EA - Do you think decreasing the consumption of animals is good/bad? Think again? by Vasco Grilo

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Do you think decreasing the consumption of animals is good/bad? Think again?, published by Vasco Grilo on May 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.QuestionDo you think decreasing the consumption of animals is good/bad? For which groups of farmed animals?ContextI stopped eating animals 4 years ago mostly to decrease the suffering of farmed animals. I am glad I did that based on the information I had at the time. However, I am no longer confident that decreasing the consumption of animals is good/bad. It has many effects:Decreasing the number of factory-farmed animals.I believe this would be good for chickens, since I expect them to have negative lives. I estimated the lives of broilers in conventional and reformed scenarios are, per unit time, 2.58 and 0.574 times as bad as human lives are good (see 2nd table). However, these numbers are not resilient:On the one hand, if I consider disabling pain is 10 (instead of 100) times as bad as hurtful pain, the lives of broilers in conventional and reformed scenarios would be, per unit time, 2.73 % and 26.2 % as good as human lives. Nevertheless, disabling pain being only 10 times as bad as hurtful pain seems quite implausible if one thinks being alive is as good as hurtful pain is bad.On the other hand, I may be overestimating broilers’ pleasurable experiences.I guess the same applies to other species, but I honestly do not know. Figuring out whether farmed shrimps and prawns have good/bad lives seems especially important, since they are arguably the driver for the welfare of farmed animals.Decreasing the production of animal feed, and therefore reducing crop area, which tends to:Increase the population of wild animals, which I do not know whether it is good or bad. I think the welfare of terrestrial wild animals is driven by that of terrestrial arthropods, but I am very uncertain about whether they have good or bad lives. I recommend checking this preprint from Heather Browning and Walter Weit for an overview of the welfare status of wild animals.Decrease the resilience against food shocks. As I wrote here:The smaller the population of (farmed) animals, the less animal feed could be directed to humans to mitigate the food shocks caused by the lower temperature, light and humidity during abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios (ASRS), which can be a nuclear winter, volcanic winter, or impact winter.Because producing calories from animals is much less efficient than from plants, decreasing the number of animals results in a smaller area of crops.So the agricultural system would be less oversized (i.e. it would have a smaller safety margin), and scaling up food production to counter the lower yields during an ASRS would be harder.To maximise calorie supply, farmed animals should stop being fed and quickly be culled after the onset of an ASRS. This would decrease the starvation of humans and farmed animals, but these would tend to experience more severe pain for a faster slaughtering rate.As a side note, increasing food waste would also increase resilience against food shocks, as long as it can be promptly cut down. One can even argue humanity should increase (easily reducible) food waste instead of the population of farmed animals. However, I suspect the latter is more tractable.Increase biodiversity, which arguably increases existential risk due to ecosystem collapse (see Kareiva 2018).Decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, and therefore decreasing global warming.I have little idea whether this is good or bad.Firstly, it is quite unclear whether climate change is good or bad for wild animals.Secondly, although more global warming makes climate change worse for humans, I believe it mitigates the food shocks caused by ASRSs. Accounting for both of these effects, I estimated the optimal median global warming i...