Visualising animal agriculture

By Henry Stanley 🔸 @ 2018-06-16T01:05 (+17)

I made a visualisation trying to demonstrate the scale of animal agriculture (and the suffering caused by it). Unfortunately I can't embed it in a post; go have a look at it here.

Interested to hear what people think of it, and whether this sort of thing is likely to be useful as a persuasive tool. It's nothing groundbreaking - just a re-imagining of some existing graphs published by ACE plus some fancy animations. But anecdotally, some people seem to find it quite powerful.

Henry

 


undefined @ 2018-07-10T22:46 (+2)

I think what you've done is compelling. Visual is visceral. Take Stabilo's recent advertising campaign 'Highlight the Remarkable'. Or the recent mining crisis, a near-textbook case of scope insensitivity. The challenge is in reducing numbers to names, and the people who can do that - designers, creatives etc. are I think, severely lacking in EA; so keep it up! But I think that attitude should go beyond graphs to metaphors, mottos and the like; though in doing so there is a risk of a loss of rigorous thinking, something to perhaps consider.

undefined @ 2018-07-10T22:55 (+2)

For example, music is one of the most powerful media, yet I know of not one EA related song, rap, etc. But there are hundreds on the Israel Palestine conflict; many for veganism etc. This has probably been addressed before but I (tentatively) think ethical belief systems need a balanced diet to survive, and EA is eating too much of the logical food. Other ways are possible too, take the London activist Chakabars as an example, who has propelled to stardom from obscurity with memes and mini-essays to promote a plant-based diet and anti-colonial worldview. I'm probably being cynical, but sometimes I feel too much emphasis is put on drawn out, watertight arguments - which should, to me atleast, be in the small print for people who haven't got time to read them all.

undefined @ 2018-06-17T10:05 (+2)

Good question -- "But a crucial question to ask is: which animals need our help most?"

"The number of wild animals vastly exceeds that of animals on factory farms, in laboratories, or kept as pets." ( https://infty.xyz/#/en/@/split/topic/94 )

undefined @ 2018-06-18T21:11 (+1)

This isn't something I'd thought about at all - I guess wild animal suffering is one of those things you just accept as unfortunate but inevitable.

Still I wouldn't say the absolute scale (# of suffering farm animals vs. # of suffering wild animals) makes much of a difference, rather the scale of what can be accomplished with a given resource investment. Suffering in factories seems like a much easier problem to solve, and I'd expect the amount of suffering reduced per dollar invested to be far higher.

Also, I would feel a lot more hesitant about large-scale interventions on wild animals, since they are part of complex ecosystems where I've been led to believe we don't have a good enough understanding to anticipate long-term consequences accurately. Farm animals are situated in a fairly simple living situation where I'd feel much more confident about the long-term suffering reduction of various interventions.

Maybe I'm missing some obvious high-impact interventions though? Or maybe the area is unexplored and there are big potential benefits from spending some effort figuring out if there are high-impact interventions?

undefined @ 2018-06-18T21:29 (+1)

For another anecdotal data point - I found that both the contrast between where money is spent and where the suffering happens, and the cumulative death count were highly effective emotionally (the dots animation less so).

However, for me personally, I'm not sure 'number of killed animals' is the best measurement for negative impact. I could imagine viewing an animal farming industry where the animals got to live free and happy lives until their sudden painless deaths as a pretty positive thing - animals in the wild generally live in far worse conditions and it seems unrealistic to expect humans to keep animals in a happy environment if there was no gain from it whatsoever.