Giving Compass' Take:

• Kelly Witwicki and Kieran Greig discuss various avenues of effective animal advocacy, focusing on social change and technological development respectively. 

• Which of these avenues is better aligned with your mission and resources? 

• Learn more about farmed animal advocacy. 

If we want to help farmed animals, there are at least two clear avenues to pursue. One, we can promote technologies to replace farming, like plant-based or clean (cultured) meat. Or two, we can try to change social attitudes towards the moral standing of animals. Does either of this options seem much better than the other? In this talk from EA Global 2018: San Francisco, Kelly Witwicki and Kieran Greig discuss the relevant considerations.

Kieran: Before we go into the considerations for and against tech change versus social change, I think we're going to first start off with a number of qualifications in order to narrow down on exactly what we are going to be discussing. The first thing is for technological development, we're just going to be constrained to food tech, so particularly plant-based alternatives and clean meat. I know there're other things we could consider, so things like virtual reality, or we could get a lot more speculative about things like artificial intelligence or potentially gene editing, but we're just really not going to go into those things. So it's just focused on food tech, plant-based foods, and clean meat.

Kelly: And I'm going to be talking about social change/advocacy. I might use those interchangeably. We're talking about the things that the animal advocacy community right now thinks are priorities, so things like strong corporate or legislative reforms, things like personhood initiatives to get basic rights for some species, or for some individuals of non-human species. And possibly also work that affects society's attitudes towards farmed animals, towards animal farming, and towards animal farming alternatives. So there's a lot of range in there. This could include supportive documentaries and non-fiction film and television, but just assume that we're talking about the best things in the clean meat, plant-based food tech space and the best things in the advocacy space. So clean chicken meat to strong reforms or personhood initiatives, not like clean suede and, I don't know, whatever advocacy we think is ineffective.

Read the full conversation about animal advocacy strategies between Kelly Witwicki and Kieran Greig at Effective Altruism.