Reasons to have hope

Remember – The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.

If we include the nonhuman animals, the world is not clearly much better now. It might be much worse now than before, or much better, depending on your view on wild animal suffering.^[1] But unfortunately the article entirely disregarded the nonhuman animals.

So it is entirely possible that "The world is awful. The world is much worse. The world can be much worse."

But to leave things at a slightly more positive note, let's say "The world is awful. The world is probably much worse. The world can be much better.

1. ^{^}

   A noteworthy point is that even if factory farming really does reduce the amount of suffering, humans deserve little praise for doing it as:

   1. We clearly did not do it to reduce wild animal suffering - wild animal suffering was likely entirely not in the minds of people who developed factory farming. But it is fair to say that farmed animals' suffering were in the minds of the people who developed factory farming

   2. There are extremely likely other ways that can achieve more reduction of wild animal suffering than cutting rainforests (which reduces the number of wild animals),  growing crops on these land and then feed the crops to raise animals we abuse to retroduce another source of suffering.