Potential Theories of Change for the Animal Advocacy movement

By JamesÖz @ 2022-02-09T22:13 (+87)

Summary

Caveat: This analysis is farmed animal suffering specific (i.e. doesn’t include what might happen to wild animals) and speculative, with lots of value judgements. I’ve also simplified things quite a lot in my graphs, so take them with a pinch of salt. For these scenarios, I’m generally thinking on a 50 year timeline, give or take 10 years.

Note: Thanks to Bruce Friedrich for some alternative protein-related comments. Cross-posted from a newsletter that I'll be writing on more frequently if anyone is interested.

 

Introduction

Based on this previous Forum post, a following comment and related conversations, I’ve tried to map out some ways the animal advocacy movement might turn out over the next 30-50 years. This is highly speculative but I think it’s interesting nonetheless and hope it inspires some discussion on the topic. The key things I would be interested in is:

I’ve tried to illustrate my thinking and intuitions in diagrams, which can be seen below. I would outline the five different scenarios I’ve mapped out as:

  1. Technology optimistic scenario: Alternative proteins, primarily cultivated meat, reach cost competitiveness with the cheapest animal products and displace animal products from the food system. Animal suffering drops significantly.
  2. Heavy regulation scenario: Significant welfare reform wins (e.g. all animals cage free, maybe the end of confined animal feeding operations) and high regulation of animal industry which significantly increases production costs of animal protein. Animal suffering drops significantly.
  3. Moral advocacy optimistic: Significant moral advocacy wins e.g. abolishing factory farming but little success with alternative proteins, but animal suffering drops significantly.
  4. Business as usual: Welfare reforms continue with no transformative changes (e.g. factory farming continues and alternative proteins aren't cost competitive). Animal suffering remains considerably large.
  5. Worst case: Animal product production continues to rise, especially in countries with low welfare standards, with no other transformative breakthroughs. This means animal suffering grows even larger than what it is currently.

 

I haven’t mapped out the scenarios for significant welfare wins or moral advocacy success with alternative protein success as I believe alternative protein success will single handedly outperform any benefits provided by the other approaches. In this case I’m defining alternative protein success as alternative proteins are cheaper than the cheapest animal products, similar in taste and widely available.

 

Below I place some estimates for the likelihood of each case. Later, I outline each scenario with a graph on the cost of animal protest vs alternative proteins, a graph sketching a very rough estimate of total farmed animal suffering in that scenario, as well as reasons for and against it being likely to happen.  At the end, I include some discussion on how we can improve our odds of success and progress we're already making.

Likelihood of each scenario 

Note that this section is very speculative and mostly formed by my opinions of being quite involved in the (grassroots) animal advocacy movement for the past three years. Further reasoning behind my estimates can be seen in the sections below. It’s also where I think where we are currently heading, rather than the maximum values for some of these scenarios. For example, I believe that with greater spending on moral advocacy, the likelihood of this scenario being true could increase above 5%. However, I could be very wrong about most of this and would encourage people to put their own estimates below.

Various Scenarios

Technology optimistic scenario

Reasons for this scenario being likely to happen:


 

Reasons against:


Heavy regulation of animal industry


Reasons for this scenario being likely to happen:


 

Reasons against:


Moral Advocacy Optimistic 

Reasons for this likely to become reality:


 

Reasons against this scenario being likely:

 

Business as usual

Reasons for this scenario being likely:


 

Reasons against:

Worst case

Reasons for this scenario being likely:


 

Reasons against:

 

So what should we do about all this?

If my assumptions are roughly right, and we have a more than 50% chance likelihood of significant animal suffering over the next 50 years, what can we do to increase our chances of success?

 

Reasons why this could be irrelevant:


What would this pluralistic animal movement look like?


 

Does this mean anything for other EA cause areas?


saulius @ 2022-02-10T13:34 (+11)

Hi James. This is a great and valuable analysis and I’ve learnt a lot from it. One thing that I think would be valuable is more cross-over between this sort of medium-term (30-50 years) thinking, and ideas from longtermism. I don’t know much about longtermism but here is my attempt to do it:

Scenarios like the ones above make me think that what factory farming looks like in 50 years is a bit less directly important. Even if we get rid of factory farming, the world is quite likely to change unrecognisably soon afterwards (if not before), perhaps into something where factory farming is not that relevant anyway. Such possibilities also make it harder to plan for the future. What we do in animal advocacy could have an effect on the far future which might be more important. But then it might be better to think about how we affect various far future scenarios directly. However, I still think that the analysis you wrote is very useful, I’d just like for us to build on it with some input from longtermists.

Martin Trouilloud @ 2022-02-10T14:45 (+6)

I think it’s usually okay for an issue-based analysis of the medium-term future to disregard relatively unlikely (though still relevant!) AI / x-risk scenarios. By relatively unlikely, I just mean significantly less likely than business-as-usual, within the particular time frame we're thinking about. As you said, If the world becomes unrecognizably different in this time frame, factory farming probably stops being a major issue and this analysis is less important. But if it doesn’t, or in the potentially very long time before it does, we won’t gain very much strategic clarity about decreasing farmed animal suffering by approaching it with a longtermist lens. There’s a lot of suffering that probably won’t affect the long-run future but is still worth thinking about effectively. In other words, I don’t think longtermism helps us think about how to be animal advocates today.

saulius @ 2022-02-10T15:59 (+3)

Hmm, maybe you are right. Maybe we can only predict the business-as-usual scenario of humanity where there is economic stagnation with enough clarity to make useful conclusions from those predictions. I guess my only point then is that medium-term strategy like this is a bit less important because the future will probably not be business-as-usual for very long.

Well, we could also think about which scenarios lead to the most moral circle expansion for people who might be making decisions impacting the far future. So e.g., maybe expansion of animal advocacy to developing countries is less important because of this consideration? I don't know how strong this consideration is though because I don't how decision-making might look in the future but maybe nobody does. I guess doing many different things (which is what the author suggests) can also be good to prepare for future scenarios we can’t predict.

James Ozden @ 2022-02-10T19:30 (+5)

Hi Saulius, thanks for your kind words! I do agree the longer-term ideas would be good to incorporate and I actually thought I put something about AI timelines in the alternative protein section but seems like I didn't. I definitely do agree something like AI within the next 50 years (which is plausible as the links you reference say) could massively speed up the development of low-cost alternative proteins so that should be a factor pushing it towards being more likely. On other ways that it would change the world to affect farmed animals, as you say, that definitely does seem more complicated so it would be interesting to get the take on someone who works on AI. 

On other considerations around human extinction, global catastrophes and other events that could change the future of humanity in huge ways, I agree it definitely does make it harder to plan and it's not obvious what we should do in these cases. I think those cases probably a) warrant a lot more thought and b) seem much harder to design interventions for that will be robustly good.  As Martin and you talk about below, it seems extremely challenging to predict good solutions for potentially very different futures whereas making the next 50 years go well for animals seems comparatively easier, and I generally believe making the next 50 years go well will be good for the next 500-5,000 years too (although this might not always be true).

I guess to clarify some of your points, is it that medium-term strategy may be unimportant as things could change  very significantly, so we should try find ways to steer these future scenarios in ways that are conducive to good animal welfare (e.g. make sure ALLFED isn't proposing insects etc.)?

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-09-24T18:00 (+4)

Great post, James!

I wonder whether decreasing the current consumption of farmed animals may be bad for future farmed animals (I did not mention this here). According to my calculations, an improvement in chicken welfare per time equal to 43.9 % (= 0.580/(-0.580 + 1.90)) of that linked to going from a conventional cage to a cage-free aviary would be enough to reach neutrality, which suggests there may be chickens with positive lives in the next few decades if corporate campaigns continue to be at least decently successful.

Efforts to reduce the consumption of animals decrease the chance of futures where there are lots of factory-farmed animals living good lives, so such efforts may decrease welfare. One can counter that animals would have to be too expensive for them to live good lives, but this does not seem true. Hens in cage-free aviaries are more expensive that ones in conventional cages, but the increase in welfare is quite large. Assuming the increase in welfare is proportional to the increase in price, the increase in price from cage-free aviaries to conditions as positive as those of cage-free aviaries are negative would be 87.8 % (= 2*0.439) the increase in price from conventional cages to cage-free aviaries. Economic growth over the next few decades, potentially boosted by transformative AI, also means consuming animals with better lives will be more affordable.

It looks like decreasing the consumption of animals is only robustly good (in terms of increasing welfare) if one is confident that factory-farmed animals will continue to have negative lives?

MattBall @ 2022-02-16T15:39 (+4)

Thanks for these thoughts. 
Having worked on both the demand and supply side for three decades, and being friends with many people across the board, this is my niche:
https://www.onestepforanimals.org/about.html 

Darkness8i8 @ 2024-01-01T08:36 (+1)

Is it possible that you're overestimating the strength between costs of plant based meats decreasing and consumption of plant based meats increasing? I'm sure this is true to an extent, but people like gourmet meats and organic/grassfed meats now and will pay extra for more natural products. Eg meat consumption is expensive already and many people are not choosing which meats to buy based on cost primarily.

Cameron.K @ 2022-02-14T15:45 (+1)

Really interesting post, I think this kind of macro thinking and overview is sorely needed.

I agree with the improving forecasting, realistically what we should do is model out chances of success as you have done here with weights and then allocate our resources accordingly IE.

For example, if lab-grown meat is 50% then we should weigh this with 50% of the resources and so forth, I'm pretty sure this is currently very out of alignment, and unfortunately influenced by funder preferences and so forth.

thanks for the insightful post.