The problem of animal suffering looks even larger in scale when we also consider wild animals, which vastly exceed factory farmed animals in number. Especially given the scale of the problem, animal welfare seems incredibly neglected. There is a small but growing base of evidence on animal welfare interventions which suggests that there are cost-effective ways to make progress on this problem.
Campaigns to try to get large companies to reduce their impact on animal suffering are one of the most promising types of intervention. Corporate campaigns to date have resulted in cage-free pledges from around companies, sparing about 60 million hens annually from confinement.
Working to promote alternatives to meat consumption may also be a promising approach. While people have eaten vegetarian and vegan diets for thousands of years, we've only recently begun to produce products that don't just substitute for meat e. Many restaurants, including large franchises , have recently begun serving vegetarian or vegan options based around products from companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat.
Consumer sales of meat alternatives have also risen sharply in recent years. The proportion of vegetarians and vegans seems to be rising in some countries like the United Kingdom and the United States , though global data is hard to come by. Attempts to replicate meat on a cellular level are also underway, and could someday produce affordable meat that is identical to what we eat today, but does not cause the slaughter of animals.
While global meat consumption has been rising as people become wealthier, it now seems possible that we could reach a future where people have overwhelmingly adopted meat alternatives — not out of moral concern for animal welfare, but because they offer a similar consumption experience at lower prices. Organizations like The Good Food Institute and New Harvest are working to encourage scientific, political, and entrepreneurial progress toward this goal.
Overall, cost-effectiveness analyses suggest that there are opportunities to have a large impact on animal welfare. The evidence from corporate campaigns seems particularly promising. However, the evidence base here is still relatively small, which suggests we should be less confident in these estimates of direct cost-effectiveness than we are for similar estimates around global health interventions.
This is because we might think that most interventions are not very cost-effective , so we should be skeptical of weak evidence of high impact. However, it also suggests that it may be worthwhile to invest more resources into evaluating the impact of animal welfare interventions.
This could help us to make better decisions in future - focusing our efforts elsewhere if these interventions do not seem to be effective, and scaling them up if the results are more promising.
Some people object to the idea of reducing factory farming by claiming that eating meat is natural - or that we need to eat meat in order to be healthy. There are a few important points to note in response to these concerns.
For example, it is natural for children to go unvaccinated, and for many to die very young as a result. But this state of affairs seems clearly wrong. Second, even if some amount of predation were natural and necessary, factory farming is not particularly natural. Hens are not naturally kept in tiny cages indoors, and cows are not naturally separated from their calves.
Moreover, many of the unnatural conditions in factory farms are avoidable. We have the resources to raise animals in a more humane way, alleviating their suffering. Many people defend the mass production of meat by arguing that we need meat in order to be healthy. There are still risks that a vegan diet can lead to deficiencies in certain micronutrients, such as B12 and Omega 3. Animal welfare seems to be a promising cause area.
But there are also several reasons why you might be unconvinced by this analysis, or why you might think that a different cause area is likely to hold even greater opportunities to do good. The evidence base here is still relatively weak, especially when compared to global health interventions. It is normally clear exactly where and how more money directed towards global health can improve and save lives.
By contrast, much less research has been done on animal welfare interventions. However, even if there is not enough evidence to say that the most promising animal welfare interventions are definitely highly impactful, there seems to be a significant probability that this is the case, which could make the expected value high.
Strength of evidence aside, you might choose to prioritise human-centred cause areas over animals simply because you think that improving human lives is a higher priority. Deciding how to prioritise animal welfare relative to the problems faced by humans depends on a number of complex issues:.
The significance of animal suffering relative to human suffering. Though it seems likely that animals have the capacity to suffer and feel pain, [22] it seems reasonable to be more confident of human consciousness than of animal consciousness. We have direct evidence of the former, but we still know very little about which physical or functional characteristics are needed to create conscious experience. Depending on how much more confident we think we should be of human consciousness, this might suggest assigning considerably less moral weight to animals than humans, and therefore prioritising interventions in human welfare.
There are other reasons you might decide to prioritise human welfare. For example, perhaps freedom and dignity are more important for humans than they are for animals.
Or perhaps you think that more complex forms of consciousness - the ability to reason and reflect, for example — are more important than pleasure and pain, and that only humans are capable of experiencing these. The indirect effects of poverty interventions versus animal interventions. Human societies are capable of development in a way that animal societies are not, and so we might think that the indirect effects of human-focused interventions will be greater.
However, improving the lives of humans could also have negative indirect effects for animals, [26] since people generally eat more meat as they get richer. This is sometimes known as the meat-eater problem. The long-run future could be incredibly morally important.
We could have billions or even trillions of descendants. This means that even a low probability of improving the lives of future generations, or ensuring that humanity survives into the future at all, could be significant. Group selection has something of a checkered history in evolutionary biology. Selection at the level of the individual will favour those who enjoy the benefits of being in a group without giving anything back -- cheaters.
Eventually, they'll dominate the group, even if it would have been better for everyone to cooperate. Even though groups of cooperators will out-compete those made up of cheaters, the cooperative groups are vulnerable to being taken over by cheaters. Evolutionary biologists have borrowed a term from economics to describe this impasse, the 'tragedy of the commons'.
Unless groups have a strongly cohesive identity, they're always vulnerable to cheating, which is favoured by individual-level selection. In many social systems including ants and bees , kinship provides the cohesion required to overcome the tragedy of the commons. As long as altruism is directed towards kin, its benefits stay within the group, and group-level selection prevails over individual-level selection.
It turns out that horizontal gene transfer can play a similar role in bacteria. Horizontal transfer ensures that others in the group also have the producer gene, strengthening the role of group selection and enabling cooperative groups to out-compete those riddled with cheaters.
The evolution of altruism depends on balancing the tension between selection at the levels of groups and individuals. The combination of horizontal gene transfer and population structure is powerful enough to pull that off, joining kinship as a mechanism for creating viable group selection dynamics. Given that, I'd like to leave you with an intriguing question to ponder: what about the combination of population structure and horizontal meme transfer?
Ref Dimitriu, T et al. Genetic information transfer promotes cooperation in bacteria. PNAS ; published ahead of print. August 11, By: Sedeer el-Showk. Aa Aa Aa. Horizontal Gene Transfer Promotes Altruism. Email your Friend. Submit Cancel. February 01, Goodbye! November 16, Divide and conquer: coaxing cheaters to battle August 10, The origins of kin discrimination—telling June 22, The Evolution of Suicidal Sex.
May 25, Shape Matters for Gene Expression. April 20, What Drove the Great Dying? April 13, The pan-genome of Emiliania huxleyi April 06, Behavioral Transplants March 30, Drug resistance evolves in inbred parasites.
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