Michael Dello-Iacovo, Author at Michael Dello-Iacovo

Interview with vegan publishers John Yunker and Midge Raymond

John and Midge are authors and co-founders of the publishing house Ashland Creek Press, which is dedicated to animal and environmental literature.

How and why did you become vegan?

It was a journey that predates Ashland Creek Press. We both took different journeys but arrived at the same destination. And the more we learned about animals and how they are treated, the more this affected every aspect of our lives, including our writing. Ashland Creek Press grew out of desire to see more works of literature that address animal rights issues.

How did you come to writing and publishing?

Midge: We both have journalism backgrounds, and we both worked in publishing in New York. This is when I first began writing fiction. After publishing a number of short stories, my first collection, Forgetting English, was published in 2009, and my novel, My Last Continent, was published this year by Text Publishing. Ashland Creek Press was born thanks to John’s novel, The Tourist Trail, which we published in 2010 after his agent couldn’t find a home for it. This experience made us realize that there is a lot of environmentally themed literature that isn’t finding its way into the world, so we decided to start a boutique press with that focus.

John: While Midge has a strong background in editing, my expertise is more in web, production, and marketing. After publishing The Tourist Trail, we began accepting submissions for Ashland Creek Press and were amazed by the high quality of work we received, which told us that there was definitely a need for an environmental press. We’re now in our fifth year and have published more than twenty books.

What would you suggest for an author looking to write or promote a book about animal ethics? For one, I imagine it’s difficult to write a popular and successful book about animals ethics when so few people take animal suffering seriously.

First, we’d encourage the author to keep us in mind! Second, we’d encourage any writer passionate about these issues to not give up. In many ways, writers who tackle these issues are ahead of their time — but our time will come eventually.

Regarding the writing itself, it’s important that writers understand their audience and what they’re trying to achieve with their work. Some writers are successful in writing for fellow vegans, and their work reflects this. But to write a novel that will appeal across the full spectrum of readers, one must be careful not to be heavy handed in style and voice. You want readers to share your journey, and you must always keep in mind that those who are not vegans might not take the same path that you took. The goal is to open hearts and minds toward these issues by asking important questions in a way that respects where every reader is coming from.

What skills would you suggest are most valuable to learn early for starting and running a great business?

Start small and keep overhead low. We didn’t “give up the day jobs” when starting this press, and we still have other work to help make ends meet. And this gives us the financial freedom take chances on books that fall outside of the mainstream.

Also, a lot of people view publishing as an easy business to run because of the rise of self-publishing models and eBooks. But there are more than 200,000 books published every year, which makes book marketing a constant and never-ending challenge. In other words, we would not recommend that people get into publishing to make money but rather to pursue their passions. It’s definitely a labor of love.

What is it about fiction that allows a message to be communicated better than non-fiction?

Non-fiction speaks to the brain; fiction speaks to the heart. And while we find that non-fiction books have a huge impact on awareness and action (we also publish non-fiction, such as Dogland), we have special affinity for fiction. We’re readers and writers of fiction ourselves and are continually frustrated by the lack of novels that see the world the way we see the world.

What is your biggest insight on encouraging regard for animals, either in print or in person?

Empathy is the key. Most people have empathy for their family pets, and they may not realize, for example, that pigs are as intelligent as their dogs. The challenge is helping them expand their love for such pets as cats and dogs to animals that have largely been overlooked. One strategy is by giving an animal point of view in a story — not an easy feat but, done well, can be quite successful, as it was with the cockatoo Caruso in Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s Love and Ordinary Creatures. Other ways we can find empathy for animals in fiction is by authors creating unforgettable animal characters that live among humans, such as Jata in Mindy Mejia’s The Dragon Keeper. And both editions of Among Animals feature animals from dogs and cats to emus and cockroaches, all of which challenge us to view these creatures in a new light.

What one movie, piece of literature or other medium has most shifted your views?

John: It’s hard to pick just one. Some of the more influential books in my life include Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee, The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy, and the story A Report to An Academy by Franz Kafka. When it comes to television, the British mini-series Edge of Darkness continues to inspire me.

Midge: I am a big fan of environmental novels like Ann Pancake’s Strange As This Weather Has Been and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior. Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves beautifully touches on important animal-rights issues. I also think film is a wonderful medium for the animal rights, especially as there are so many good films that tackle the subject from different angles, from Forks Over Knives to Earthlings to Cowspiracy.

What is one thing that you believe which almost no one else does?

We have long made the point that often widely acclaimed “environmental literature” isn’t truly environmental in that nature is exploited rather than respected. We are working hard to promote a “new environmental literature” that doesn’t glorify hunting, fishing, or any form of extraction from nature. We’ve founded the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature (www.siskiyouprize.com) specifically to highlight these works. We believe we’re due for a revolution in environmental literature.

What’s next for you?

For ACP, we’ve just published the second volume of Among Animals, an anthology of short stories that explore human-animal relationships.

We also just launched the third annual Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature.

Next year we will be publishing the novel The Crows of Beara, about Ireland, nature versus industry, and the power of landscape. We’ve also just signed a non-fiction book about wild bears of Europe. Most people aren’t aware that there are bears there, and this book sheds light on the struggles that they face, as well as the people who advocate on their behalf.

And we’re also both writing new novels.

Thanks for sharing your time! If you want more information about Ashland Creek Press, check out their website.

I’m hoping for interviews with interesting people doing interesting things will become a regular segment. If you enjoyed this and want to hear more stories, make sure to subscribe. And if you have any interesting stories/experiences/wins you’d like to share, please do get in touch so I can interview you!

Why this failed pregnancy intervention highlights the need for charity evaluators

Cross-posted from LinkedIn.

From 2003, almost 3,000 school girls in Western Australia have participated in an unusual social intervention. They were given electronic baby dolls to create the experience of being a mother. The study team hoped that it would reduce teenage pregnancy rates. If you’re skeptical as to whether this would work, you’d be right, but you might be surprised by just how ineffective it was. According to a recent study published in The Lancet, not only did this intervention not have a positive effect on pregnancy rates, it actually increased them.

Australians gave over $6.8 billion to charity in 2014. We should be proud of this. Our country is built on the pillars of mateship and giving everyone a fair go – values reflected in Australians giving 6.5% more this year than last. We live this culture during Easter and Christmas appeals, when we sit down across the nation for Australia’s Biggest Morning Tea, and when we step into our local Salvation Army to help those in need.

While few would challenge the importance of giving to help others, we don’t tend to pore over the annual statements and fiscal returns of our most beloved charities. Rather, the majority of Australians base their giving choices on identity and respect for an organisation’s mission. Many charities we support aren’t always transparent about their methods, simply reiterating terms like ‘community’ and ‘support’ to encourage donations.

Surveys show that duplication and wastage of resources by non-profit organisations is our biggest concern when it comes to giving. Our concern should not only be administrative costs, but rather whether the programs they operate actually help people. Are they using evidence-backed strategies shown to work? Do they rigorously check that their programs are helping people at low cost? Sometimes the answer is yes, but too often it is no.

Unfortunately, most social programs simply aren’t that effective. David Anderson, previously Assistant Director at the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy (now working at the Arnold Foundation) said:

…75% [of social programs] or more turn out to produce small or no effects… [or] negative effects.

This is worrying, and it highlights the need for more research into the effectiveness of charities and social interventions. Luckily, GiveWell and other charity evaluators exists to undertake in-depth charity research to find out which programs are having the greatest impact on poverty.

‘Effective Altruism’ is a growing worldwide social movement which applies rigorous evidence and analysis to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for highly effective charities. This philosophy of acting with the head and the heart is gathering steam with growing think tanks conducting research in San Francisco and Oxford. Its supporters range from Australian philosopher Peter Singer to Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

Helping is not straightforward. But this is no excuse not to give. A minority of programs are found to be incredibly effective, saving and transforming lives at a very low cost per person.

By providing a growing literature on how to give effectively and make a difference with our careers, Effective Altruism promises to empower people around the world to make a real difference with their donations and their time. Aussies can now make tax-deductible donations to some of the most proven effective charities across the globe by visiting Effective Altruism Australia’s website.

Yes, giving from the heart is important. But our feelings need to be guided by facts. We now have the opportunity to be better informed about how, where and to whom we give. It has never been more possible for Australians to have a meaningful and positive impact on a massive scale.

Straw man, steel man and grass man

Straw man

A straw man is a well-known logical fallacy whereby one person appears to be refuting their opponents’ argument in a debate, but they are actually refuting a modified version of their opponents’ argument which has been made easier to refute. This gives the impression that one has beaten their opponent in a debate, when in fact they have beaten a ‘straw man’ which they have set up on purpose. This is also known as ‘attacking a straw man’.

Steel MAN

‘A Steel man‘ is the use of an improved version of an opponents’ argument that is harder to defeat than their original argument. This can (and should) be used in a debate to convince yourself that your own argument is indeed correct, and to give fair representation to your opponent.

Grass MAN

I would like to propose a new phrase along these lines – a ‘grass man’ – which is like a straw man, but involves holding an easily refutable position on something you already disagree with on purpose so that your friend (who you pretend not to know, or at least not to agree with) who believes what you really believe can knock down your ‘grass man argument’ and get people across the fence. This might be used to convince people of an argument they strongly disagree with by sowing doubt. However, this is of course a questionable and dishonest act, and so I don’t necessarily advocate for it. But I do think it is an interesting and new concept. One example of a potential use for a grass man argument that may be warranted is as follows.

There is a room full of people who don’t believe in vaccination. Several prominent scientists have tried to convince the people that vaccination is not harmful, and is actually quite beneficial, to no avail. Two people, unknown to the anti-vaxxers, then enter the room with a prior agreement to engage in a grass man. The first person starts telling the other that vaccination is clearly harmful, and provides a list of very easily attackable reasons for why that is so. The anti-vaxxers then identify with this proponent of what they believe. The second person easily debunks the first’s argument in a way that it is clear it was wrong. This sows doubt in the anti-vaxxers as to whether their position is right after all.

If one has still has moral qualms about such a deceitful tactic, perhaps we can assume that twenty children are about to die if their parents are not convinced that vaccines are safe.

Of course, this example assumes that people are logical and rational. However, there is reason to believe that emotion may still dominate in these situations, and they still won’t change their mind despite the grass man.

When did milk become an ethical dilemma?

If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately you’d know that there has been an uproar over dairy prices in Australia which are at record lows. People are out in droves buying milk and supporting our local farmers, and 891 ABC radio recently asked how milk became an ethical issue. And even more recently, Senator Nick Xenophon has proposed that the government pay to implement a free milk program for school kids.

It always has been an ethical issue, but not for the reasons that you think. I’d like to talk about the hidden victims of the dairy industry; the cows. It’s obvious, but people forget that, for a cow to produce milk, like any mammal, they have to be currently or recently pregnant. As a result, in order to produce the milk, they are often artificially inseminated, which is the most efficient way to get cows pregnant. It’s akin to rape, and animals are literally placed on ‘rape-racks’ to facilitate this process. Once the calves are born, they will want to drink that delicious milk, which of course is ours, so we take the calf away and either grow it for meat or have it killed. Once the dairy cow is too old to produce milk, they are slaughtered, usually for their flesh.

It’s not for any good reason either. Despite myths stating otherwise, milk from other species is quite harmful for humans, and leads to increased rates of osteoarthritis, and so Xenophon’s proposal is irresponsible and simply dangerous. Most humans are against exploiting animals for enjoyment, but somehow food animals are in a category of their own.

How did we get caught up in this hysteria around milk while forgetting the real victims of the situation? Luckily, there are at least a few who realise the insanity of the situation.

If you already recognise the horrors of the dairy industry, make your voice heard lest we start feeding our kids the product of torture, rape and suffering (I mean, what kind of lesson is that?). I might suggest writing your local politician, or write a letter to the editor in a newspaper. If this is totally news to you, I’d advise you to do some research.

Adapted from a submission to the Adelaide news publication The Advertiser.

Favelas and the Olympics: The hypocrisy of anger towards Brazil

There are some strange things going on in Brazil at the moment. Residents of impoverished ‘favelas’ in Brazil have been evicted in the lead up to the Olympics, causing international uproar. It’s hard to say exactly which part of this the uproar is about specifically, but I daresay it’s in relation to the fact that Brazil has spent a lot of money (a taxpayer contribution of $11.6 billion USD) on the Olympics while many are still in poverty.

I have to say it seems a little perverse to me for people to be attacking Brazil for holding the Olympics while there are still people in the favelas since Brazil isn’t the only country with poverty to host the Olympics. Not only that, when Australia held the Olympics in 2000, they too made the choice to spend money on the event rather than spend it on those in need locally and abroad. I would even propose that Australia is about as morally reprehensible for hosting the Olympics as Brazil.

To predict a common response, I don’t think that Brazil is more responsible for Brazilians than Australians (or anyone else) are. To say so must surely mean that we think Brazilians are worth less than Australians. When we have an opportunity to help people, we should do so, regardless of where they are. And yet as a nation, in 2000 Australia decided that $1.7-2.4 billion USD (taxpayer funded proportion) was better spent on games than on helping people. The Against Malaria Foundation didn’t exist at the time, but they are now able to save a live for around $3,000 USD. Consciously or not, we may as well have decided that the Australian Olympics was worth 566,666-800,000 lives. Were the economic benefits and the enjoyment of the public worth so many lives?

And so I don’t think we can really get too upset with Brazil. They made the same choice we did with a bit less visibility. I don’t mean to say that it’s ok that Brazil is largely ignoring their most impoverished at the expense of others. I think it’s terrible. Which is why I had to draw attention to this.

From utilitarian to abolitionist and back in a month

I’ve made a video version of this article and have expanded on some of the points here.

I’m a utilitarian through and through, so it might be a surprise to you to know that I called myself an abolitionist for about a month. But I’ve stopped, and I think my thought process is potentially quite useful. Regardless of your current position regarding animal activism, I ask you to read this.

If you’re not familiar with the abolitionist (or rights) approach to animals (and its opposite, welfarism), I’ll briefly sum it up here. Welfarism is about focusing on trying to minimise suffering felt by animals. Some welfarists advocate for strategies such as welfare reforms in factory farming, like changing the way animals are slaughtered. They might also advocate for people reducing their meat consumption. Essentially, it’s a utilitarian point of view, or close to.

Abolitionism rejects this approach, and wants to abolish the property status of animals. For example, an abolitionist would say that anything less than advocating for full veganism (e.g. saying vegetarianism is ‘ok’ or ‘good’) is wrong, and anything less than advocating for full abolition of animal use (e.g. by advocating for welfare reform) is also wrong. The abolitionist movement is lead by Gary L. Francione, Rutgers University law and philosophy scholar/professor.

The story

I had loosely heard of the abolitionist point of view and had dismissed it on utilitarian grounds. I was already vegan and opposed animal experimentation for a number of reasons, but I still reasoned that, in some hypothetical where testing on 1 animal could mean that 10 other animals could leave, it would be quite unreasonable to not test on that animal. This point of view attracted a lot of criticism in mainstream vegan circles such as Facebook groups. One particularly emotive and memorable comment (which I paraphrase) was:

“You would put poison in the eyes of a puppy?”

To which I replied:

“To save 10 other puppies? Yes. If you wouldn’t you’re in effect killing 10 puppies to save 1 to save yourself feeling uncomfortable. That doesn’t make sense.”

We got nowhere but I was satisfied I had soundly won that debate on logical grounds. What got me thinking, though, was this video interview with Francione, where he argued that welfare reform is actually just not effective, and that we already had a welfare reform under Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Things did get a little better for exploited animals, but after a while people became complacent and things got worse. That seemed reasonable enough to me. And so while I never dropped the utilitarian stance, I was open to the possibility that, even on utilitarian grounds, an abolitionist approach was just better in the long run.

Perhaps the best way to be a utilitarian is to pretend not to be a utilitarian.

And so I called myself an abolitionist, and started acting like one. I became opposed to the owning of pets, to welfare reform campaigns, and to advocating for anything less than veganism. I began arguing with my non-vegan family more and started to find it harder to function in a society of meat eaters. But I’m no stranger to dealing with adversity for the sake of my goals, and so I pushed on.

The turn

I began questioning Francione’s point of view when I heard him state in a talk that he wouldn’t test on one animal even if it meant curing cancer, which reminded me of the conversation I had had on Facebook. The math just didn’t add up for me.

I read Francione’s Rain Without Thunder (1996), or at least made it halfway before giving up. He had some solid points in that welfare reforms simply were not as effective as people thought they were, and possibly made things worse. He criticised Peter Singer and his utilitarian stance towards animals (who believes that animal use could be acceptable as long as their interests are considered equally to human interests), and praised Tom Regan‘s deontological position of giving all animals rights, although he didn’t spend any time justifying why deontology was better than utilitarianism. The more I read, the less I was convinced.

The tipping point

The final tipping point was when I was reading Brian Tomasik‘s work on wild animal suffering. He argued that a rights approach to animals might actually increase animal suffering in the long run, if we consider wild animals. I directly quote from Wikipedia here:

“The argument is that animal rights leads people to believe that all animals have fundamental rights and should not be exploited or interfered with, regardless of the outcome on wellbeing. This may lead people to be against interfering with nature and wild animals. However, the magnitude of wild animal suffering is potentially immense,^[9] and interfering with the wild may be a good way to reduce this suffering.”

I feel that the reason most discussions about abolitionism go nowhere is because people aren’t even valuing the same thing, and so of course they have different answers. If you primarily value the wellbeing of animals and disvalue their suffering, you would probably seek to do whatever max/mins wellbeing/suffering in the long run, which might be an abolitionist-like methodology, and might not. If you want to try and optimise for individual rights instead of wellbeing you’d perhaps take a different approach.

I’m becoming less convinced that I should try and optimise for rights above and beyond how it relates to wellbeing. If it came down to me choosing (all else being equal including flow-on effects, which doesn’t really happen in reality of course) between an animal being happy and an animal being miserable but slightly less exploited, I don’t think I could justify the latter. It seems almost forceful and exploitative itself to choose to consign some animal to misery just so they can be a bit less exploited. Surely what animals fundamentally value themselves is wellbeing, not a lack of exploitation. Humans value not being exploited because it feels bad. Non-human animals only feel bad in factory farmed conditions because such conditions objectively suck for animals. They are abused and are kept in awful conditions. I’m not convinced that ‘humane’ slaughter is possible in reality, and so I still won’t advocate for it, but I won’t pretend that there is some other thing that animals value called ‘rights’.

Final thoughts

As the icing on the cake, I expressed my concerns to Francione on his Facebook page, and he deleted my comment and blocked from liking the page. Well said, Francione.

On funerals and death

“Imagine at the next funeral you go to, you hear in the eulogy that they died because people at a previous funeral didn’t donate their time or money instead.”

I just returned from a funeral where I thought some long thoughts. This essay is them, and also serves as an informal will, seeing as I don’t have one.

As I sat in the pew of that church, I couldn’t help but wonder at how many people were present; it must have been at least 200. My thoughts quickly turned to what I would want if it were my funeral. And I realised that I don’t want a funeral at all, and not just because I’m not religious.

Like most people, I care a lot about others, and I want to reduce the amount of suffering and loss in the world. One of my earliest motivations for this was when a friend’s mum passed away from cancer. When I offered my sincere condolences, they told me that there was nothing I could have done. That stopped me. Why? Perhaps there was something I could have done. I started to think about ways to stop cancer, but I quickly realised that suffering can come in many forms, and it is the suffering that I want to end, not necessarily just cancer.

So eventually I realised that I could donate $4,000 AUD to the Against Malaria Foundation and save a life. One whole life for the cost of a holiday. It suddenly seemed hard to justify ever going on a holiday again. If my reaction to death is wanting to stop it, and I have the opportunity to easily stop it, how could I possibly turn that down for some leisure?

Back to the funeral – 200 people in a room for 90 minutes. Assuming that many people would come to my funeral, that’s a lot of person hours (300 to be precise). In my funeral, they are offering my family their condolences and remembering my life, sure, but what if they could use that 300 hours to save another life. Let’s say those people are able to earn $20 an hour on average. If they each spent 90 minutes working instead of being at my funeral, they could make $6,000, enough to save 1.5 lives.

Of course, people can’t always just work at moment’s notice, so this is meant to be illustrative only. But now we’re getting at something – death is awful, but what if you could prevent a death in the time you spent mourning a life? I foresee getting some criticism at this point, so let’s try a thought experiment.

Imagine you’re on your way to a funeral and you see a person lying on the side of the road bleeding out. You stop your car and spend the next 90 minutes performing CPR until the ambulance arrives. You miss the funeral, but the paramedic tells you that you quite literally saved a life. Do you think you were justified in missing the funeral? Do you think the person who died, or their family, would forgive you?

Ah, you say, but I can’t make $4,000 in 90 minutes, so this is an unfair analogy. Ok, well let’s now ask whether you would do the same for a cat you had just driven past. Same situation, CPR until the vet rocks up, and you’re told that you saved the cats life. This is probably a trickier choice, but I imagine a number of people would still pick the cat over the funeral. As readers of this blog would know, a donation to one of the animal charities recommended as being highly effective by Animal Charity Evaluators can reduce one year of animal suffering for just 60 cents (USD). And so if you make $20 an hour, in 90 minutes you could spare 33 animals from a year of suffering.* Even if you would drive past a single cat, you probably wouldn’t drive past a truck full of 33 cats bleeding out.

Of course we can go 1 step further to organisations working to reduce the chance of existential risk where estimates of the impact of a dollar donated range from saving 1 to 1,000,000 lives at some point in the future (albeit with significantly more uncertainty – but on expected value this may check out).

So while people can’t necessarily spend 90 minutes working extra for money at will, they could do a range of other things, like doing some high impact volunteering (I don’t mean working at a local soup kitchen or handing out blankets, which wouldn’t have anywhere near the kind of impact I’m talking about). Add onto that the $5,000 that I estimate a funeral of that size to cost, and it seems quite perverse for me to ask people to come and honour my life for 90 minutes.

So in lieu of having an actual will, I formally request here that, in the event of my death, if you would have come to my funeral, please instead donate 90 minutes of your salary to [insert whatever I think is the most effective charity at the time here – at the moment I suspect it’s one of Machine Intelligence Research Institute, ACE, Foundational Research Institute or Raising for Effective Giving**] and ensure that the $5,000 that would have otherwise been spent on the funeral goes there too.

Of course, I fully accept that we don’t keep promises or go to funerals for the dead, we do it for the living (and I don’t think that not going to a funeral to make $4,000 would be anywhere near as socially acceptable as saving a life on the road, even if you donated it to AMF, and even though I think it should be***). And yet, I can’t imagine that spending 90 minutes mourning in a group is really a better thing to do than to arrange to save so many lives.

Imagine at the next funeral you go to, you hear in the eulogy that they died because people at a previous funeral didn’t donate their time or money instead.

* I use ‘year of suffering’ instead of ‘lives saved’ here because the charities tend to either reduce the amount of suffering experienced by farm animals or reduce animal product demand/create vegans to remove animals from being brought into a life of suffering. But this is still valid, and since many farm animals live for less than a year, I feel justified in using this example.

** The best cause/organisation to give to will almost certainly change over time. In case I don’t update this (or get around to making an actual will), I would be comfortable with giving either Michael Dickens or Brian Tomasik the right to decide where these donations (and any leftover assets I have) end up going. I don’t know them very well, but they are two of the few people I trust to make a mostly rational decision, and to care sufficiently about both non-human animals and the far future.

*** At this point, one might reasonably ask why I go to funerals. I don’t have a great answer. I personally think that my going to funerals is more selfish than staying home and working on some problem, because by not going people would think less of me.

Should you donate to Animal Charity Evaluators even if you’re not vegan?

If you haven’t heard of Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) yet, there’s a really neat summary of them here, but in short, they are doing research on the most effective ways to help animals and reduce their suffering. They perform foundational research on a range of things from the effectiveness of various interventions, such as leafleting to encourage people to go vegan or eat less meat, to the scale of wild animal suffering (it’s huge).

They also produce recommendations on which charities to donate to in order to reduce animal suffering. Perhaps counterintuitively, they don’t recommend animal shelters. This is because the impact of creating one extra vegan on animal wellbeing is so high that it makes the impact of sheltering one extra animal look tiny in comparison. ACE estimates that Vegan Outreach, one of their standout charities which does leafleting at universities, can spare 1.87 animals from a life on a factory farm per dollar donated. By reducing the demand for meat, the animals are, in theory¹, never brought into existence in the first place. If you believe like I do that a life of immense suffering is worse than no life at all, this is surely a good thing.

Let’s suppose that rescuing and sheltering one animal costs $50. I have no idea what it costs but I think this is a safe underestimate. Therefore, for the same cost that it takes to shelter an animal, Vegan Outreach can spare 93.5 animals from a life of suffering. Unless you value shelter animals much more than you do food animals, you should donate to Vegan Outreach (or better yet, ACE, to multiply your impact). I don’t think you should value shelter animals more than food animals though. They can all suffer, and in fact pigs are more intelligent than dogs, so if capacity to suffer is what you care about, you should probably care about pigs a little more than dogs.

So this is why I would argue you should donate to an effective animal charity rather than a shelter, but what about the original question? There are many great reasons to go vegan, and it’s really easy, yet many have still decided to not go vegan because they enjoy the taste of animals too much. Even if this is you, I think you should still donate to ACE. Most people who eat animals still claim to care about animals, so if you want to be at least partially consistent with that belief, the very least you could do is donate to a charity which is reducing their suffering. Of course, I think being vegan is far easier than people think, and you should do this as well because it’s not one or the other (see this video for how to literally go vegan overnight). I’m also not saying that anything but a vegan lifestyle is ethically justified, and don’t want to make it sound like I’m supporting that. But if you can’t bring yourself to be completely vegan, at least donate a chunk of your money to ACE². Last estimate I heard was that it costs $500 to create one vegan through Vegan Outreach, so you should donate at least that much³. But why stop there?

Let’s go one step further and say that you currently donate to charities that focus on humans. Arguably the most effective charity working on poverty and global health, the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), saves a human life for around $3,300 USD. In effect, you would have to value human life something like 3,000+ times more than the life of an animal to donate to AMF instead of a top animal charity.

Footnotes

¹I say in theory because other factors such as market elasticity are at play which dilute your effect.

² I’m wary that such a stance will make people less likely to go vegan and to just donate a bit of money to ACE and think they’re ok. I think, on balance, this article is more likely to have a net positive effect than a net negative effect (otherwise I wouldn’t have posted it), but I want to make it doubly clear that I think you should do both.

³ An interesting conclusion comes out of this which might be uncomfortable for those who aren’t consequentialist in their ethical beliefs. If donating $1 is expected to save 1.87 animals from a life of suffering, that means that by not donating, you have confined 1.87 animals to a life of suffering, because there is no morally relevant different between an action and an inaction (think walking past a drowning child in a shallow pond when you could easily save them). By extension, if you’re vegan (or even if you’re not) and you spend $20 on a nice restaurant meal when you could have eaten for $5, having spent $15 on yourself needlessly instead of donating it to a top animal charity, you have consigned 28 animals to a life of suffering. Consider that next time you dine out. This leads to questions like ‘well where does it end then?’ Maybe it doesn’t. Living on less is easy and arguably better for your wellbeing, and you get to save a ton of lives. Why wouldn’t you?

Disclosure: While Michael has worked with ACE in the past, he has never been an employee or an official volunteer.

How you should vote in the Australian federal election (to maximise wellbeing)

Multi-issue analyses of which party is the best one to vote for from an objective point of view are seriously lacking. In fact, we couldn’t find a single one for Australian parties in the lead up to the 2016 federal election, which prompted us to perform this research.

In this article, Hugo Burgin and myself have attempted an analysis of which of 6 parties are the best to preference, and what order they should be placed in, based on how their policies make the world a better place generally. That is to say, we have attempted to select the party that is ‘best’. We say ‘attempted’ because such analyses are incredibly complex (which is possibly why none exist), although we believe that some attempt at picking the best party is better than no attempt.

We intend to sway your opinion, though we ourselves are open to being swayed. If you believe we have erred in our analysis or missed something crucial, we want to know so we can change our analysis and our own vote. Thus, this will be a living document until the election. Please also leave any comments below that you believe are useful or add to the discussion.

The parties analysed are:

Liberal
Labor
Greens
Animal Justice Party
Science Party
Nick Xenophon Party

This is a long piece, and we suggest reading the policy by policy summaries or skipping to the conclusion if you are time poor (and trust us).

Important edit: There seems to have been a bit of confusion from some people about what we’re trying to prioritise here. A lot of questions have been of the nature “Well, it’s all well and good that some people care about animal issues, but I don’t, and you haven’t really convinced me that working on animal issues or foreign aid will increase the wellbeing of Australians.”

This kind of response misses the point. We have not chosen to focus on these issues solely because of the impact they have on humans. We chose to focus on animal issues because of the enormous impact they have on animals. We chose to focus on foreign aid because of the enormous impact they have on foreigners. We didn’t choose these issues just because of the impact they have on Australians (although both have positive flow on effects for Australians anyway, e.g. human health and climate change for animals, and international relations and security for foreign aid). Animals and foreigners alike can experience wellbeing just as Australians can, and so we should consider their wellbeing too when thinking about who to vote for.

Introduction

People often say that you’re unlikely to have any impact when voting, or that the impact of your vote is so small that it’s not worth thinking about, but this is only true if you only care about yourself. In Doing Good Better, Will MacAskill simplistically estimates that the expected value of voting for a US citizen, when spread out across all citizens in USA, is around $5,200 USD (~$7,000 AUD at the time of writing). That is to say, on average, $5,200 of the budget will be spent differently as a result of your vote (see the appendix for a more detailed explanation of why this is so). This means it’s very important to vote for the party that will spend the budget in the best way possible.

The impact of your vote on you personally, however, is worth significantly less than $1 (see the appendix). So unless you think you’re really, really important, you should probably vote for the best party for others in general. By the best way possible, we mean the way that will improve the happiness and wellbeing of humans and non-humans alike globally, which means we also consider things like foreign aid budgets.

Because of this exceptionally high value of voting, it’s worth spending a reasonable amount of time deciding who to vote for. In the lead up to the Australian federal election, we wanted to do this transparently. In addition, it seems reasonable to argue that, if one is pretty sure they know which party is the best, they should encourage other people to vote for them as well to maximise their impact. This is our attempt at doing so.

As we have said, if you disagree with anything we’re saying or our conclusions, we obviously want to know, because we’re trying to maximise our impact, so we urge you to tell us in the comments or contact us directly. This kind of analysis is exceptionally difficult because of the vast range of interrelating issues to cover, and we freely admit that this is not comprehensive by any stretch of the imagination. Also, policies can be changed, and promises can be broken, a fact which we’ve attempted to account for. We’ve tried to break down policies into several key areas. There are also a lot of parties (57 total, not including independents), and we clearly haven’t covered them all. Please also let us know if a particular party is worth covering here. We do urge you to use rational, evidence backed responses where possible. If you disagree with, say, a left-wing policy or party, you should have a brief rationale for why that policy in particular is bad.

Please also let us know if you’ve changed who you’re voting for because of this work. We love measuring impact. If you agree with our recommendations, please share this to increase your impact even more. If you don’t, tell us why ASAP!

One more disclaimer: Whilst we have taken an Effective Altruist approach to this, the research and recommendations made here don’t necessarily represent the opinion of the Effective Altruism community in general, or of any organisations that we are affiliated with.

On voting generally

First, it’s important to understand how the Australian voting system works, especially since the rules for voting for the upper house have changed recently, so check out this video or this article.

So does this mean one should just vote for the party they wish was running the country? Not necessarily. Here is an example of where you wouldn’t do that. If there was a small/new party that focussed on a specific issue, you might assume rightly that they wouldn’t do a good job of running the country if they won the majority of seats. However, since they almost certainly won’t win a majority of seats, it could still be worth voting for them to try and get them a few seats so they can make progress towards that specific issue. As they gain popularity and funding, they might branch out into other issues in the future and gain the expertise necessary to cover all issues. So really we have to try and think about our marginal impact – “What is the impact of my individual vote?”

We also highly recommend you plan your vote before arriving to reduce the chance of you being swayed by a smiling face with a ‘how to vote’ card at the booths, or to make an uninformed decision due to pressure or forgetfulness. This is a tool to plan your senate vote.

To judge the parties, we use a utilitarian approach. That is, we pick the party that we believe will lead to the greatest wellbeing for the greatest number of individuals. We do this on a policy by policy basis, then attempt to weight these policies against each other to come up with a final recommendation. We have covered 3 broad policy areas which we believe are the most important for increasing wellbeing. These are:

Non-human animal policies
Foreign aid
Climate change

On to some policies.

Non-human animals

The amount of suffering experienced by (non-human) animals as a result of human activity is enormous, and probably many times greater than that experienced by humans. Around 60 billion land animals and 90 billion marine animals are killed annually (including by-catch from fishing this is argued to be over 1 trillion by some), most of which experience an enormous amount of suffering. If you care about animals close to as much as you care about humans (which most people do judging by the way they treat their pets, and which you should because they have a capacity for suffering and wellbeing that, while not equal to humans, is in the same ballpark), you should care about what your vote does for animals.

The issue of where to vote for non-human animals is complicated by the distinction between animal welfare (wellbeing vs. suffering) and animal rights (giving animals the right to not be exploited). I personally argue that the thing that we should be valuing for animals is wellbeing (or a lack of suffering). Giving animals the right to not be exploited might be the best pathway to this (or it might not be – there is still much debate here), but the fundamental goal should be to reduce animal suffering as much as possible.

No party has a primary policy of promoting or encouraging a vegan lifestyle (the closest to this is the Animal Justice Party). That is to say, most parties encourage reducing the suffering experienced by farmed animals rather than stopping them from being exploited in the first place. It is difficult to say whether welfare reforms make lives better or worse for animals in the long run. They arguably make them better in the short term, by improving their living and slaughter conditions, but they may make people more comfortable with exploitation, thus prolonging their use and therefore suffering. For the sake of recommending the best party for animals, we suggest that the party with the best intentions towards actually eliminating animal suffering for the sake of animals (not for any flow on effects to humans) will be more inclined to change their mind with new evidence in the future.

Liberal

The Liberal party does not have a formal animal policy, however they do have some policies that affect animal welfare. They propose a plan to ban the sale of new cosmetics tested on animals. They don’t support an Independent Office of Animal Welfare or an end to live exports. They advocate for a removal of tariffs on exports of dairy, beef and seafood, which is expected to increase the exploitation and suffering of animals.

Labor

http://www.farmweekly.com.au/news/agriculture/general/politics/alp-animal-welfare-policy-slammed/2752727.aspx

Labor, like Liberal, advocate for a removal of tariffs on exports of dairy, beef and seafood.

Greens

Despite having a detailed animal welfare policy, the Greens don’t advocate veganism or a push towards encouraging veganism to reduce animal use. Instead, they focus on increased regulation and legislation to protect animals from suffering, including:

“An end to cruel or unnecessary use of animals for teaching and research purposes” (as argued by Gary Francione in Rain Without Thunder, there is reason to mistrust the use of ‘cruel’ or ‘unnecessary’, as all research can be argued to be necessary)
“Make any act of animal cruelty subject to criminal penalties”
“Regulate conditions for the captivity, transport and slaughter of animals”
End the “export of live animals for consumptive purposes”
“The establishment of an independent national regulatory body to provide national oversight and coordination of animal welfare”

Despite the overarching party policy, we suggest that voting for certain senate candidates within the Greens over others may be effective. For example, from conversations with senator candidate Jody Moate (SA), she is interested in supporting pro-vegan campaigns despite the Greens themselves not explicitly supporting them. Senator candidate Lee Rhiannon (NSW) appears to support similar campaigns for reasons of animal suffering, public health burden and climate change. We suggest that preferencing Moate, who is not the primary candidate for Greens in SA, might be an impactful thing to do.

AJP

The Animal Justice Party have a large number of policies relating to animals. In summary:

AJP claim to advocate a plant based diet (their candidates must all be vegan or vegetarian), but it does not appear to be a key policy, or well planned for how this will happen
AJP is open to supporting cultured meat, which is expected to be a positive, but there are currently no strong policies in place to do so
AJP advocates an end to live animal exports
AJP appears to be against animal experimentation as it is misleading to extrapolate animal testing results to humans. As an interim, they advocate for reducing the suffering of animals in research.

Science Party

The Science Party has a number of policies relating to animal welfare, including:

Supporting in vitro meat (lab meat) production to reduce animal use
Establishing an Independent Office for Animal Welfare
Restricting (but not eliminating) live exports
Ending the use of battery cages and sow stalls
Improving regulation around animal use in racing (but not necessary abolishing it)
Improving food labelling
“The Science Party supports the use of animals for scientific and research purposes.”

Nick Xenophon Party

The Nick Xenophon Party does not have an animal welfare policy, but support strict controls on live animal exports, and prefer that meat is processed in Australia and exported chilled.

Conclusion

It appears that no party is currently advocating for a reduction in animal suffering as much as they could be, though this could be a strategic move (too hardline a stance may mean losing votes). In terms of perceived intentions towards non-human animals and promises, we recommend the preferencing Animal Justice Party first, followed by Greens, then (closely) followed by the Science Party, followed by the Nick Xenophon Party/Labor then Liberal last.

Also, a brief summary of animal policies for 21 parties is available here.

Foreign aid

One of the areas where the value of your vote may have the largest impact is within Australia’s contribution towards overseas aid. Taking a snapshot of current figures, Australia currently spends $5.03 billion dollars on foreign aid, amounting 0.32% of our countries gross national income (GNI).

Liberal

The policies found on the Liberal Party of Australia’s website contain no mention of contributions to foreign aid. However, recent plans by the Coalition are to progressively reduce this figure by almost a third to 0.22% of NDI placing Australian foreign aid at its lowest level for 60 years, while most other developed nationals contribute close to four times this amount. Additionally, during their most recent term the Liberals have introduced performance benchmarks for national aid programs, incorporated AusAID into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and prioritised aid spending such that the priority of foreign aid expenditure shall be ‘Australia’s national interest’. The benchmarks are expected to be a positive, as they come with claims of being more outcome oriented.

Labor

A mark above the Liberals, the ALP is supposedly dedicated to “Tackling inequality and disadvantage”. Their policies include an immediate reversal of the $224 million cut to overseas aid outlined within the most recent budget including the on-going investment of $40 million a year to help Australian Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) deliver frontline service to some of the world’s poorest communities. All up, over a four-year period the ALP claim, that if elected they will provide around $800 million more for overseas aid that the Liberals. Additionally if elected Labor would improve the overall effectiveness of Australia’s overseas aid programs, legislating for transparency and accountability. We feel it is important to note that, whilst providing a more comprehensive approach to foreign aid on paper, as with the Liberals the ALP have a history of reducing Australia’s foreign aid contribution.

Greens

The standout of the major three parties when it comes to investment in foreign aid is the Greens. With a number of policies ranging from assisting developing nations affected by climate change through re-settling and re-housing to the promoting of debt cancelling schemes for developing economies where debt re-payment results in increasing poverty. Additionally the Greens want to see: an increase to a foreign aid contribution of 0.7% GDI (on par with the UK and other western nations), transparency and accountability in the purpose of all Australian aid programs, non-commercial aid programs and the establishment of AusAID as an independent department with its own dedicated cabinet minister. On top of these is the Greens policy to preference multilateral trade agreements, except where bi-lateral agreements may favour a developing country. Please visit the Greens website for a more comprehensive view of their foreign aid policies.

Science Party

The Science Party want to see an increase in Australia’s humanitarian intake in proportion to other migration schemes. This includes additional places in the short term allocate to recognised refugees from Malaysia and Indonesia to reduce smuggling.

The Nick Xenophon Party

The Nick Xenophon Party provides no policy regarding to foreign aid on their website.

The Animal Justice Party

The Animal Justice Party believe in a compassionate approach to migrants and refugees while keeping the home grown component of our population growth at or below zero.

Conclusion

Once again, we are assuming that increasing Australia’s foreign aid and its overall effort to assist developing countries is a good thing. Based on policy alone the recommendation here is to place The Greens 1, ALP and Science Party 2 or 3, Animal Justice Party 4, NXP 5 and the Liberals 6.

Climate change

While climate change is a highly important issue, I think several other issues (e.g. those listed above) are more pressing and have a larger impact on wellbeing, even after considering flow on effects.

Liberal

Liberals support a Renewable Energy Target at 23% of Australia’s total energy use by 2020. They support a transition to clean energy through the $1 billion Clean Energy Innovation Fund and $2.55 billion Emissions Reduction Fund. They claim they will double renewable energy in Australia over the next 4 years. And Liberal have a target of reducing emissions by up to 28% by 2030 based on 2005 levels. These are modest targets, but are low compared to the other parties.

Labor

Labor have promised that at least 50% of Australia’s electricity production will be sourced from renewable energy by 2030. They will expand the investment mandate of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, provide $206.6m to ARENA to support solar thermal, establish a Community Power Network and Regional hubs ($98.7m over 4 years), implement an electricity emissions trading scheme and reinvigorate the Carbon Farming Initiative.

Greens

The Greens want a net zero or negative greenhouse gas emissions in Australia within a generation.

The Greens don’t support natural gas, which I believe is a mistake, due to its proven ability to reduce emissions in USA (Full disclosure, I have previously worked at an oil and gas company, and currently hold shares in several). They also don’t support nuclear energy, which on the whole is expected to have prevented significantly more deaths than it has caused. To put things into perspective, nuclear is expected to have killed less people per unit energy produced than wind and solar.

AJP

The Animal Justice Party have the following key objectives for climate change; to transform to a carbon free infrastructure, to allow reforestation by reducing grazing animal agriculture, to prohibit the expansion of fossil fuel industries, to implement a carbon tax for both coal and animal agriculture, to direct carbon taxes towards a number of climate change solutions, and to protect existing forests and marine habitats in general.

AJP also recommend that natural gas be phased out over the next 15-20 years.

Science Party

The Science Party support carbon pricing mechanisms as their primary solution for climate change. They propose that more work needs to be done on mitigation and adaptation, and fund increased research for geoengineering (with the caveat that no major geoengineering will actually be undertaken until thorough research on its safety has been undertaken).

They propose zero net carbon emissions from electricity generation by 2030 and have plans to support this, and will seek to end all subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. They also propose small scale nuclear power generation to take place in Australia as a trial, with the plan to scale this up if successful. They also seek to support research on nuclear fusion. The Science Party propose some policies to improve animal welfare (discussed below), but do not recognise the role that large scale animal agriculture plays in climate change.

Nick Xenophon Party

The Nick Xenophon Party support a 50% renewable energy target by 2030. They have been against wind energy in the past for ungrounded fears about the health implications, but not without other good reasons.

Conclusion

To simplify this analysis, we suggest that, all else being equal, reducing the effects of climate change on humans and in general is a good thing. On this issue specifically, the Science Party and the Animal Justice Party have the most ambitious targets, but don’t have a proven political track record of effecting this change. The Greens have an operational track record, however support neither nuclear energy, natural gas or a reduction of livestock related emissions. Labor appears to have more ambitious policies than Liberal. The tentative recommendation here is to put AJP and Science Party 1 or 2, Greens 3, Labor 4, NXP 5 and Liberal 6.

Existential risk

The impact a political party has on the likelihood of human extinction, even if very small, probably dominates all of the other factors (see this site for an explanation of why). Having said that, the impact of policies and parties on X-risk is significantly more uncertain than on other categories.

Increased research into the likelihood and potential solutions to X-risk concerns are likely to be the best way to have an impact in this issue, but no party to our knowledge is either for or against this work.

It seems likely that increasing international ties and cooperation/collaboration will reduce the chances of catastrophic extinction. Increasing foreign aid is a possible way of doing this, which has been discussed above.

It is expected that certain trade-related policies or other foreign relations policies could be a good way to increase (or decrease) international collaboration, but an analysis of these policies were beyond the scope of this draft due to time considerations, and the authors are very open to suggestions here.

Final recommendation

We have clearly missed out a lot of important categories, and haven’t addressed the economic, political or social viability of any of the policies (the likelihood they will be implemented successfully). This was meant to be a more extensive project but due to the number of people involved and time availability, it fell short. From this limited analysis, however, we tentatively suggest voting in the upper and lower house in the following order:

Greens
Science Party/Animal Justice Party
Labor
Nick Xenophon Party
Liberal

A suggestion has been made that, since the Animal Justice Party and Science Party are unlikely to elect many or any members, despite being ranked 2/3 you should still list them 1/2 and Greens 3. If a party receives at least 4% of ‘1’ votes, they receive extra funding for every ‘1’ vote. Further, if the AJP or Science Party don’t win, the vote will just go to the Greens. We think this is a valid way of strategic voting, and so would suggest voting Science Party or AJP 1, followed by the other and Greens, even though we think the Greens party has a more comprehensive and better overall policy than the Science Party and AJP.

Also, to be clear, this is a relative listing. That is to say, we think Labor is better than Liberal, but we don’t necessarily think they should be your 4th and 6th preference. We think that there are likely many more parties not covered here that are better than Liberal, and that you should probably these parties above them to minimise the chances of a Liberal member being elected.

This ranking is based qualitatively on the following ranking system of policies in terms of relative importance.

1 – Existential risk
2 – Non-human animals
3 – Foreign aid
4 – Climate change

You might note that a discussion of ‘jobs’ is broadly lacking. This is because we believe that, relative to the other issues here, jobs per se aren’t a particularly important policy. This is sure to rustle some feathers, so for a brief analysis of why we think this is the case, please see the appendix.

Not all of these parties have candidates in each state. If you are unable to vote for a party recommended here, we suggest simply moving to the next on the list. If there are other parties that you think would benefit humans and animals generally, we would recommend placing them between the Animal Justice Party and the Nick Xenophon Party. Please also tell us about them in the comments.

Thanks to those who reviewed early versions of this work and provided useful input.

To get in touch either leave a comment or send me an email at mdello@hotmail.com.

A lot of people have been quick to criticise me of being biased. This is possible, but for what it’s worth, I am not a member or volunteer of any political party (nor have I ever been, I make a point to not get involved to retain partiality), and I have changed my personally preferred party several times since starting this analysis.

Appendix – The value of voting

The estimate of the value of voting being $5,200 USD as calculated by MacAskill is briefly described here.

Political analyst Nate Silver, Professor Andrew Gelman (Statistics) and Professor Aaron Edlin (Law) calculated that the odds of an individual changing the outcome of the 2008 USA presidential election was, on average, around 1 in 60 million, which is a low probability, but we have to also look at the potential impact.

Estimating simplistically that the benefit per person of the $3.5 trillion annual US budget being spent 2.5% more effectively ($1,000 per person per 4 year election term), the benefit that you would expect to receive personally over an election term based on your vote is 0.0016 cents. However, looking at the benefit received by all Americans ($1,000 multiplied by 314 million), the expected value of voting is $5,200 ($314 billion of value multiplied by a 1 in 60 million chance of swaying the outcome).

This is further simplified by the fact that the policies of parties aren’t always opposite, and there is significant overlap, however it does demonstrate that the value of one person voting, when spread over the population of a country, can be big.

Appendix – The value of jobs

The number of unemployed Australians as of August 2015 was just over 800,000, or around 6.3 %. A target of spending part of the budget on ‘jobs’* might be to bring unemployment to 4% (the lowest it’s been since at least 1980), a lofty goal indeed. Let’s now suppose that the government spends $20 billion of the budget in making this happen. Therefore they will have created one job per $68,478**. And let’s now that having a job increases an Australians’ wellbeing by double.

For a comparison, the world’s top rated charity focusing on poverty/global health, the Against Malaria Foundation, can save a life for around $4,000 AUD. That’s 17 times cheaper than the job creation. And these lives saved tend to last a while, whereas jobs are often lost again quite quickly (national average tenure in a job is around 7 years). While AMF is an exceptional charity, and many charities are orders of magnitude less effective, this example should at least highlight that foreign aid (let alone the two policies listed above it in importance) is arguably much more impactful than a focus on ‘jobs’***.

*In reality governments tend not to spend money just on ‘jobs’, but jobs come about as part of other spending which might be focused on jobs.

**A point was made that, if you come at this analysis from another direction, and argue that one could create a job if given $X, you could arrive at a similar answer to our estimate.

***We also recognise that there are flow-on effects of ‘jobs’, but there are flow-on effects for everything, and so we have ignored them to simplify our analysis.

Edit history

Edit 1 (8:20 pm, 28/06) – After reassessing the individual policy recommendations, we adjusted the final recommendations from Science Party 1, Greens/AJP 2/3, NXP/Labor 4/5, Liberal 6; to Greens 1, Science Party/AJP 2/3, Labor 4, NXP 5, Liberal 6.

Edit 2 (3 pm, 29/06) – Several miscellaneous points added.

The morality of having a meat-eating pet

In this article I examine the relative impact on the environment and animal suffering of having one pet compared to eating an average omnivorous diet instead of a vegan diet. Note that this analysis is relative, with the final results in terms of animals consumed in both cases to allow for a rough comparison. I time-limited this research to 1 hour on purpose and so the study is not as in-depth as it could be, and I assume that I have not missed any major unforeseen factors in my work. If I have, I want to know, so please tell me in the comments.

My family has two cats and one dog, all of whom eat canned pet food every day, which is mostly meat. After going vegan for ethical reasons, it occurred to me that my pets were also consuming animal flesh, which presumably led to some non-zero amount of suffering. Therefore, by having a pet, I was still contributing a good deal to suffering. I wanted to determine just how much suffering.

Let us first assume that each pet consumes one can of pet food per day for the sake of argument. I am using a 400g can of Whiskas cat food for this example. The can states that the ingredients are ‘Meat including chicken, beef and/or lamb and/or pork and turkey; gelling agents; vegetable oil; colouring agents; flavours; vitamins and minerals; taurine; plant extracts’. It does not state which meats are used, nor in what quantity to the non-meat components. I will conservatively assume that only half the can is meat (i.e. 200g of meat per pet per day) and examine two cases; all beef and all chicken.

An important question here is whether the meat is factory farmed or not, as this makes a significant difference to the amount of suffering experienced by the food animals. According to Ethical Consumer, Whiskas pet food contains factory farmed meat, dairy and eggs. I believe that it is safe to assume that most pet food is factory farmed. Another important question is whether the meat is primarily ‘waste product’. If it is, reducing the demand for it may not have as strong an effect on suffering as if ‘human grade’ meat is used, though I expect the effects to be similar.

Edit (08/06/18) – One of the biggest critiques of this post was indeed that animal-based pet food is mostly waste product. According to Ryan Bethencourt, this might have been the case 10 years ago, but not anymore. As much as 1/3rd of the meat consumed in the US is consumed by pets.

Chicken

The average chicken has a 2.26 kg market weight after 5 weeks, which I have interpreted to mean the amount of usable meat at time of sale. In this case, an average pet will consume 1 chicken in just over 11 days, or 33 chickens per year.

Beef (cow)

This article estimates that 490 pounds (222.26 kg) of usable meat is retrieved from a cow. In this case, an average pet will consume 1 cow in around 1,111 days, or 0.33 cows per year.

Average omnivorous diet

According to the Vegan Calculator, the average American eats 11 cows and 2,400 chickens over their life (as well as 27 pigs, 80 turkeys, 30 sheep and 4,500 fish). Using the average US citizen life expectancy of 79 years, this amounts to around 0.14 cows and 30.38 chickens per year. Comparing this to the average number of cows or chickens consumed by a pet in a year, we can see that, for one type of animal at least, the impact of having a pet is comparable to the impact of eating an omnivorous diet over a vegetarian (or vegan) diet. Thus I argue that having a pet that consumes meat is about as unethical as consuming meat yourself.

Some argue that there is a difference as some pets need to consume meat to live, while humans don’t. This is true, however an alternative is to simply not get a meat eating pet in the first place. This argument also places the wellbeing of a single pet animal as being orders of magnitude higher than that of a food animal, which is speciesist. On the topic of rescuing animals from shelters, perhaps it is better to let the animal die so that hundreds of others may live.

Some people claim to need animals for reasons of mental wellbeing, and I make no comment on whether or not this is true. However there are many pets that don’t require meat to live a healthy life, and I would strongly recommend having such a pet, like a pig, over one that does require meat. I also make no comment as to whether certain pets like cats can live on a meat free diet. I have heard that this is possible, but do not recommend it without further research.

A video version of this is available here.