I’m really curious why all of the major animal welfare/rights organizations seem to be putting more emphasis on vegan outreach than on in-vitro meat/genetic modification research. I have a hard time imagining a scenario where any arbitrary (but large) contribution toward vegan outreach leads to greater suffering reduction than the same amount put toward hastening a more efficient and cruelty-free system for producing meat.
There seems to be, based just on my non-rigorous observations, significant overlap between the Vegan/Vegetarian communities and the “Genetically Modified Foods and big Pharma will turn your babies into money-forging cancer” theorists. Obviously not all Vegans are “chemicals=bad because nature” conspiracy theorists, and not all such conspiracy theorists are vegan, but the overlap seems significant. That vocal overlap group strikes me as likely to oppose lab-grown meat because it’s unnatural, and then the conspiracy theories will begin. And the animal rights groups probably don’t want to divide up their base any further.
(This comment felt harsh to me as I was writing it, even after I cut out other bits. The feeling I’m getting is very similar to political indignation. If this looks as mind-killd to anyone else, please please correct me.)
That seems plausible, though PETA already has a million-dollar prize for anyone who can mass-market an in-vitro meat product. Given their annual revenues (~$30 million) and the cost associated with that kind of project, it seems like they’re going about it the wrong way.
From a utilitarian perspective, wireheading livestock might be an even better option—though that probably would be perceived by most animal activists (and people in general) as vaguely dystopian.
Opium in the feed? Cut their nerves? Some sort of computerised gamma-ray brain surgery? I’m certain that if there were a tiny financial incentive for agribusiness to do it then a way would swiftly be found.
It’s not so hard to turn humans into living vegetables. Some sorts of head trauma seem to do it. How hard can it be to make that reliable (or at least reasonably reliable) for cows?
Least convenient world and all that: If we could prevent animal suffering by skilfully whacking calves over the head with a claw hammer, would that be a goal to which the rational vegan would aspire? It would be just as good as killing them, plus pleasure for the meat eaters. Also it would probably be possible to find people who’d enjoy doing it, so that’s another plus.
It’s not so hard to turn humans into living vegetables. Some sorts of head trauma seem to do it. How hard can it be to make that reliable (or at least reasonably reliable) for cows?
Probably not that hard. Doing it without ruining the meat or at least reducing yields sounds harder to me, though—muscles atrophy if they don’t get used, and they don’t get used if nothing’s giving them commands. I’d also expect force-feeding a braindead animal to be more expensive and probably more conducive to health problems than letting it feed itself.
To continue the ‘living vegetables’ approach, one could point out that to keep a human in a coma alive and (somewhat) well will cost you somewhere from $500-$3k+. Per day.
Even assuming that animals are much cheaper by taking the bottom of the range and then cutting it by an entire order of magnitude, the 1.5-3 year aging of standard cattles being butchered means 50 1.5 365 = >$27.4k extra expenses.
So just kill all the farm animals painlessly now? Sure that sounds good. But if there will still be farm animal being raised then it seems there still is a problem. Or if you are just talking about ways of making slaughter painless for continuing to factory farm, that sounds better than nothing.
though that probably would be perceived by most animal activists (and people in general) as vaguely dystopian.
I find this interesting, because it seems to imply that people have an intuitive sense that eudaimonia applies to animals. I’ll have to think about the consequences of this.
Do you know of any sources for this? In my also non-rigorous experience this is a totally unfounded misperception of veg*nism that people seem to have, founded on nothing but a few quack websites/anti-science blogs.
Consider for instance /r/vegan over at reddit, which is in fact overwhelmingly pro-GMO and ethics rather than health focused. Of course, it is certainly true that the demographics of reddit or that subreddit are much different from that of veg*ns as a whole (or people as a whole). Lesswrong is an even more extreme case of such a limited demographic.
A lot of animal welfare/rights organizations provide funding for in-vitro meat / fake meat, though they don’t do much to advertise it. The idea is that these meat substitutes won’t take off unless they create some demand for them. Vegan Outreach is one of the biggest funders of Beyond Meat and New Harvest.
I like Beyond Meat, but I think the praise for it has been overblown. For example, the Effective Animal Activism link you’ve provided says:
[Beyond Meat] mimics chicken to such a degree that renowned New York Times food journalist and author Mark Bittman claimed that it “fooled me badly in a blind tasting”.
But reading Bittman’s piece, the reader will quickly realize that the quote above is taken out of context:
It doesn’t taste much like chicken, but since most white meat chicken doesn’t taste like much anyway, that’s hardly a problem; both are about texture, chew and the ingredients you put on them or combine with them. When you take Brown’s product, cut it up and combine it with, say, chopped tomato and lettuce and mayonnaise with some seasoning in it, and wrap it in a burrito, you won’t know the difference between that and chicken.
I like soy meat alternatives just fine, but vegans and vegetarians are the market. People who enjoy the taste of meat and don’t see the ethical problems with it don’t want a relatively expensive alternative with a flavor they have to mask. There’s demand for in-vitro meat because there’s demand for meat. If you can make a product that tastes the same and costs less, people will buy it.
Maybe it’s likely impossible to scale vat meat such that it is actually cheaper to produce, long-term, than meat from conventionally-raised livestock. Has this sort of analysis been done? I’d assume from the numbers New Harvest quotes − 45% reduction in energy use, 95% reduction in water use, etc. - that it is actually possible.
If you put vat meat on a styrofoam plate with a label with a big red barn on it and a cheaper price tag than the stuff next to it, people almost certainly will buy it. If consumers were that discerning about how their meat was produced, they wouldn’t buy the stuff that came from an animal that spent its entire life knee-deep in its own excrement.
If you put vat meat on a styrofoam plate with a label with a big red barn on it and a cheaper price tag than the stuff next to it, people almost certainly will buy it.
I dunno—look at all the brouhaha about genetically modified food.
That there’s a population brouhahaing over GM food doesn’t preclude the existence of a population eager to buy cheap tasty-enough meat. Indeed, I expect the populations overlap significantly.
I predict a big drop in price soon after vat meat becomes sufficiently popular due to money saved on dealing with useless organs and suffering, as well as a great big leap in profit for any farm that sells “natural cow meat.” One is inherently efficient due to it simplfying farming. The other is pretty, however ugly it is for the animals. I do worry about the numbers New Harvest gives, but in the long run, there is hope for this regardless of what the price is initially—the potential for success in feeding humanity cheaply and well is just too great, in my opinion. Seems like I will be pushing “meat in a bucket” whenever possible, and I am not even that into making animals happy.
Well if vegan/vegetarian outreach is particularly effective then it may do more to develope lab meat than just donating to lab meat causes themselves (because there would be more people interested in this and similar technologies). Additionally, making people vegan/vegetarian may have a stronger effect in promoting anti speciesism in general which seems like it will be of larger overall benefit than just ending factory farming. This seems like it would happen because thoughts follow actions.
We can try to estimate New Harvest’s effectiveness using the same methodology attempted for SENS research in the comment by David Barry here. I can’t find New Harvest’s 990 revenue reports, but it’s donations are routed through the Network for Good, which has a total annual revenue of 150 million dollars, providing an upper bound. An annual revenue of less than 1000 dollars is very unlikely, so we can use the geometric mean of $400 000 per year as an estimated annual revenue. There are about 500 000 minutes in a year, so right now $1 brings development just over a minute closer.*
There currently 24 billion chicken, 1 billion cattle, and 1 billion pigs. Assuming the current factory farm suffering rates as an estimate for suffering rates when artificial/substitute meat becomes available, and assuming (as the OP does) that animals suffer roughly equally, then bringing faux meat one minute closer prevents about (25 billion animals)/(500 000 minutes per year) = 50 animal years of suffering.
If we assume that New Harvest has a 10% chance of success, $1 dollar there prevents an expected 5 animal years of suffering, or expressed as in the OP, preventing 1 expected animal year of suffering costs about 20 cents.
So, these (very rough) estimates show about similar levels of effectiveness.
*Assuming some set amount of money is necessary and the bottleneck and you aren’t donating enough for diminishing marginal returns.
There are already meat alternatives (seitan, tempeh, tofu, soy, etc.) which provide a meat-like flavor and texture. It’s not immediately obvious that in-vitro meat is necessarily more effective than just promoting or refining existing alternatives.
I suppose for long-run impact this kind of research may be orders of magnitude more useful though.
I’m really curious why all of the major animal welfare/rights organizations seem to be putting more emphasis on vegan outreach than on in-vitro meat/genetic modification research. I have a hard time imagining a scenario where any arbitrary (but large) contribution toward vegan outreach leads to greater suffering reduction than the same amount put toward hastening a more efficient and cruelty-free system for producing meat.
There seems to be, based just on my non-rigorous observations, significant overlap between the Vegan/Vegetarian communities and the “Genetically Modified Foods and big Pharma will turn your babies into money-forging cancer” theorists. Obviously not all Vegans are “chemicals=bad because nature” conspiracy theorists, and not all such conspiracy theorists are vegan, but the overlap seems significant. That vocal overlap group strikes me as likely to oppose lab-grown meat because it’s unnatural, and then the conspiracy theories will begin. And the animal rights groups probably don’t want to divide up their base any further.
(This comment felt harsh to me as I was writing it, even after I cut out other bits. The feeling I’m getting is very similar to political indignation. If this looks as mind-killd to anyone else, please please correct me.)
That seems plausible, though PETA already has a million-dollar prize for anyone who can mass-market an in-vitro meat product. Given their annual revenues (~$30 million) and the cost associated with that kind of project, it seems like they’re going about it the wrong way.
From a utilitarian perspective, wireheading livestock might be an even better option—though that probably would be perceived by most animal activists (and people in general) as vaguely dystopian.
Does the technology to reliably and cheaply wirehead farmed animals now exist at all? Without claiming expertise, I find that unlikely.
Opium in the feed? Cut their nerves? Some sort of computerised gamma-ray brain surgery? I’m certain that if there were a tiny financial incentive for agribusiness to do it then a way would swiftly be found.
It’s not so hard to turn humans into living vegetables. Some sorts of head trauma seem to do it. How hard can it be to make that reliable (or at least reasonably reliable) for cows?
Least convenient world and all that: If we could prevent animal suffering by skilfully whacking calves over the head with a claw hammer, would that be a goal to which the rational vegan would aspire? It would be just as good as killing them, plus pleasure for the meat eaters. Also it would probably be possible to find people who’d enjoy doing it, so that’s another plus.
Probably not that hard. Doing it without ruining the meat or at least reducing yields sounds harder to me, though—muscles atrophy if they don’t get used, and they don’t get used if nothing’s giving them commands. I’d also expect force-feeding a braindead animal to be more expensive and probably more conducive to health problems than letting it feed itself.
To continue the ‘living vegetables’ approach, one could point out that to keep a human in a coma alive and (somewhat) well will cost you somewhere from $500-$3k+. Per day.
Even assuming that animals are much cheaper by taking the bottom of the range and then cutting it by an entire order of magnitude, the 1.5-3 year aging of standard cattles being butchered means 50 1.5 365 = >$27.4k extra expenses.
That’s some expensive meat.
So just kill all the farm animals painlessly now? Sure that sounds good. But if there will still be farm animal being raised then it seems there still is a problem. Or if you are just talking about ways of making slaughter painless for continuing to factory farm, that sounds better than nothing.
I find this interesting, because it seems to imply that people have an intuitive sense that eudaimonia applies to animals. I’ll have to think about the consequences of this.
Do you know of any sources for this? In my also non-rigorous experience this is a totally unfounded misperception of veg*nism that people seem to have, founded on nothing but a few quack websites/anti-science blogs.
Consider for instance /r/vegan over at reddit, which is in fact overwhelmingly pro-GMO and ethics rather than health focused. Of course, it is certainly true that the demographics of reddit or that subreddit are much different from that of veg*ns as a whole (or people as a whole). Lesswrong is an even more extreme case of such a limited demographic.
A lot of animal welfare/rights organizations provide funding for in-vitro meat / fake meat, though they don’t do much to advertise it. The idea is that these meat substitutes won’t take off unless they create some demand for them. Vegan Outreach is one of the biggest funders of Beyond Meat and New Harvest.
I like Beyond Meat, but I think the praise for it has been overblown. For example, the Effective Animal Activism link you’ve provided says:
But reading Bittman’s piece, the reader will quickly realize that the quote above is taken out of context:
I like soy meat alternatives just fine, but vegans and vegetarians are the market. People who enjoy the taste of meat and don’t see the ethical problems with it don’t want a relatively expensive alternative with a flavor they have to mask. There’s demand for in-vitro meat because there’s demand for meat. If you can make a product that tastes the same and costs less, people will buy it.
Maybe it’s likely impossible to scale vat meat such that it is actually cheaper to produce, long-term, than meat from conventionally-raised livestock. Has this sort of analysis been done? I’d assume from the numbers New Harvest quotes − 45% reduction in energy use, 95% reduction in water use, etc. - that it is actually possible.
If you put vat meat on a styrofoam plate with a label with a big red barn on it and a cheaper price tag than the stuff next to it, people almost certainly will buy it. If consumers were that discerning about how their meat was produced, they wouldn’t buy the stuff that came from an animal that spent its entire life knee-deep in its own excrement.
It seems overwhelmingly unlikely that the optimal method of meat production is to have it walking around eating plant matter and going ‘Moo!’.
Especially for sheep. The training costs would be prohibitive.
I dunno—look at all the brouhaha about genetically modified food.
That there’s a population brouhahaing over GM food doesn’t preclude the existence of a population eager to buy cheap tasty-enough meat. Indeed, I expect the populations overlap significantly.
I predict a big drop in price soon after vat meat becomes sufficiently popular due to money saved on dealing with useless organs and suffering, as well as a great big leap in profit for any farm that sells “natural cow meat.” One is inherently efficient due to it simplfying farming. The other is pretty, however ugly it is for the animals. I do worry about the numbers New Harvest gives, but in the long run, there is hope for this regardless of what the price is initially—the potential for success in feeding humanity cheaply and well is just too great, in my opinion. Seems like I will be pushing “meat in a bucket” whenever possible, and I am not even that into making animals happy.
Well if vegan/vegetarian outreach is particularly effective then it may do more to develope lab meat than just donating to lab meat causes themselves (because there would be more people interested in this and similar technologies). Additionally, making people vegan/vegetarian may have a stronger effect in promoting anti speciesism in general which seems like it will be of larger overall benefit than just ending factory farming. This seems like it would happen because thoughts follow actions.
I’ve wondered about this as well.
We can try to estimate New Harvest’s effectiveness using the same methodology attempted for SENS research in the comment by David Barry here. I can’t find New Harvest’s 990 revenue reports, but it’s donations are routed through the Network for Good, which has a total annual revenue of 150 million dollars, providing an upper bound. An annual revenue of less than 1000 dollars is very unlikely, so we can use the geometric mean of $400 000 per year as an estimated annual revenue. There are about 500 000 minutes in a year, so right now $1 brings development just over a minute closer.*
There currently 24 billion chicken, 1 billion cattle, and 1 billion pigs. Assuming the current factory farm suffering rates as an estimate for suffering rates when artificial/substitute meat becomes available, and assuming (as the OP does) that animals suffer roughly equally, then bringing faux meat one minute closer prevents about (25 billion animals)/(500 000 minutes per year) = 50 animal years of suffering.
If we assume that New Harvest has a 10% chance of success, $1 dollar there prevents an expected 5 animal years of suffering, or expressed as in the OP, preventing 1 expected animal year of suffering costs about 20 cents.
So, these (very rough) estimates show about similar levels of effectiveness.
*Assuming some set amount of money is necessary and the bottleneck and you aren’t donating enough for diminishing marginal returns.
There are already meat alternatives (seitan, tempeh, tofu, soy, etc.) which provide a meat-like flavor and texture. It’s not immediately obvious that in-vitro meat is necessarily more effective than just promoting or refining existing alternatives.
I suppose for long-run impact this kind of research may be orders of magnitude more useful though.