ClimateDoc's Quick takes

I'm not wild about this campaign either. I've shared this feedback privately with Aidan and Thom, but think there's value to doing so publicly to make clear that EA / the animal movement's moderate wing / FarmKind's funders don't uniformly endorse this approach. (To be clear: I'm writing in my personal capacity and haven't discussed the following with anyone else at Coefficient Giving.)

I'm a huge fan of FarmKind's team. I've personally donated to them and directed funding to them via Coefficient Giving. I thought they did an incredible job during the Dwarkesh fundraiser earlier this year and I admire their ingenuity and grit in pursuing the very hard challenge of bringing in counterfactually new funds to effective animal advocacy. I appreciate that they meant well with this campaign, which I think they saw as using a a playful fake-feud with Veganuary to generate media.

But I thing this campaign was a mistake for three reasons: 

1. This feels like an incitement to infighting, which has long plagued the animal movement. In recent years, I've seen the abolitionist / more radical wing of the animal movement take major good faith steps to reduce this infighting (see, e.g., my session with Wayne Hsiung at this year's AVA). Whether Veganuary was in on this or not, I'm seeing vegan activists reasonably interpreting this as an attack on their advocacy. I think we should have a very high bar for deliberately starting a fight in the movement, and I don't think this meets it.
2. This feels like an attack on vegans. I think we should also have a very high bar for attacking well-meaning people doing good in the world, whether vegans, EAs, organ donors, aid workers, or longtermists. I appreciate that attacking vegans wasn't the campaign's intent, but I think it was the predictable result, and certainly how the folks in the Daily Mail's comments sections have (gleefully) interpreted it.
3. This feels dishonest. To be clear: I don't think FarmKind intended it this way and I think the people behind it are deeply ethical people. But I think our movement is at its best when we hold ourselves to high standards and that includes not deliberately misleading people. And creating a fake "meat-eating campaign" feels like it crosses the line for me.

Again, this isn't to question the intent or abilities of FarmKind's team. Instead, I'm sharing how I personally feel about this campaign. I hope we can avoid campaigns like this in future, while continuing to pursue the innovation in tactics that the animal movement and EA needs. 

Hi all,

Thom from FarmKind here. We at FarmKind wanted to provide a bit of context and explanation for the choices we’ve made around this campaign.

Context

• Cooperation: We let Veganuary know about our intention to launch this campaign at the very start of our planning process and have kept them informed throughout. Our campaign provides them with another opportunity to put forward the benefits of diet change. We are all on good terms and there is absolutely no infighting.
• Origin: At this time of year, due to the annual Veganuary campaign, many people and the UK press debate the pros and cons of diet change, often with very entrenched views on both sides. This creates a unique opportunity to get people who are currently unwilling to change their diet to consider donating as an alternative entry-point into helping farmed animals - something that is extremely hard to get media attention for most of the time.
• Goal: The goal of this campaign is to get the question of 'should you do Veganuary' more media attention, and shift the focus from ‘is eating animals bad’ to a focus on the question of which solution(s) to factory farming an individual will choose to participate in. In other words, we want the debate to be about whether to choose diet change or donating, rather than whether factory farming is a problem worth dealing with or not.
• Our funders: FarmKind made the decision to launch this campaign. Organisations and individuals that have provided FarmKind with funding are not endorsing the campaign and it would be a mistake to equate past funding of FarmKind with support for our approach.

Campaign

The campaign encourages people to offset their meat this January by donating to help fix factory farming. As part of this, we hired three top competitive eaters to talk about donating to offset the animal welfare impact of their diet as they undertake one of their typical eating challenges.

By working with individuals who eat meat (but who would be undertaking these meat-eating challenges anyway), we can help reduce suspicion among entrenched meat eaters that our true motive is to make them vegan. It allows us to be authentic in our message that being unwilling to change your diet doesn’t mean you can’t start helping animals. 

Our campaign aims to show that those who are unwilling to change their diet today can and should still begin their lifelong journey of helping animals by donating to charities working to change the food system.

Concerns

We know that some may have concerns about this approach and feel uncomfortable with the idea of paying competitive eaters who are eating meat, even in an effort to help farmed animals. However, to make change we have to start from where people are now. For most people, that starting point is eating and enjoying meat and being unwilling to change their diet.

Some media coverage has suggested that our campaign aims to encourage people to eat meat or that we are running a ‘meat-eating campaign’. This is untrue, and we have corrected them. Tapping into the pre-existing anti-Veganuary media narrative is a feature, not a bug, because this is why they’re running stories about effective giving for farmed animals (which they would never touch otherwise) and giving Veganuary free media coverage.

As part of our commitment to being as transparent and effective as we can, we’re happy to answer specific questions anyone has about the campaign but as this campaign is ongoing we may have to answer some questions in the future or privately via email.

abrahamrowe @ 2025-12-29T15:15 (+33)

FWIW:

• Cooperation: We let Veganuary know about our intention to launch this campaign at the very start of our planning process and have kept them informed throughout. Our campaign provides them with another opportunity to put forward the benefits of diet change. We are all on good terms and there is absolutely no infighting.

I think it would be more useful to clarify if Veganuary supported you doing this campaign. If the answer is yes, that seems great! If the answer is no, this seems explicitly not cooperative, and in that case, it would be misleading to frame this as a cooperative effort (independent of if this was good or bad to do). I don't think whether or not Veganuary was informed was what folks were looking for, but if they endorsed the idea or did not endorse it / anti-endorsed it.

I think this just seems like a clarification worth making here given how negative the reaction has been to the campaign (from within the movement - hopefully it had a positive reaction externally!)

NickLaing @ 2025-12-29T11:20 (+27)

Thanks for this reply - I agree with most of what you have written here.

I think though you've missed some of the biggest problems with this campaign.

1. This seems to undermine vegans and vegetarians (see image above), and their efforts to help animals. It seems straightforwardly fair to interpreted this as anti-veganuary and anti-vegan, especially at a glance.

2. What matters in media is how you are portrayed, not what the truth is. Your initial campaign poster is ambiguous enough that its easy to interpret as a pro meat-eating campaign and anti-vegan campaign. I could have interpreted it as that myself, I don't think the media were grossly wrong here to report that.

The Telegraph article is pretty good actually overall and makes good points that could be good for animal welfare, although the first "clickbaity" title and paragraph is unfortunate (see above)

 Media lasts for a day, correcting it is the right thing to do but doesn't have much of an impact.

I can see what you are trying to do here, and its quite clever. I love most of your stuff, but this campaign seems like a mistake to me.

ClimateDoc @ 2025-12-29T20:34 (+13)

Thanks Thom for responding. I wasn't actually aware of who FarmKind were when I wrote my post above. It looks like a very good project overall, thanks for your work in the space.

Your response doesn't answer for me the question of why it was decided to create such an anti-vegan campaign (at least in its webpage). I can see there could be a lot of good done by persuading people who are unlikely to try a vegan diet to donate. But something along the lines of "If you don't want to be vegan but want to help animals, try this instead" or even "If you hate Veganuary, here's how to beat vegans at their own goals" or something would seem to suffice (but with better words...). Creating a webpage full of negative messages about being vegan doesn't seem necessary, and seems to me to actually be misinformation, given I'm not aware of anything showing that the typical Veganuary participant's experience is like what is presented.

Having read the article in the Telegraph, I didn't think it was actually that bad - it seemed to be mainly arguing for promoting donations rather than diet change, and didn't actually seem to put veganism down (except for bringing up "vegan dogma"). (Though I wouldn't agree that putting on a meat-eating challenge is ethically OK.) So being negative about veganism doesn't seem to have been necessary to get publicity, so it makes it seem even stranger why the campaign web page takes this line.

It doesn't seem to have been picked up by any substantial media outlet other than the right wing UK press - I'd have thought it would be desirable to get a broader reach, since I'd guess that people on the political left would be more likely to donate, and I wonder if being less adversarial might have worked better.

It would be good to see follow up analysis of what impact on donations the campaign actually has.

Cooperation: We let Veganuary know about our intention to launch this campaign at the very start of our planning process and have kept them informed throughout.

Aidan says here that it is a "bit". That would seem to imply that Veganuary are collaborating with you on this. Can you say if that's accurate? If there's a follow up, it would seem good to highlight it to people here.

Our funders: FarmKind made the decision to launch this campaign. Organisations and individuals that have provided FarmKind with funding are not endorsing the campaign and it would be a mistake to equate past funding of FarmKind with support for our approach.

One of the things that people are going to do with a campaign like this is try to see who is funding it. Currently if you click the "Transparency" link at the bottom of the campaign page, it goes to a list of FarmKind's funders, including the EA Animal Welfare Fund. It's then going to at least raise the possibility in people's minds that these funders implicitly endorse the campaign. Unless you've switched to self-funding, it does seem like these funders' money is being used to finance it (including individual donors to the EA AWF). Would it not be normal to check with funders before launching a campaign that's expected to be controversial? Particularly if their own donors might feel attacked by the campaign? It seems like it creates a fair amount of potential for blowback against the EA animal welfare movement.

If there is some complex strategy involving coordination with Veganuary or others, I'd hope it was discussed with a diverse range of experienced people in the animal welfare space and got their endorsement.

I would also say that the campaign web page loses credibility by calling competitive eaters "experts" (I've seen this in comments in non-EA spaces) - why would anyone go to such people for expertise on how to best help farm animals through donating? To me, relevant "experts" would be people knowledgeable about welfare campaigns and ethics.

I think there should also be considerably more nuance around the idea of offsetting impacts of meat-eating - calling it "like carbon offsetting" seems misleading as they seem different in a number of significant ways, which may affect what people want to decide to do.

Belle @ 2025-12-29T17:21 (+5)

Thank you so much for your response, Thom. Would you be able to clarify whether the meat-eating challenge “in which three competitive eaters will consume nothing but animal products for a whole day”, as reported in the Telegraph and Daily Mail, were misrepresentations by these outlets, or was this originally part of the campaign and FarmKind then changed course in response to the backlash? The articles still have the same headlines and no corrections have been made with regards to the meat-eating competition in either of the articles, as far as I can tell.

I think I understand the worries and discomfort people feel about this approach. But I’m not sure how fruitful it is for all of us to have a vibes-based conversation about the possible merits of this campaign. It already exists. It might end up being good, it might end up being bad. We can make it better. If you think some of the risks taken and assumptions made by FarmKind are unaddressed, let’s talk about how we can mitigate those. Let’s also figure out how we can support FarmKind do what they intend to do for animals. And most importantly, let’s make sure we learn from this campaign.

How can we learn from this experiment?

• Trying new approaches in this complex and relatively new space is great if you thoughtfully measure if it works or not. Measurement and evaluation are especially important because there are backfire risks and because this is a deeply underfunded cause area, so we cannot afford to be careless.
• It can be easy to falsely attribute successes and failures. So, what are some indicators that this might demand pivoting / repeating? I’d love to hear from FarmKind, The Mission Motor, behavioral scientists, and ACE researchers who worked on the Better for Animals resource what they think would give us valuable insights.
• What is the bar for money raised that would make this worth it? What is the cost of FarmKind’s Veganuary campaign, what else could have been done with those funds, how much money is raised through their platform specifically in response to this campaign?
• Can we assess spillover effects?
• Are there some PhD students out here who are willing to work with FarmKind to figure out some RCTs to learn some stuff? E.g. how long do people donate, do they change their diet, what do they think of factory farming, what were their priors, etc.

How can we mitigate possible harms?

• Risk: discussion remains focused on individual diet change, not ending factory farming
  • Can FarmKind, now that they have the attention, redirect their messaging and no longer talk about diets but instead about the horrors of factory farming?
  • Can both vegans/Veganuary and FarmKind state that what they care about is a more hospitable world for all and that industrial agriculture is the enemy.
• Risk: moral circle expansion is slowed
  • Can Toni and FK and participants come out saying something like this, "Don’t get us wrong, we are all actually bleeding hearts, we do care about animals, we don’t think eating animals the way society does now is necessary, natural, or normal, but we are just being pragmatic. We think being vegan is good, but preaching veganism is not."?
  • Can they direct some of the funds they raise to high-impact interventions that do things like education programs aimed at fostering compassion and empathy for animals, anti-speciesist policy work, actions promoting moral consideration of animals in public discourse, etc.?
• Risk: time is wasted on infighting
  • Can both Veganuary and FarmKind state that what they agree on and care about is a more hospitable world for all and that industrial agriculture is the enemy?
  • Can Toni flip-flop some more, and in February say, “You know what, I was wrong. It’s not either/or; it should be both or can be a little bit of each.”?
  • Can FarmKind share the metrics and results of their campaign and show up in vegan spaces like R/vegan to explain their approach and solicit feedback?
  • I think AVA is planning to host a discussion about this at their Summit in Canada in May.
• Risk: fewer people reduce their animal consumption or do it later
  • Meat producers can use this in their propaganda; can we use AI to find the conversations about this that misrepresent the arguments and counteract them?
  • Can Toni and other former vegans come out and say something like, “Actually, after having hung out with all of these meat eaters and learning more about where their food comes from and having seen what it does to their bodies, I think it’s actually kinda gross/disgusting/unsympathetic. I’m happy they donate, but for their sake, I hope they eventually put their mouths where their money is.”
  • What would happen if Veganuary went on offense with aggressive angles like:
    • “We applaud that FarmKind offers all the weak-willed meat-addicts out there a compassion cheat code against animal cruelty. We do hope that the people who listen to Toni and FarmKind’s advice 1) also talk with their doctors and nutritionists and 2) learn about the hidden truths about factory farming.”
    • “We agree that there are multiple roads that lead to Rome, and the super-highway is one where we both do no harm and reduce harm as much as possible. So, we actually already recommend to people who participate in Veganuary also donate to high-impact pro-animal charities. Yes, we are even more holier-than-thou than you thought. We hope vegans put their money where their mouths are. And we hope that offsetters eventually put their mouths where their money is, for animals’ sake and their own.”
    • "How do you know someone is a meat eater? They will tell you. (And they're more likely to need GLP-1.)"

    • “If you’re not one of these privileged people who can buy humanely raised meat and donate money, remember that beans are healthy, cheap, and cruelty free.” 

      (I don’t particularly endorse any of these messages, but I could see people pulling up a chair and a popcorn bucket to watch this while being exposed to different arguments based on the same premise, that farming cruelty is bad.)

How can we increase the likelihood of success?

• Opportunities to increase donation conversion
  • Is there a possibility for a follow-up press release by FarmKind or a pitch with testimonials of carnists who have made donations?
  • What would happen if FarmKind dares vegans and Veganuary supporters to donate? Can they do a donation contest with Veganuary? ACE can probably set up a fundraising page for vegans if Veganuary doesn’t want to do it on the FarmKind site. (Happy to credit FarmKind for those donations, but I’d like them to go where they are likely to do the most good.)
  • Can Toni share where she donates to?
  • Can we leverage the comment sections to encourage people to share where they donate and include donate links?
• Opportunities for awareness increase
  • Can Toni talk about how Veganuary doesn’t talk about animals enough and too much about health and climate, and how the big problem is factory farming?
  • Can FarmKind include and promote people in their pitches who also started reducing their meat intake after learning more about factory farming?
  • Can FarmKind or Toni talk about small-bodied animals and their Shrimpact work? What if Toni says, “Sure, maybe it’s okay if some of these people want to eat some red meat and offset their donations, as long as they don’t start eating chicken or salmon, or eggs.”

There are probably more and more productive ways to help FarmKind and Veganuary and the whole EAA movement in this endeavor. Please share your ideas. Also, what will you do this January, donate, go vegan, or both?

Three final thoughts that I didn’t really know where to put:

1. If we think AI can soonish solve some of the big alt-protein questions (taste, scaling, price, etc.), then we will still need people to stop thinking they need animal products. If we think public discussions will affect alignment, then we need pro-animal messaging to be out there. I’m wondering if this means that hard-to-measure interventions toward increased prevalence of anti-speciesist values might have become more important than I thought they were. On the other hand, if we think AI will solve factory farming, maybe in the meantime we need to focus as much of our time as possible on increasing the welfare of animals who are farmed until then, and that’s more likely done through welfare campaigns than promoting veganism. Either way, we should probably be careful in how we talk about vegans and bring animals up more often, even in meat reduction work. However, I’m very uncertain about all of this and curious what you think.
2. What could this offsetting approach to donating mean for effective giving? Is there a way to leverage this work to get people to make GWWC pledges or to get offsetters to think about how they use their donations in general. FarmKind wasn’t successful in becoming the Giving Multiplier for animals and pivoted to offsetting, but maybe they can still direct offsetters to the Giving Multiplier?
3. I work fulltime in animal advocacy. I don’t think that gives me an excuse to eat animals. I am vegan. I don’t think that absolves me from donating to effective charities to reduce as much harm as possible. It’s a privilege that I can do all three of these things. In this world, few people can. It seems good to encourage people to do everything they can, while also understanding that might be limited. So, let’s help people help more animals as best as they can. We need to understand better what works and work together to make that happen.

Edit: This is my personal take and not Animal Charity Evaluators' opinion.

Oh. I find this negative and personally upsetting.

Effective altruism brought to animal advocacy a strong norm of collaboration and this feels like undermining years of work. I wrote about it some time ago:

Back in the days, the movement was constantly infighting and spending significant time attacking and criticizing each other. There were a lot of personal attacks, hostile takeovers, and constant attempts to bring individuals down.

In this post I won’t get into details, but many ambitious projects stopped due to this culture, and I suspect many people have drifted away from the movement because of it.

This campaign seems like a well made one, but I think it contributes to polarization and I worry of alienating potential talent that is motivated by helping animals. It feels off to use a name for campaign that uses other charity's name in a negative sense - feels like an attack. Finally, very adversarial tone toward plant based choices undermines some of the charities' work recommended by FarmKind, like Dansk Vegetarisk Forening.

So, overall it feels like optimizing for bringing money at the expense of collaborativeness and at the expense of other factors that contribute to the impact of the movement, like alienating talent.

I hope I'm wrong and that I'm missing some considerations, but I think effective altruists should have moral guardrails that make them unlikely to engage in certain behaviors and, to me, collaborativeness is one of the virtues that should not be discarded easily.

If anything, it feels a bit like a missed opportunity for some collab with Veganuary, but maybe FarmKind had reached out to Veganuary.

As @NickLaing has pointed out, I think how people perceive the campaign or interpret its message is a lot more important than what the intentions are behind it. We can try and spin it however we like, but this is a straightforwardly anti-vegan campaign, maybe not in intent but in actuality. It is absolutely horrible in its attitude towards vegans, even though vegans are probably more likely to donate money to animals than any other group. Here are just a few choice snippets from the site:

1. Someone trying to go vegan had to plan every meal, give up her favourite foods, annoy friends and family, and get bloated. For all that, she helped far fewer animals than someone with an overflowing platter of meat.
2. "Can you survive Veganuary?" implying that its some terrible trial that someone needs to endure.
3. "Every day can be hard when you're vegan". Hardly selling veganism.
4. Listing celebrities who couldn't "make veganism stick," including references to them feeling weak and struggling with ill health.

Honestly, you'd have a hard time finding a carnivore influencer who more passionately bashes veganism. People should donate money. They should also go vegan. If they can't do both, they should at least do one. But if they can do both, they should do both. That isn't implied anywhere; to the contrary, veganism is portrayed as a waste of time and vegans as weak, misguided, joyless fools.

Thank you for sharing this. I'm personally very surprised to see this campaign from FarmKind after reading "With friends like these" from Lewis Bollard and "professionalization has happened, differences have been put aside to focus on higher goals and the drama overall has gone down a lot" from Joey Savoie.

I would have expected the ideal way to promote donations to animal welfare charities to be less antagonizing towards vegan-adjacent people.

@Vasco Grilo🔸 given that your name is on the https://www.forgetveganuary.com/ campaign and you're active on this forum, I'm curious what you think about this. Were you informed?

Edit: they will remove that section from the page

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-12-29T09:36 (+5)

Hi Lorenzo.

@Vasco Grilo🔸 given that your name is on the https://www.forgetveganuary.com/ campaign and you're active on this forum, I'm curious what you think about this. Were you informed?

Edit: they will remove that section from the page

I was not informed.

Lorenzo Buonanno🔸 @ 2025-12-29T09:45 (+6)

To clarify, it was just in a Google Reviews carousel they also have on the homepage, at the bottom of the page, and it was quickly removed

After having a quick look at this campaign, it pretty straightforwardly seems misguided and confusing. Farmkind's efforts to appeal to regular people to donate rather than go vegan seems good and makes sense. This adversarial campaign looks and feels awful. Two reasons immediately jumped out as to why it feels off.

1. it undermines and even goads vegans and vegetarians doing their bit for animals
2. glorifying people who eat lots of meat feels bad in a guttaral almost "Kantian" kind of way, regardless of the utilitarian calculation. 

In general i think complex utilitarian arguments struggle to be communicated well in pithy campaigns.

I'm surprised the FarmKind people have made what seems like a pretty straightforward mistake like this, I've been super impressed by all the other material they have put out.

Contrarian marketing like this seems like it would only work well if the thing being opposed was extremely well known, which I don't think Veganuary is.

Tobias Häberli @ 2025-12-29T08:50 (+14)

which I don't think Veganuary is.

Seems true. Looking at google trends, 'veganuary' is a lot less searched for than 'movember'. 

And I'd suspect that 'movember' isn't all that well-known either. For example, comparing it to black history month.

Jesse Gainsburg @ 2025-12-30T17:24 (+7)

This might be a bit pedantic, but I would note that Veganuary is more popular in the UK. If we adjust the Google trends search to be UK-only, it looks more comparable.

Of course, I suspect Movember is more US-based, so this is now maybe too biased towards Veganuary, and even so, Movember still outpaces Veganuary, but it does look more competitive.

(I don't know if Black History Month is a fair comparable, especially considering it's part of the US education system in a way the other two aren't.)

Again, I don't think this changes your larger point all that much, but figured additional context helps.

This feels like a very negative take on a lighthearted campaign that is trying to get across an important point. It's important to do outreach to people who disagree with you - even people who think vegans are annoying.

Woah! Agreed. I have a somewhat more positive view of go-vegan/meat reduction campaigns; but even disregarding that, this doesn't make sense. Current vegans are probably the best targets for a donate-more campaign and I can tell from experience reading r/vegan that this is unlikely to go down well!

Completely speculating here, but I wonder how much of the impetus for a campaign like this could be (emphasis on could!) illustrative of a broader disinterest in diet change work among some EAs. And so, even if vegnauary and adjacent efforts, or even veganism generally, are undermined in public discourse, some EAs might be ok with this because they basically don't think diet change is a serious way to help animals? 

Like, to me, if this campaign successfully brings in a lot of donations that otherwise wouldn't be given, then that would be a success, assuming in the interim there aren't major fractures in the movement generally or other harms. But I wonder if some EAs basically round those fractures to zero regardless of how serious they are/may seem.

This could be completely wrong, though! This is a quick take afterall :). 

Mill's point that happiness might derive from having intrinsic goals other than happiness is interesting; I do find it hard to imagine having this feeling though:

In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!"

I personally am quite confident I would experience "a great joy and happiness" if some reform happened e.g. factory farming ended at this moment, and I find it hard to imagine this not being the case. But as you suggest, this may be more likely to occur at a certain "development point" I've not reached yet unlike Mill.

Nor has it ever been the case for me that "My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object [of being a reformer of the world]". Though I do often wish, on a meta-cognitive level, that my happiness (which seems like almost the same thing as my "conception of my own happiness") was much further in that direction, because then I would work much harder on doing good, even if burnout like this becomes a bit more of a risk.

Mill was working as a colonial administrator in the British East India Company at this point in his life, right? Could there have been a role for cognitive dissonance in driving his depression? 

Normally I’d recommend freewill.com for this (which is designed with charitable donation as a central use case), but I see now it’s only for US-based assets

Also seeking conciser templates. Dozen page will templates feel dramatic for young people and make me delay the process to not raise concerns