Defending Farm Animal Sanctuaries from Effective Altruism

This piece expands on the content of The Power Of Farm Animal Sanctuaries by defending the work of farm animal sanctuaries from the principles of Effective Altruism. When I say sanctuaries in this piece, I am referring to effective farm animal sanctuaries that maximize their impact on rescue, vegan outreach, and the vegan community.

Effective Altruists: “Show me the data.”

What is Effective Altruism (EA)? EA is applied utilitarianism. Or, if you are not a moral philosopher, EA is the deliberate practice of maximizing one's effort at reducing suffering since reducing suffering is the most important (if not the only) moral imperative. Quantifiable suffering is the currency in which effective altruists make decisions.

One way to think about EA is if you had $100 to use, how would you spend it to reduce the most suffering possible? A non-EA-aligned donor might round up at the grocery store or give to the Salvation Army or Habitat for Humanity. EA would argue one should donate towards stopping malaria with bed nets in the poorest of countries or building robust defenses from biological weapons since the potential suffering is far greater than constructing an impoverished person a home. EA looks at numbers. This is called the utilitarian calculus. Simply add up the amount of suffering for various causes, and whichever contains the most suffering is the cause area to focus on.

We do utilitarian calculus so that we are data-driven in our decisions. How do we know we are reducing the most suffering if we lack the data backing up that claim?

When applying these methods in animal advocacy, we must consider the type of activism we do and how we allocate funds. Which organizations do we support? Should we hire another person? Is a billboard worth renting or is that money better spent on creating cultivated meat? This can be a challenging exercise, especially if one has invested so much time and resources into a particular tactic or strategy. EA can be a hard pill to swallow since it often challenges our deep biases. Yet we owe it to the 70+ billion animals that are going to be slaughtered this year that we are effective with our actions.

For example, Animal Charity Evaluators published this graphic showing the number of donations between dog and cat and farmed animal organizations versus the number of animals impacted. This chart implies dogs and cats get a significant amount of donations while suffering a fraction of the total amount of suffering. Hence, EA argues we should spend more on farm animals instead of our beloved companion animals to do the most good.

EA has grown in popularity since its inception in the 2000s. Anyone seeking to do good in the world is not free from its criticism and methods. Organizations are essentially being forced to provide proof their group is doing the most good. Individual actions are similarly scrutinized. Faunalytics is an EA-aligned organization that does a variety of surveys and experiments on effective tactics within the animal movement attempting to root out how best to, say, approach topics of animal rights with the public or how the public perceives plant-based and cultivated meat. They put all actions under the microscope to ensure we are doing the most good we can for the animals.

Factory Farming is a core problem in Effective Altruism

How does one show EA alignment? For a problem to be a focus for EA, one must show the problem is neglected, important, and solvable. Factory farming already meets these criteria as a core problem for EA:

• Neglected - Too few people work on ending factory farming

• Important - Given the massive scale of suffering within factory farms, ending factory farming is important

• Solvable - We have solutions ranging from banning factory farms through legislation to promoting individual diet changes to technological innovations by creating plant-based and synthetic substitutes

More details at 80000 hours factory farm write up.

Farm animal sanctuaries work with farm animals and seek to make factory farming obsolete, so farm animal sanctuaries are working on an EA problem. What remains is defending the approach of farm animal sanctuaries against other strategies for stopping factory farming.

Defending Sanctuaries from Effective Altruism

When strategies or organizations come under attack as not being EA-aligned, defending against EA comes in two forms: arguing against utilitarianism or the availability of data.

Sell the Vatican, spend the money on ending factory farming

If you do not agree with utilitarianism then you might feel this discussion is a waste of time. The problem is that EA is growing in influence and controlling the flow of money from everyday donors and large foundation grants. So the task of arguing against utilitarianism becomes difficult for those who do not have a utilitarian philosophical leaning while soliciting donations from those who do.

As a utilitarian myself, I find these arguments extremely weak because their arguments boil down to trying to defend a different value metric than suffering. This is hard to do. Trying to convince me I should give my money to support the arts or give a child a bike when billions of chickens are in sheds living lives not worth living is an argument that will fall on deaf ears. Those problems do not compare.

Philosophers have been discussing different value metrics since the dawn of utilitarianism. EA with its practical approach is forcing those value systems into action. Are all values equal? Or does one reign above the rest? Attempts claiming suffering is not the most important value in animal advocacy can be found in a previous post about the Sierra Club or Hope For the Animals podcast.

Data, Data, Data

The second approach to defending against EA criticism is to talk about data gathering and measurements. EA prides itself on being data-driven. We need data to show how our actions, programs, and organizations are effective in reducing suffering. But what happens if you cannot get that data? When an animal rights activist has a conversation with a person on the streets and gives them a flyer, how can we know the impact that has? Will they throw the flyer into the trash or be so inspired to go make the documentary Dominion? If we funnel large amounts of money into government lobbying, what are our chances of success, and how many animals does that impact?

Many EA-aligned organizations attempt to discover this data. Faunalytics - mentioned previously - primarily work on this issue. Sentience Institute researches previous social justice movements to discover data about their successes and failures so that we in the animal liberation movement can learn from them. The Humane League believes their utilitarian calculus shows fighting to get egg-laying hens out of cages is one of the most effective uses of your dollar.

However, ask every hardcore EA-aligned animal rights activist and none of them can tell you definitively what strategy is most effective. If we truly knew, we would be doing that and only that. Instead, the animal rights movement is a collection of different people with different areas of expertise attacking the same problem from every angle possible. While some might argue the cringe stunts by PETA are less effective than getting friendly with a local politician to ban the sale of fur in your city, finding complete and trustworthy data comparing strategies is hard, if not impossible. Hence we should be wary of anyone saying they know the one path to achieve our goal of a vegan world. A plurality of approaches should continue to be supported until data on what is truly effective appears. I believe in the end all approaches will converge on each other.

Karen Davis of United Poultry Concern (UPC) recently wrote an article in a similar vein as this section. While she hits many of the same points I do, she dismisses EA thoughts due to the lack of statistical inference that can be done when measuring various approaches in animal advocacy. However, I believe we can embrace EA and support farm animal sanctuaries. If she had any EA supporters, after reading her article, they would be forced to choose between EA or UPC. Instead, if she showed how she is aligned with EA then she could keep those supporters.

My defense lies in the fact that we cannot effectively measure what works, but given farm animal sanctuaries have a unique approach (connecting people to farm animals) along with the ability to do outreach and community building, Effective Farm Animal Sanctuaries should continue to be supported.

Support from EA Organizations

It is worth noting that sanctuaries have been called out and supported by other EA organizations. Two major EA-aligned organizations have written about the power of sanctuaries and how they can be effective. This faunalytics report surveys tour-goers at Farm Sanctuary to see the level of the tour’s impact as variables are changed. Animal Charity Evaluators wrote about how a sanctuary could be effective, which I took a lot of inspiration from.

William MacSkill is one of the founders of EA thought. When asked in 2019 what the typical EA forum reader likely gets wrong, William says the role of small wins and symbolic actions. I quote his reply here at length because William is so influential in the EA space. The fact that he is supporting symbolic actions to motivate and inspire others is huge for those EA supporters thinking they need spreadsheets and math formulas to figure out how to do good in the world.

“I think a lot about Henry Spira, the animal rights activist that Peter Singer [Singer is another colossal figure in the EA world] wrote about in Ethics into Action. He led the first successful campaign to limit the use of animals in medical testing, and he was able to have that first win by focusing on science experiments at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, which involved mutilating cats in order to test their sexual performance after the amputation. From a narrow EA perspective, the campaign didn’t make any sense: the benefit was something like a dozen cats. But, at least as Singer describes it, it was the first real win in the animal liberation movement, and thereby created a massive amount of momentum for the movement.

I worry that in current EA culture people feel like every activity has to be justified on the basis of marginal cost-effectiveness, and that the fact that an action would constitute some definite and symbolic, even if very small, step towards progress — and be the sort of thing that could provide fuel for a further movement — isn’t ‘allowable’ as a reason for engaging in an activity. Whereas in activism in general these sorts of knock-on effects would often be regarded as the whole point of particular campaigns, and that actually seems to me (now) like a pretty reasonable position (even if particular instances of that position might often be misguided).”

Esther the Wonder Pig is one pig. Yet she is a symbol for all pigs. Her caregivers acquired her when she was young, and that forever changed their life. This one pig motivated them to take up the cause of animal liberation by creating a sanctuary and promoting veganism. However, so many people know about Esther because their caregivers had a unique approach: making Esther a celebrity. They use creative content and social media to make life with Esther fun. We love seeing what outfits she has on today or how the boy pigs are flirting with her. This to an EA might seem a waste of time, but just like Henry’s win against the New York’s American of Natural History was small, these actions over years continued to accumulate massive results.