even take it further to...

"Are there other justice movements that won without being justice movements."

The moral underbelly, and even the passion in that underbelly which keeps me going personally is indeed a thirst for justice and liberation (in my case for humans in poverty not animals suffering but same diff). EA helps me enact this chance through finding cost-effective ways to fix the problem. Even among more "intellectual" EAs, I think a decent number of us are still (emotionally at least) motivated towards those ends rather than a utilitarian suffering minimisation mindset.

ElliotTepSep 1415

Out of personal curiosity, this appears to be a big shift from your previous position on diet change advocacy. I've listened to you talk in the past and recall you were quite negative on the value of diet change. What has led to the shift? Or let me know if I'm misunderstanding.

For example this talk you gave at EAG in 2018:

Then I went to work at PETA in 1996 and I thought everybody loves animals. All we really have to do - we don't have to win an argument with a meat eater - all we have to do is show people what's happening and obviously people will want to align their values and their actions. Everybody's going to go vegan. We just need to tell them, and again, it didn't happen.

What I've come to understand is that the vast majority of people are not going to radically change their diet on the basis of really anything other than price, taste and convenience. Maybe health. There appears to be something in human nature. I don't know if it's emotion or physiology or biology or psychology. I don't know what it is, but the vast majority of people just aren't that interested in changing their diet, and they're not interested in hearing from me about why they should change their diet.

Bruce Friedrich 🔸Sep 1417

Thanks for your note, Elliot.

What Prompted This Post —

This post was precipitated by thinking about the potential influx of a significant amount of money for farm animals and wondering whether AI and a lot more money might change the nature of what’s possible w/r/t animal liberation and diet advocacy.

Put another way, it seems to me that what’s possible in one reality (until now) might be be quite different from what’s possible in another reality (AI + a lot more philanthropic support).

I don’t know, of course, but I think it’s probably worth thinking about that explicitly.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about recent posts from Nan Ransohoff (The third wave of American philanthropy), Lewis Bollard (The AI Windfall), and Itsi Weinstock (The San Francisco Strategy for Animal Welfare). .

Nan: “AI is about to generate hundreds of billions in new philanthropic funding. We have a huge amount of work to do to make the most of it.”
Lewis: “New AI money could bring a step-change for factory-farmed animals — if we spend it well.”
Itsi: “the projects that step up to the plate will happen.”

And then also thinking about the fact that Coefficient Giving, the Navigation Fund, the EA Animal Welfar... (read more)

ElliotTep

Sep 14

Thanks for the detailed reply. I appreciate the full engagement and answer

James MorganSep 1312

Such a well-rounded, and thought-provoking article, Bruce. If other social justice movements have taught us anything, it’s that lasting change requires time, patience, and a diversity of tactics. Thank you for showing how these pieces puzzle together, and for reminding us never to lose sight of our movement's DNA

Seth Ariel Green 🔸Sep 1213

Finally, it’s simply true that eating animals entails paying for abuse so extreme that almost everyone is repulsed by it.
But as far as I'm aware, we have no one with an EA mindset focused on how we make these arguments most effectively

👋 I and many others are working on this! See, eg, Meaningfully reducing meat consumption is an unsolved problem: meta-analysis. We write such papers with the goal of figuring out what strategy works best for talking to people about factory farming.

P.s. Welcome to the forum Bruce, hope it’s a good experience.

Bruce Friedrich 🔸

Sep 12

Thanks Seth - that's great to see! I'm sorry I didn't realize that. Are any of the major EA funders supporting your work? Aside: I've been here off and on for almost ten years! :-) Joined Nov 6, 2016

Seth Ariel Green 🔸

Sep 13

Ah, apologies, should have clicked your profile. Yes, my/our lab's work is funded by Coefficient and by the Strategic Anima Funding Circle, and my blog is funded through Coefficient's Living Literature Review program. Some other EA-flavored research we've produced (and sometimes reported here): * Research report: adding a plant-based option (or two) doesn't change behavior * Research report: modern alternative proteins did not replace meat purchases in restaurants * Documentary films can increase public interest in plant-based diets in the USA * Adjacent to our work, Kenny Torella of Vox writes about a randomized evaluation of the documentary Dominion (Kramer & Landry 2026) & I talk to James Ozden about the limits of behavioral approaches on his podcast How I learned to Love Shrimp. All of this, I think, is circling around questions of persuasion and talking to people about meat.

Bruce Friedrich 🔸

Sep 13

Thank you so much, Seth - Really cool to see all this - I'm excited to dig in. I subscribed to your "Regression to the Meat" substack: fun name! I love that you published in Science about the small body problem - brilliant. Bruce p.s. I'm sure you're familiar with the Stanford green bean study (health labels decrease consumption) and the LSE menu study (vegetarian sections = fewer orders for those dishes)? And all the studies showing that vegetarian and vegan labels decrease consumption. Fascinating stuff! BTW, if I am wrong in my understanding of these studies, please do correct me!

Seth Ariel Green 🔸

Sep 15

Hi Bruce, I know those studies reasonably well: 1. We reviewed the Turnwald et al. piece for our MAP reduction meta but didn't end up including it because it measures vegetable consumption rather than reduced meat consumption and I'm never clear on how to translate between those outcomes. 2. We reviewed Bacon & Krpan as well and excluded for its online/hypothetical outcomes. I think your read on both papers is accurate. I just don't accord them very much weight in my models of what reduces meat consumption. However, BITE is a big believer in tasty titles to promote plant-based options, as I'm sure you know. In general I do think labels matter (e.g. Berke 2023).

Tom Cohen Ben-AryeSep 1211

Couldn’t agree more.
First, the amount and diversity of suffering produced by animal agriculture is inconceivable. Cage size is only the tip of the iceberg. Welfare campaigns usually target one problem at a time, but farmed animals face countless harms: extreme selective breeding, separation from parents, overcrowding, behavioral deprivation, painful procedures, transport, slaughter, and probably many forms of physical and psychological suffering we do not even understand.

There is also a basic economic constraint behind it. Keeping a companion cat or dog in good welfare conditions over their lifetime cost around $10K–$100K. A chicken raised for food has to cost only a few dollars. Animal agriculture cannot provide anything close to the conditions we would normally consider humane. In contrast, reducing the number of farmed animals addresses all of these harms simultaneously.

It's true that a moderate campaign attract more audience. But welfare reform lacks a clear trajectory. Suppose we move from conventional eggs to cage-free eggs. It is still just as difficult for the consumer to move from cage-free eggs to plant-based food. Compare this with Meatless Monday. It is also moderate, b... (read more)

Alistair Currie

Sep 13

I think your analysis here is great but, with respect, doesn't account for one thing. People need a reason to leave meat and animal agriculture. Of course there are strong arguments that have nothing to do with animal liberation, but environmental arguments haven't made them abandon their cars and we all know that it's perfectly possible to eat a nutritious, healthy diet which includes some animal products. Like you say, by a whole load of criteria, meat is a good product. In addition to making it easier for people to leave, we need to make it attractive for them to leave. That's why we need to invest in the advocacy which changes hearts and minds. Once you "get" animal rights, then abandoning animal products is a matter of when, not if. Making it easier to leave it certainly makes when come sooner. Is anyone aware of any work intended to convert plant-based consumers to veganism, ie to test how open to animal rights arguments people are when they no longer eat animal products? I agree with you, Tom, that reducing the cognitive dissonance should work, so I'd really like to see any evidence about whether it does and how best to do it.

Tom Cohen Ben-Arye

Sep 13

I agree advocacy is valuable, especially for creating activists and people who care enough to push for systemic change. I'm just not convinced lack of moral motivation is the main barrier to veganism. Faunalytics famously found that 84% of people who had tried vegetarian/vegan diets eventually abandoned them.

Alistair Currie

Sep 13

True, though Faunalytics and others have found that ethical vegans are less likely to lapse than people who become vegan for other reasons. As you say, making it easier will help prevent that but developing the understanding of animal rights that underpins true veganism (not just the diet) is another key component in making and retaining people. https://faunalytics.org/exploring-the-factors-behind-vegan-dietary-lapses/

Claudio PomoSep 1410

There is another important argument i think we should all acknowledge and put into the conversation: the modern animal rights movement is now 50 years old, but diet change and factory farming has been its highest global priority for only about 15 of those years - an extremely short time period.
This movement has been mostly focused on fighting animal research, the fur industry, hunting and animals in circuses for so long. Of course there has always been advocacy on veganism and factory farming, and some vegan organisations, but all the focus on farm animal investigations and campaigns is quite recent.

If our goal is animal liberation, our movement has the toughest one ever in human history for many reasons we all know so well. And one of them is that the list of animal abuse issues is very long. But, most important of all, i think if we look at the effectiveness of our movement through these lenses, we can see it has actually been extremely effective, with often little resources and as a young and inexperienced movement: fur farming was huge in the past, but now it has been banned in almost all European countries and the global production has now dropped 90% in the last ten years; ab... (read more)

Alistair CurrieSep 127

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. This could be the most important post for animals ever put on this forum. Someone engaged with and respected by the EA community respectfully challenging the orthodoxy.

My longstanding concern about EA’s influence on animal advocacy is that it so dramatically skews priorities in the direction of welfare and has led to a situation in which the animal liberation movement is unwilling to articulate its values and beliefs and is scared to say its own name.

Exactly as Bruce says here, we cannot succeed by hiding what we are. Of course n... (read more)

Sebastian JoySep 126

Great article, Bruce!

To your point: "... as far as I'm aware, we have no one with an EA mindset focused on how we make these [ethical] arguments most effectively..."

In my experience, many EAs are vegan or care about animals because of Peter Singer (that's also how it started for me). However, his book Animal Liberation came out over half a century ago (with an updated version in 2023) and its surprising how relatively little the movement has done to activel push Singers books/articles out there and/or to package his arguments (and those of Melanie Joy and ... (read more)

Bruce Friedrich 🔸Sep 1211

I remember talking with Lewis Bollard and Richard Parr once upon a time about the idea of giving every incoming student at the US's top universities a copy of Animal Liberation.

I still really love that idea, as step 1 of turning all of those universities into immersive environments for animal liberation and diet change advocacy.

Matthew C. Halteman

Sep 18

It's astonishing to me that the movement doesn't invest crazy money in universities and religious communities, especially given what we know about the history of these institutions' ability to leverage massive social change. With education, Big Ag even hands us the playbook: they effectively leveraged land-grant universities to cultivate a particular vision of the human-animal relationship that they were then able to scientize, professionalize, normalize, disseminate, and scale throughout the culture at large by using university research facilities, creating industry-university partnerships, funding university research and infrastructure, influencing dining services and health and veterinary curricula, instituting scholarships and programs of study, and inculcating generations of students who then went out into the world and replicated the vision in their own professional and private lives. It could happen again, but in a new direction, by buying professors' (relatively cheap!) time to develop and offer courses, and then bankrolling the galvanization and integration of the already-existing but often siloed and grossly underfunded faculties and on-campus communities that are doing movement-adjacent work. Now is the perfect time to invest! There's a projected influx of money into the movement. Many universities are in revenue crises, but have existing faculties and centers and institutes that could scale up quickly with funding (and funders can often negotiate really sweet restrictions because of how urgently the unis need the infusion). Education and adjacent community organization have well-studied and successful track-records when it comes to fomenting social change.

Vasile Stanescu

Sep 20

I agree with this; in fact, it is what my research is about. I have been looking at how the beef checkoff and related industry groups invest in universities to influence research. They fund research chairs, often by paying part of the cost if the university will cover the rest. Academics in these positions then make public statements about beef and the environment, speak to policymakers, and get quoted in the media as university professors. In some cases, they have spoken directly to sitting senators about the environmental benefits of beef and the need to produce more of it. Those claims then get repeated in the media as something a professor or scientist said. The animal movement could do the same thing. If a university is willing to match the funding, a donor might only need to cover part of the salary to create a permanent position in animal studies. And it is not just teaching, although teaching is highly important. In essence, I am able to spend most of my time on animal advocacy because I am a tenured professor. My joke is that I am a “professional vegan.” I can do research, apply for grants, give talks, respond to media, and work with students. The ROI for a professor can be extremely high. I recently had a grant and a research assistant working with me over the summer on academic capture. At the end of the summer, she gave me a thank-you letter explaining that the experience had convinced her to go vegan. I was not expecting that, but it is a good example of how the effects of these positions can extend beyond a single class. In essence, this is Bruce’s earlier point about one of the major problems with a lot of vegan advocacy: too much of it is “hit-and-split.” People encounter the message once and then return to a culture that constantly reinforces eating animals. He is correct. The interventions that seem more promising involve longer engagement. That is exactly what more vegan professors teaching animal studies could provide. I very much agree wi

Matthew C. Halteman

Sep 21

Thanks, Vasile, for this thoughtful reply! (P.S.--I'm looking forward to meeting you, finally, in November in Denver!) I think you're right on the money here, both with the fund-matching strategy and with the value proposition of freeing professors to do scholar-advocacy work. In my experience, funders get a big multiplier when they partner with universities because the university, by its very nature, is (a) a nexus of tightly interwoven institutions and communities where influence can be catalyzed in a variety of directions simultaneously (curriculum, dining services, internships, public lectures, certificate programs, scholar-advocacy, student organizations, inter- and cross-disciplinary ferment, etc.) and (b) a place where young people are being formed into adults whose attitudes, actions, and consumer practices will shape the next generation's vision of progress. I would like to see our movement become a bit more hermeneutically sophisticated and a bit less susceptible to measurability bias, and I think that investment in universities is a strategy that could help us grapple more effectively with these challenges too. The reality seems to me to be that food systems transformation is fractally complicated, and so isolated interventions in any one sector that under-appreciate the extent to which we are facing a cosmic-scale institutional coordination problem are going to end up disappointing money pits at best and industry-enabling obstacles to food systems transformation at worst.

Mark WestcombeSep 126

Failure of a TOC, strategy, campaign or tactic can happen in 3 ways:

The resources used are not deemed worthwhile - inefficient. This could be down to either the concept or its implementation;
The execution was weak and didn’t deliver - failed efficacy; or
The wrong thing was done - ineffectiveness.

Industry disentangles these. As a movement we seem to leap to (3), whereas to my mind the explanatory cause is often (2).

Whether EA or non EA we often risk dismissing good concepts because as you say someone tried once and failed.

There has been a limit on progr

... (read more)

Aidan Kankyoku

Sep 14

Hey Mark! We should catch up. I think it's helpful to split these three. I had the same "factors of production" in my latest post: people, money, strategies. They also weave back together in interesting ways. I see a lot of 2 in the liberatory approaches I've been part of or around, and it would be easy for someone to argue for 1 as well. But the persistent appearance of 2 might ultimately point to 3. It may be that some strategies are possible but would require a larger number of extremely disciplined operatives to execute. Part of why I feel discouraged about more attempts like that is it seems really hard to me to get a large enough group of sufficiently clear-headed people on the same page to pursue it– instead, I expect the human shortcomings to keep emerging. Like, corporate campaigns are badly bottlenecked on capable talent right now; if abolitionist campaigns would require a larger pool of cracked people, then without a realistic plan to solve 2 we wind up at 3. Project Slingshot arguably is trying to plug the 2 gap with 1, and with a ton of AI money that might work. One factor of production can make up for a deficit in another but it gets more inefficient the greater the imbalance between them.

Alistair Currie

Sep 13

Yes. If we date the movement back to Singer or to the founding of key organisations like Animal Aid (UK) and PETA, a nascent movement trying to promote one of the most radical ideas in human history tried and made almost no progress for a few decades, working it out as it went along and making lots of mistakes. Well, duh. Of course the most effective approach wasn't going to be taken and of course progress was minimal. That doesn't show us the wrong thing was being done - in my view what it shows us is that the right thing was being done in the wrong way. And where it was done right, it takes more than 30 or 40 years to undo tens of thousands of years of culture. With proper investment from those with money, we can do it better and we can give it time.

Ariel Simnegar 🔸Sep 125

I appreciate your post's arguments and share your sentiment about wanting to be honest about pursuit of justice and the fact that factory farming is arguably the most profound injustice perpetrated by humans today. My reticence about your conclusions has just been driven by the repeated personal experience that it is not productive to give people my honest opinion about how bad it really is to, say, eat a chicken sandwich. In contrast, making less "blame-valenced" claims like "farmed animal conditions are really bad and we should improve them" has been far... (read more)

Bruce Friedrich 🔸

Sep 12

Thanks for your note, Ariel. I hope others will jump in here, too, but here are some thoughts from me: I think there are two distinct forms of communication here: 1) campaigns; and 2) interpersonal (i.e., your question about “a conversational formula with members of the general population.”) I think the former can be done quite easily without getting people too upset. My hypothesis is that part of the failure of animal rights to make a bigger impact is that all the animal liberation campaigning is hit-and-split. People see the messaging once and only once, and then it leaves their consciousness as they go about their lives, where 99.9% of messaging reinforces the normalcy of eating animals, etc. One of the things I love about college campuses is that there is a possibility of ensuring that every single person on campus sees animal rights messaging on a fairly nonstop basis. Some years back, Whole Foods founder John Mackey and I went to a bunch of campuses and debated meat-eating against student debate teams (e.g., Stanford and Emory); we didn’t pull punches: If you would not eat a dog or cat, you can’t justify eating a chicken or pig. For things like debates, you get an audience of 50-1,000+ (the big numbers come when the school puts the event on their calendar and requires that students go to a certain number of official events/year). Also, we usually had campus paper coverage, so that amplified the reach. We came and went, so I suspect that the impact was not that great, though I do occasionally hear from someone who attended one of the debates that it turned them vegetarian or vegan, etc. With sufficient funding, we could sustain animal rights messaging on campuses. Look at what the Federalist Society accomplished, e.g., without overwhelming resources. TBC, I’m absolutely not the expert here; I’ve done vanishingly little animal advocacy for more than 10 years now. My point with the post is that I think we’re writing animal liberation and diet

Alistair Currie

Sep 13

I'm sure all of us who've tried and failed to bring individuals we know to our point of view have experienced what you describe here, Ariel. It's disheartening. But as Bruce says in his excellent reply, personal experience isn't the best guide to what's going to change society. We already have quite a bit of evidence about what might work, but we need more, and what we do know hasn't been implemented at scale. That's where those funders come in and where members of the EA community with a belief in animal liberation can have a transformative effect.

Britty M - Planted SocietySep 135

Thank you Bruce! As someone working on the culture-change side, a take like this is rare & welcome. Building on Mark's point, failure of execution ≠ a failed idea/tactic/entire genre of advocacy, and without funding for the work...good luck to those of us trying to find out which was which.

InTheSkySep 135

Thank you for writing this. It’s a topic I’ve been discussing a lot. So frustrating to hear EAs argue for things like tabooizing mention of veganism and serving animal products at EA events, as if upholding the basic ethic of our movement (that animals are valuable moral patients) is worth sacrificing in order to avoid alienating people who have such low tolerance for it that they won’t participate if they’re reminded of it too often.

MarinaBaptistaRosaSep 232

Really interesting post. Your question about other justice movements made me think about a slightly different way of framing the welfare/liberation distinction.

I work on animal rights and legal change, and one of the questions I’ve been thinking about in my research is precisely what a transition towards animal rights could look like when full liberation is politically and institutionally out of reach.

I’m increasingly unconvinced that we need to choose neatly between incremental welfare reform and keeping animal liberation as the underlying objective. In o... (read more)

Dylan RichardsonSep 164

If we broaden this to "value change" and maintain it as a future aspiration rather than a current priority, then I'm for it.

Some limited form of value change seems necessary for progress on wild animals and digital minds, so I don't think the topic can be avoided indefinitely.

My two cents is that the movement has yet to achieve widespread value change even in highly-educated, academic circles. I think it would be highly effective on the margin to focus on think tank staffers, elite law school students, graduate students in ecology subfields, and so on. Th... (read more)

RasaPetrauskaite

Sep 20

I think that most people know that animals suffer, but they don’t care enough to make any changes. Most people are just selfish and largely apathetic towards most others. I thought that maybe meditation will help people to become kinder, but some people who meditate a lot for many years still eat meat. They go on multi-month silent retreats and still order meat when they go to a restaurant. However, I noticed that around 4% - 15% of people who attend multi-day meditation retreats at Spirit Rock are vegan, based on the number of vegans posted in the dining hall. So maybe meditation will help people to become kinder. Anecdotally, some people say meditation helped them to care about animals more and to become vegan.

Ronen BarSep 163

At the end of the day the ceiling for how much you can change without touching the core, the ethics, is limited. I don't think that ceiling is that high, because interests collide and the interests of animals and humans are not just going to magically align due to new technology.

The big thing I think we are missing, well, one of them, is getting people to act for farmed animals, (not only for welfare reforms but also more "radical" activism), into a community, regardless of what they eat. What you said, Bruce, "I don't care what you eat", that is a good t... (read more)

Alistair Currie

Sep 17

Actually, animal rights advocates such as PETA have a very good track record for engaging legislators etc, over decades before and after the EA movement emerged. I've done political lobbying for many years in many AR organisations and am currently a lobbyist in the UK for The Vegan Society. We engage productively with legislators and policymakers who are not vegan, veggie or interested in animal rights. If you come to them with a proposition that makes sense and aligns with some other goals or values they have, they still work with you. Animal rights campaigners and lobbyists have been central to legislative changes that have benefited animals hugely for a very long time.

Ronen Bar

Sep 17

Thanks Alistair, Yes I agree and I have done some lobbying too with parliament members who obviously were obviously not vegan (sometimes even while sitting with them while they are eating chicken). I was talking more about the people who are coming to those legislators for the animals and who are part of the movement - volunteering or working. The movement for farmed animals has not been able to widely expend it community, core activists, beyond vegans, that was the argument and I think it is kinda true, not exactly accurate.

Alistair Currie

Sep 17

Thanks for the clarification, Ronen. A wider and deeper pool of people engaging has got to be beneficial and I welcome the engagement of people within the EA community in the kind of work you identify. I guess what I consistently object to is the argument or belief that the animal rights movement has "failed" at anything. In many cases we clearly haven't succeeded, but in my view that's because we haven't got it right yet. I know it's just a word and one that can be meant and interpreted in different ways, but the narrative that the AR movement has failed is corrosive and counterproductive. And premature by about 100 years!

RasaPetrauskaite

Sep 20

I agree with you that the Animal Rights movement is growing and achieving successes. We have achieved a number of legislative successes such as banning the sale of new fur in California and banning all large animal operations in a city. That would ban a race track that was there, and it shut down as we were working on the ballot measure. It is not easy to quantify the benefits of our legislative successes for animals. However, we are working towards an animal bill of rights in the U.S. where it would be illegal to intentionally harm any animal. We are in the early stages of promoting this legislation. We are building up to it through smaller successes first. Also, there might be people who think it would be impossible to achieve this legislation. To them I would say that for every person who says something is impossible, there is someone else doing it.

robert_grilloSep 172

Bruce, it's refreshing to hear your recognition of dietary change activism. I wonder if you mean a continued reliance on consumer-facing outreach or a systemic approach that targets powerholders who are making the big deals and decisions about our food system on our behalf. Do you think that EA doesn't fund the latter because the donor class might oppose the kind of systemic change needed to have any real impact on animals, the planet and public health? Or asked another way, if the donor class is benefiting from things staying relatively the same, why woul... (read more)

Bruce Friedrich 🔸

Sep 20

Hi Robert, I don't think there's anyone in EA-world who has a vested interest in perpetuating the use of animals for food. I think they don't support diet advocacy and animal liberation b/c they don't think it will do much good, resources are limited, and animal welfare advocacy makes real and positive changes for animals. i.e., basic cost-benefit analysis. I would like to see that thinking updated on the basis of new information and a new reality, but I also think it's totally genuine. And I don't see any mixed incentives.

Alan PaterSep 142

Ironically, Animal Liberation Now, the update to the classic Animal Liberation, leans heavy on criticizing factory farming as opposed to criticizing animal exploitation in general. I fear that this could result in people concluding that free-range, organic, regenerative meat production solves all the ethical issues.

RasaPetrauskaiteSep 18*1

I think this is a great post with an important point. Supporting cage free eggs seems like a waste of time because then it might make people feel good buying eggs as if they are doing something good. Also, some veterinarians (such as Dr. Crystal Heath) argue that chickens who live in cage free facilities may suffer on average as much or more as chickens who live in cages. It also seems like a waste of time to support cage free egg campaigns because the amount of benefit for an animal to live in a crammed barn versus a crammed cage seems negligible as co... (read more)

Soili Kasanen kasasenkootutSep 221

Thank you! Exact my thoughts, too. Just imagine what could be accomplished if EA would address the root causes of carnism and speciesm, as ASAP (Allied Scholars for Animal Protection) led by Dr. Faraz Harsini and supported by Peter Singer does!

akberkhanSep 122

If we had the money, I'd like to see every print media surface in and around major universities saturated with effective messaging a la the Slingshot campaign in the UK.

Aidan KankyokuSep 141

I think this post was a good contribution to this topic and I'm excited to respond to different parts of it more in future posts.

>EA appears to have largely walked away from the moral foundation of our work on behalf of animals.

I strongly disagree with this. I think you can guess my reasons and I'm wondering it it's what you meant.

On its face, I think it's a bad faith argument for basing our strategies on what feels aesthetically satisfying to us.

Bruce Friedrich 🔸

Sep 14

You write: "I think this post was a good contribution to this topic and I'm excited to respond to different parts of it more in future posts." Thanks! I've been thinking about these things since reading the Substacks from Nan, Lewis, and Itsi, but it was your recent Sandcastles piece that moved me from thinking to writing. So thanks for that, too. You write that you "strongly disagree with" my line about largely walked away from the moral foundation of our work on behalf of animals, noting: "I think you can guess my reasons and I'm wondering if it's what you meant." Reply: Perhaps that's too strong -- I'm not sure. My point is that EA is not funding animal liberation work or much in the way of moral persuasion work around diet change, etc. To me, saying that EA has walked away from the moral foundations of our work feels right, but it's 100% possible that I'm quite wrong. I'll look forward to your (or others') response/s. I'm also very curious to hear more about this: "On its face, I think it's a bad faith argument for basing our strategies on what feels aesthetically satisfying to us." I'm not sure what you're saying here; do you think the arguments are so bad that I can't possibly be serious? That's what I think I'm getting from the article you link to. I assure you that I'm serious... I could, of course, be incredibly wrong, and it's very possible that you'll explain and I'll agree. I don't know what I don't know. Or perhaps you're saying that the post aligns to my self-interest (the more common connotation of "bad faith"); since the post advocates that EA should fund things I don't work on professionally (and as I note in the post, haven't done much with over the past 10+ years), I'm not sure how my argument would align to that more common understanding of bad faith, either. Curious what you think of the author's view from that article about bad faith: "Arguments can be evaluated on their merits, without addressing what the speaker's angle is in say

Aidan Kankyoku

Sep 14

>I think you can guess my reasons and I'm wondering it it's what you meant. On re-read this sounds passive aggressive and I didn't mean it that way, I'm just jet lagged on a train in Europe! >EA appears to have largely walked away from the moral foundation of our work on behalf of animals. What I think you're saying is that EA work on behalf of animals is not as rooted in morality as it was previously or as it should be. My reason for objecting is that I think this conflates using moral arguments as a means with being motivated by morality in the end. When I hear other people (e.g. abolitionist critics of EA animal advocacy) say this, I often think they think mean that EAs are motivated by something like an apathetic drive to optimize a spreadsheet rather than a burning moral conviction to help animals. I think this is an incorrect belief that interferes with constructive debates over strategy. Yet I don't think it's likely that you would be making this argument so I wanted to ask what you thought. As for bad faith, I linked the article to indicate that I'm using the term in the low-threshold way, which doesn't mean "malicious" but can include "saying something other than what you think is true for rhetorical reasons," which is a subconscious thing that I do quite often in my writing and invite people to call me out on more often.

Bruce Friedrich 🔸

Sep 14

Thanks Aidan. You say: “My reason for objecting is that I think this conflates using moral arguments as a means with being motivated by morality in the end…” Response: Aha, that’s a helpful clarification, though I’m not sure I agree. On the one hand, yes: I think most of the EA farm animal welfare community is motivated by a burning moral conviction to help animals—true. On the other hand, if 99%+ of our advocacy resources are focused on the welfare work that we think the vast majority of people agree with, then I think my statement holds up. Our internal motivation is important, but if we’re not doing much to bring others on board with those understandings, I think it’s fair to say that we’ve “walked away from the moral foundation of our work.” I’m also, as discussed, concerned that this decision may be counter even to our welfare goals, since: How likely are we going to be to build a powerful movement? How likely are we to move the Overton Window? Are we doomed to have a cause that people care about, but only after the myriad things that impact them personally? Where will those single-issue voters come from? And are we going to have the talent problem you described in your most recent Sandcastles reflection? I understand your definition of bad faith ("saying something other than what you think is true for rhetorical reasons”) and understand that it can happen unintentionally. I know I do that sometimes and, like you, I appreciate having it pointed out. Here, though, I don’t think I did that.

Daniel LevySep 170

If I was a Jew in the Holocaust, in a Nazi camp, how would I feel towards the person who got me better working conditions?

If I were a human slave, how would I feel towards the person who got me better working conditions?

I would appreciate the person who saw me as more than property, an object, or meat. I am a liberationist.