I recently sent these dot points to a student I’m collaborating with, who was curious about this dilemma. My thoughts on the welfarist/abolitionist question are:

  • Welfare means better lives / less suffering for animals, which is good. Rights means fewer animals are farmed, which is good.
  • The movement should be doing both. I think the majority (>70%) of the movement’s resources should be in welfare campaigns, based on the current state of the evidence.
  • In defense of welfare improvements:
    • Welfare improvements can be very meaningful, and reduce a large proportion of the suffering experienced by farm animals. e.g. cage-free campaigns in egg production and switching to slow-growing broilers in meat production both reduce >50% of the intense pain experienced by animals, which is a really, really, really meaningful win. The work by Welfare Footprint Project is a great source in this regard.
    • The movement has a long history with welfare improvements, so there are well-validated pathways to achieving success in these campaigns.
    • Nobody knows how to actually secure animal rights yet. By definition, since there are no jurisdictions where animals have the type of rights we’re aiming for (e.g. legal personhood), there is no well-validated pathway to achieving this. This means that any rights campaigns will be inherently based on a large part of speculation.
    • The strong abolitionists (thinking of Francione here) are worried that greater welfare might be counterproductive (e.g. making future campaigns harder to succeed). I’ve seen exactly 0 compelling evidence for this, even after reading much of Francione’s arguments. I think many of Francione’s arguments in particular are quite poor.
  • In defense of rights:
    • Vegan advocacy does seem to work and be moderately cost-effective (I have an upcoming report on mass media for example, which goes into the cost-effectiveness of veg advocacy in detail)
    • There are many clever abolitionist campaigns that I strongly support, e.g. the Nonhuman Rights Project. These are all, by definition, hits-based approaches.
  • A complicating factor:
    • Abolition, or indeed any campaign that changes the number of wild animals killed or not killed (e.g. more insects living on farmland that would otherwise be used for broiler chicken barns) runs the risk of the messy food web thing.
    • See here, here and here.
    • I think this is a serious problem that makes estimating the impact of any non-welfare campaign extremely messy.

My views are informed by these sources: