Thank you @Vanille Victoria Ashkanovna  for your inspiring plant-based food system change work in France and Europe. I think it's a great opportunity for animal protection and environmental and health movements to get together and ask @Holden Karnofsky and other donors at Anthropic to use their LLMs to develops a complex systems approach for helping animal, climate, environmental, health, and food security advocates in plant-based food system change. We need to move way Beyond Cage-Free. We can do it together!!

Definitely a holistic systems approach is needed to help animals, climate and environmental protection, reduced pandemic risk, food security and health. It's a win-win. Thanks for your inspiring work in Brazil.

Hi @Bruno Monteiro 
Do you see small wins in plant-based meal replacement as motivating. @Naman Dedhia and Chef Jaya went into multiple schools in Bhutan and made the menu entiredly vegan and these are documented in 2 Vlog series (one in April and one from last month) on Plant Based Treaty's IG and YouTube. Chef Jaya says people are so open to plant-based, more than we might think. She make delicious, nutritious and cheaper meals. I think it's these kind of programs that could be scaled AMA: Lewis Bollard, Open Philanthropy 

@Soili Kasanen 🔸 thanks for sharing your wonderful story of awareness and evolution. I too went through a buying cage-free phase for years. I became a vegetarian and only in 2004 a vegan after I learned about the milk indsutry's spearation of calves and their killing. I assumed before that animals weren't killed (somehow) and never really thought about it from the animals perpective what their journey was. If someone told me I'd change right away. Students at Queen U who were followers of Gary Francione called me out and I then researched dairy milk and changed. I'm grateful to the students! :)

Thanks @Valezca for your plant-based food advocacy in Mexico. Mexico is a great opporunity with a climate and food conscious President that just shifted the national food guidelines to 92% plant based but this needs to be implemented in schools, unis, hospitals and other institutions. They need a national action plan for plant-based food. AMA: Lewis Bollard, Open Philanthropy your help here would be momentous.

Thanks Lia, you're passion, knowledge and dedication are infectious. Thank you for publishing a blog for In Defense of Animals (IDA). Living in the Bay Area as you do you can see the focus on welfare tech and I know how difficult it is when the metric should be reducing the number of animals in the food system and not optimizing factory farms for efficiency and impossibly welfare - as no person would want to live in a factory farm and have machines breed, confine, feed and kill you.

Thanks @Jack White 🔹 for the good references. Regarding the second the authors conclude there isn't great data yet but there is great interest in recent years which is encouraging. They write: "we observe many fruitful collaborations between researchers and advocacy organizations, as shown by the large number of nonprofit white papers in our sample." and "many promising designs and interventions still await rigorous evaluation. For instance, no study that met our criteria evaluated extended contact with farm animals [144], manipulations to the price of meat [145], activating moral and/or physical disgust [146], watching popular media such as the Simpsons episode “Lisa the Vegetarian” [147] or the movie Babe [148], and many categories of choice architecture intervention [149]." UK's Project Slingshot is working on the "activiating moral and/or physical disgust" criteria and is attempting measurement. AMA: Lewis Bollard, Program Director of Farm Animal Welfare at OpenPhil is providing support for this approach.

The found a couple of choice architecture studies useful. The psychology and persuasion studies not so convincing yet.

With respect to your first reference, I'll take a look and speak to PETA's White Paper authors (Amber Canavan and Prof. Vasile Stanescu). My own take right now is there are multiple atrocities in factory farms and animals are bred and exploited without their consent. None of us would want to replace ourselves for them because in the western tradition the individual is sacrosanct and has rights. Applying the Golden Rule, we need to treat others as we'd like to be treated. For me it's not about weighing and shifting welfare pains but being treated like a subject-of-a-life with animal rights. This suggests we pivot beyond cage-free to plant based food system change as the main priority. Thanks again for references. 

I'm heartened by you and your team at your NGO work on plant-based food demonstrations in communities, cafes, and restaurants. There is a way forward. Turkey has experienced climate changes that have been devastating to wildlife and farmed animals plus the earthquake. You've first hand witnessed this and rescued dogs, chickens and other animals. It's so important to work to mitigate climate change through diet change. AMA: Lewis Bollard, Open Philanthropy it's so important to support people and groups in the frontlines.

Thank you Alexis for your strong dedication to animal liberation and climate action.

The PETA White Paper was release less than a year ago and most people have not read it yet. The Beyond Cage-Free Open Letter attempts to summarize the White Paper in a table to make it easier for people to have an overview of it. There are multiple atrocities in a factory farm and it's very difficult helping animals in this situation as none of us would want to take their place even if one or two atrocities are removed but multiple ones remain in place and none of us want to be treated as a means instead of an end. That's why it's an impossible situation and so very sad. 

The best way out of this is for the EA community to broaden it's philosophy beyond a focus on welfare and suffering towards animal rights, deontology and animals as a subject-of-a-life as Tom Reagan argues in "The Case for Animal Rights". This philosophy will refocus our movement on plant-based food system change as the main priority. But as you say, even from a utilitarian focus on welfare, the PETA White Paper shows how welfare improvements like cage-free lead to other welfare deterioration like worse air quality, more injurious pecking, keel bone fractures, and fungal diseases.

We also need holistic systems thinking to treat climate change and other environmental and health concerns. They should never be treated as externalities.

The "AI Windfall" provides a great opportunity to adopt a broad philosophical approach. Thank you for your work in this throughout LATAM!

Thank you for your great plant-based work in India and Asia @Naman Dedhia. You've shown along with Chef Jaya that plant-based meal replacement in schools is healthy, delicious and cost effective. It is scalable. 

The Global South has been ahead of the West in terms of healthy eating but in recent decades large corporations such as Cargill, KFC etc. and their allied nonprofits like Heifer International as well as growing wealth dynamics (the push and pull) have led largely plant-based societies to eat more meat, dairy and eggs. The Standard American Diet (SAD) has spread worldwide. We need to reverse that not only in the US, where the population has become more sick and obese, as a result, but also avoid it spreading globally. This SAD diet has also produced the Standard Global Farm. George Monbiot, author of Regenesis, shows how this has led to a less resiliant food system and call for a shift to a plant-based food system.