Not inevitable, not impossible

Why ending the worst abuses of factory farming is an issue ripe for moral reform

I recently joined Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast to discuss factory farming. I hope you’ll give it a listen — and consider supporting his fundraiser for FarmKind’s Impact Fund. (Dwarkesh is matching all donations up to $250K; use the code “dwarkesh”.)

We discuss two contradictory views about factory farming that produce the same conclusion: that its end is either inevitable or impossible.

Some techno-optimists assume factory farming will vanish in the wake of AGI. Some pessimists see reforming it as a hopeless cause. Both camps arrive at the same conclusion: fatalism. If factory farming is destined to end, or persist, then what’s the point in fighting it?

I think both views are wrong. In fact, I think factory farming sits in the ideal position for moral reform. Because its end is neither inevitable nor impossible, it offers a unique opportunity for advocacy to change the trajectory of human moral progress.

Not inevitable

Dwarkesh raised an objection to working on factory farming that I often hear from techno-optimists who care about the issue: isn’t its end inevitable? Some cite the long arc of moral progress; others the promise of vast technological change like cultivated meat or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which surpasses human capabilities.

It’s true that humanity has achieved incredible moral progress for humans. But that progress was never inevitable — it was the result of moral and political reform as much as technology. And that moral progress mostly hasn’t yet extended to animals. For them, the long moral arc of history has so far only bent downward.

Technology may one day end factory farming, just as cars liberated working horses. Or it may just expand factory farming further, as it has done so far. Dwarkesh and I discuss how the genetic turbocharging of chickens has already produced an animal so efficient that it’s hard to compete with.

Will the arrival of AGI be different? Maybe. Perhaps it cracks cultivated meat or another better way to produce protein. But, as Dwarkesh and I discuss, we’ll still need to persuade people to eat it — and politicians not to ban it.

Thankfully, there’s a lot we can do to lower the probability of factory farming’s abuses persisting forever, and to accelerate progress toward its extinction. (Even ending factory farming a few decades earlier would spare hundreds of billions of animals from lives of suffering.)

Not impossible

Consider advocates’ progress in recent years on three iconic cruelties of factory farming.

• Battery cages. The egg industry adopted cages as the cheapest method of production and the pinnacle of efficiency. It had no plans to ever drop them — until advocates won cage-free pledges from major corporations and laws from US states and EU nations. Today the US hen flock is 47% cage-free, while the EU flock is 62% cage-free, and both regions are on a new trajectory to be entirely cage-free.

• Broiler chickens. The chicken industry had for a century moved in only one direction: toward crowding ever-fatter birds ever more closely together. Then advocacy groups won chicken welfare reforms from most British, French, German, and Dutch retailers. Last month, French group L214 secured a pledge from the country’s largest chicken producer, LDC Group, to adopt major animal welfare reforms for up to 400 million birds annually.

• Chick killing. For decades, the egg industry’s killing of male chicks seemed immune to reform. Then advocates helped kickstart in-ovo sexing technology, which is already in use for 28% of EU hens and just arrived in the US. Today chick killing is on a path to eventual extinction.

Collectively these reforms have already reduced the suffering of over a billion animals. Given they’re permanent, they will reduce the suffering of more than another billion every year, or over 10 billion within a decade. And they’ll further tilt the trajectory away from ever-more cruelty in the world.

Few other social movements can count their impact in how many billion individuals they help.

Operating on a shoestring

Source: CauseIQ database, based on US non-profits’ form 990 financial reporting (mostly from 2023).

The scale of these reforms is all the more remarkable compared with the scale of the movement that achieved them. The entire global movement to fight factory farming — every intervention in every country to help farmed animals and alternative proteins — employs a few thousand full-time advocates and spends less than $300M/year combined. That’s at least an order of magnitude smaller than most comparable movements.

This philanthropic neglect has two silver linings. First, it means that the contribution of each individual matters even more than on most issues. An advocate focused doggedly on an animal welfare reform, or a donor contributing a few hundred thousand dollars, can hope to impact over a million animals’ lives.

Second, it makes me optimistic about what we can achieve as our movement grows. If this is what the pilot version of our movement is capable of, think what the scaled-up version will achieve. And every year our movement is growing.

The opportunity to reduce suffering

I wish the end of factory farming were inevitable. I wish there were an easy path to end all the cruelty it causes. But changing the world is seldom easy — if it were, someone else would have already done it. Factory farming is, after all, a trillion-dollar global industry entrenched deeply in our diets, economy, and politics.

The surprise is not that a few thousand advocates have failed to end this system, but that we’ve achieved so much progress in ending its worst abuses. This progress is all the more remarkable because it was never inevitable. Advocates and funders aren’t just accelerating progress — they’re changing the course of history.

For most of human history, influencing the lives of millions was a luxury reserved for emperors, generals, and prophets — many of whom used that power for ill. Today it’s an opportunity available to most of us. We should seize it.