When I started writing the post, I was going to address factory farming as well as climate change. For the sake of focus, I decided against it.
But yes: the vast majority of us won't have any effect on factory farming. I've seen people argue otherwise, but I think they misunderstand probabilities.
However, the problem of animal suffering is like the problem of poverty in the sense that I can do something about it, such as "rescue" various animals. It won't help with factory farming, but okay. In any case, *what I do in the grocery store* won't effect factory farming.
For the issue of killing animals for food, the argumentation is a bit different from how it works for climate change. But it’s not wildly different. For simplicity, let’s assume you live in the USA and buy food only from the USA.
Suppose you have a choice between living two lives.
MEAT choice: you eat one whole chicken per day, every day. That’s your total meat consumption.
NO-MEAT choice: you don’t eat any meat, ever.
Under MEAT, you consume 365 chickens a year. The US kills over 9,000,000,000 chickens per year for food. So, each year you are eating very roughly about 1/25,000,000 of the US output of chickens prepared for eating. No company that kills chickens for us to eat is going to change its production rate because you took up NO-MEAT.
Suppose you influenced 100 people to actually go from MEAT to NO-MEAT. You didn’t just talk and write about it, but actually moved people to successfully make this enormous change in their lives, permanently. Your actions would generate a decrease in chicken consumption of about 1/250,000. That’s a 0.0004% decrease. Again, no chicken manufacturer is going to change anything in response to your project.
This suggests that *what you do in the grocery store* won’t have any effect on the issue of factory farming. I think the argumentation gets more complicated than in the climate change case, but it’s pretty similar.
This isn’t to say that you can’t do anything about factory farming. It’s only to say that your dietary choices, and the dietary choices of people actually influenced by you, make no difference.
You can of course make a huge difference to the issue of animal suffering—just like you can with global poverty. You can rescue some animals that were destined for death or horrible lives and take care of them, either yourself or through the help of others.
Some of the objections & responses to the above reasoning are similar to those I covered in my original post.
Hot Take: This is also true about animal suffering/veganism too. It’s one of the reasons I’m not a vegan (but not the only one or most important one)
When I started writing the post, I was going to address factory farming as well as climate change. For the sake of focus, I decided against it.
But yes: the vast majority of us won't have any effect on factory farming. I've seen people argue otherwise, but I think they misunderstand probabilities.
However, the problem of animal suffering is like the problem of poverty in the sense that I can do something about it, such as "rescue" various animals. It won't help with factory farming, but okay. In any case, *what I do in the grocery store* won't effect factory farming.
could you send me further reading for why consumption choices have a negligible effect on factory farming?
For the issue of killing animals for food, the argumentation is a bit different from how it works for climate change. But it’s not wildly different. For simplicity, let’s assume you live in the USA and buy food only from the USA.
Suppose you have a choice between living two lives.
MEAT choice: you eat one whole chicken per day, every day. That’s your total meat consumption.
NO-MEAT choice: you don’t eat any meat, ever.
Under MEAT, you consume 365 chickens a year. The US kills over 9,000,000,000 chickens per year for food. So, each year you are eating very roughly about 1/25,000,000 of the US output of chickens prepared for eating. No company that kills chickens for us to eat is going to change its production rate because you took up NO-MEAT.
Suppose you influenced 100 people to actually go from MEAT to NO-MEAT. You didn’t just talk and write about it, but actually moved people to successfully make this enormous change in their lives, permanently. Your actions would generate a decrease in chicken consumption of about 1/250,000. That’s a 0.0004% decrease. Again, no chicken manufacturer is going to change anything in response to your project.
This suggests that *what you do in the grocery store* won’t have any effect on the issue of factory farming. I think the argumentation gets more complicated than in the climate change case, but it’s pretty similar.
This isn’t to say that you can’t do anything about factory farming. It’s only to say that your dietary choices, and the dietary choices of people actually influenced by you, make no difference.
You can of course make a huge difference to the issue of animal suffering—just like you can with global poverty. You can rescue some animals that were destined for death or horrible lives and take care of them, either yourself or through the help of others.
Some of the objections & responses to the above reasoning are similar to those I covered in my original post.