Jeff, welcome back to the Clear Thinking podcast.
Thank you for having me back, Spencer. Great to see you.
So, you have a bit of a radical idea, which is a proposed global ban on industrial animal agriculture by 2050. I mean, that's a pretty shocking concept. You want to tell us what is that?
Yes, this comes from a law review paper that I published with a couple of collaborators, Emma Dietz and Tony Sims. And basically we propose that the countries of the world work together towards a global international ban on industrial animal agriculture in both its intensive form, like factory farming, and large-scale extensive form — picture large cattle farming operations — for animal welfare and public health and environmental reasons. And we argue that this is both necessary and possible to try to achieve. And we suggest that countries aim for 2050 because that would align a global phase down of industrial animal agriculture and a just transition to a plant-based food system with relevant other climate and biodiversity and deforestation targets that are of course linked to this project.
Before we get into things like is this feasible, is it acceptable, what are the benefits? Suppose that we did this, like what would we achieve?
Yes. Well, probably many people in your audience are familiar with some of the harms, if not all of the harms, of factory farming and industrial animal agriculture, but very briefly, these are some of the worst industries that our species has ever built. And they really do cause massive and unnecessary harm to humans and other animals and the environment. And so for animal welfare, of course, we now farm tens of billions of land vertebrates every year, more aquatic vertebrates every year, more land and aquatic invertebrates every year — hundreds of billions if not trillions — and then of course one to three trillion animals killed per year in industrial fishing. That is a huge amount of animal suffering that we cause in our global food system.
There are also public health risks and harms. For example, we still use antibiotics and antimicrobials regularly in factory farming to stimulate growth and suppress the spread of diseases. And that contributes to antimicrobial resistance. And of course, when you have a bunch of stressed animals with weakened immune systems living in close proximity to each other in their own waste, that can also really, really accelerate the development and distribution of novel pathogens, including antimicrobial-resistant pathogens.
And then on the environmental side, we have of course risks and harms associated with local pollution when you have so much concentrated waste near factory farms and slaughterhouses that the land is not actually able to absorb it. But then also global pollution and land and water consumption and biodiversity loss associated with deforestation and climate change associated with methane emissions and deforestation. And essentially, and really importantly, many of these harms trade off against each other. So small-animal intensive farming is really bad for animal welfare and large-animal extensive farming is really bad for the environment. Both are bad in different ways for public health. So there is basically no way of farming animals at scale that can be good for humans and animals and the environment at the same time. By phasing this system down and replacing it with a predominantly plant-based food system, we could do better for everybody at the same time, or at least many of those stakeholders at the same time.
Right. So it's a ban on industrial animal agriculture. So what would it still allow in terms of raising animals?
Yes, it would still allow a very specific category, which is small-scale extensive animal agriculture. So basically we conceive of industrial animal agriculture as including intensive animal farming — and so you picture factory farming, where you have a huge number of chickens or pigs in a single facility living in their own waste — as well as large-scale extensive. So those are those big cattle feedlots, the ones that really require knocking down lots of trees in the Amazon and so on. So what is left are basically small-scale extensive operations, smaller farms where animals have a lot of space to roam. This is probably what a lot of people have in mind when they think about animal farming. They think of a single-family farm where animals are out roaming on the pasture and they live happy lives, even if they are ultimately killed for their flesh or used for their milk or their eggs. So that would not be included in the proposed ban by 2050, mainly because there are many countries, especially low-income developing countries, that do rely on that kind of animal agriculture to meet their basic needs. And there is a lot of debate about whether and when we should include that kind of agriculture in any proposed ban. And so our proposal is that we focus on the targets that are still very ambitious, still very aspirational, and causing the vast majority of the harm — intensive animal agriculture and large-scale extensive animal agriculture. Work together towards phasing those down and replacing them with alternatives by 2050. And then we can fight along the way about what to do with the small-scale extensive operations where cows and pigs are roaming the plains in the fullness of time.
So basically only allowing farming that's shown in the picture on the egg carton.
Exactly. For now. At least for now. We can fight about that one and then we can work together to fight against the other ones.
Now obviously the world mostly would be very against this proposal, right? Like it's hard to get people to support things like this. To what extent is this a proposal you actually could see coming to pass versus you're trying to push the boundary, you know, push the Overton window on what's discussed?
Both. And I think that people are more open to this kind of possibility than we might think based on their behavior or based on their political affiliations. Obviously, survey results are a weak signal, but there are survey results that show people favor animal welfare, favor public health, favor environmental protection, are against animal abuse in factory farms and slaughterhouses. Now, then of course, anytime any government passes a law that even slightly increases the cost of meat or milk or eggs, people then rebel against that. So there is some tension between what people say and what people do.
But I do think we have reason to believe that if we have a very gradual, incremental phase down of industrial animal agriculture and phase up of alternatives — and that can include informational policies that educate people about the effects of food systems, financial policies that increasingly subsidize alternatives and reduce subsidies for industrial animal agriculture, regulatory policies that ban the worst excesses in ways that further increase the cost of production, and just transition policies that make sure that farmers and workers and consumers increasingly have access to better alternatives — if we gradually, incrementally implement these kinds of policies, then I think what we will see are natural, organic shifts in production and consumption patterns responding to these incentives. And then there could be a tipping point where plant-based alternatives are so delicious, so desirable, so plentiful, so accessible, and the harms of industrial animal agriculture are so better understood, and social change has happened, that we really do start to see that consistently reflected both in survey results and consumer behavior.
Sometimes people say that what really matters to consumers at the end of the day are the cost of the product, how tasty it is, and how convenient it is. And you know, if you don't get those things right, you're basically screwed. I mean, do you tend to buy that argument?
I buy it to a point. So yes, price, taste, and convenience is a commonly used slogan that refers to what people think drives consumer behavior. Price, taste, and convenience. That definitely is, I think, a major factor in consumer behavior. There is some reason to believe, however, that it is not the only factor or set of factors. For example, there is a lot involved with identity, culture, religion that goes beyond price, taste, and convenience that also drives consumer behavior. And so I think the full picture looks something like price, taste, convenience on this side and then identity, culture, religion, these other more qualitative considerations on the other side.
And this is why I favor a systems approach. I mentioned before that it helps to be incrementally implementing informational policies, financial policies, regulatory policies, and just transition policies. These can all be implemented by governments. But then they need to come along with other actions that are best done in the private sector or just in communities, like investments in research and development for plant-based alternatives so that they can reach that same price-taste-convenience threshold, as well as work to change hearts and minds in particular communities, and this is best done by members of those communities through ordinary education and advocacy. So I think when all of that is happening at the same time, then we stand the best chance of having all of those efforts really click together and become mutually reinforcing. And then suddenly what seemed impossible a generation ago suddenly starts to seem, if not inevitable, then at least very plausible as an outcome of this work.
If this were to succeed, it would essentially hinge on enough improvements in the technology of producing plant-based products that you could reach something like parity on these major factors like cost, convenience, and taste.
Yeah, I do not have a strong view about exactly what the alternative needs to be. And many people in the animal advocacy and public health advocacy and environmental advocacy communities give a version of this answer as well. We want the alternatives to add up to 100%, but are somewhat unsure whether that means mostly rice and beans and fruits and vegetables with a little bit of plant-based and cultivated meat, or if it means mostly plant-based and cultivated meat, which really would require a lot of research and development, and then a little bit of rice and beans and fruits and vegetables.
What I imagine is that the path will be smoothest if we do have a nice diversified portfolio across the rice and beans and fruits and vegetables and plant-based meats of various kinds and then eventually increasingly cultivated meats of various kinds, so that they can all have a different role to play. At least in a transition when people are still quite attached to the aesthetics and the cultural and religious significance of what they perceive as meat, it would really help to have progress in research and development and bringing the price down, bringing it to par on those alternatives. But in the fullness of time, I could see that ending up only being a transitional tool and reaching a point where we are actually pretty happy with, you know, tofu and fruits and vegetables and so on.
Something that I experience from time to time is I'll be at a restaurant, someone will notice I order vegetarian and for some reason, even though they're a meat eater, they'll decide to ask me about it while we're eating. I don't know what makes them think this is a good idea. And I'm just like, 'Yeah, well, you know, I don't like to cause harm to animals,' and then we'll have a conversation about it at the most awkward time possible. And what happens in my experience is their brain tends to reel for like the first sort of excuse they can think of. And often I'll notice like really smart people will say things that really make no sense because you can just see the level of like discomfort they're having with this conversation that they brought up. I wouldn't bring it up with them in that context anyway.
But it seems to me like there is this real psychological discomfort that most people think it's wrong to harm animals unless there's like a really good reason to do so. It's hard to justify like eating them as a really good reason to do so. So they have to like find something that makes that okay. But in practice most people don't act on that, right? Like there is this — I think there's a way in which many people are out of alignment with their own values, right? Not trying to impose any values on them but just saying what are their own values. But it seems to me insofar as what I'm saying is true, that that's like a huge barrier to overcome, is that if people are already not acting in line with their own values, you know, like well how does that change? How does that shift?
Yes, absolutely. This is all true to my experience as well. I often get asked that question at the most awkward possible time and then like you I try to answer it as honestly as possible, as candidly as possible, but still with a smile on my face, still in a friendly way. And it does make people somewhat uncomfortable, but hey, you chose to ask the question right now, not me.
And there is some sociological, psychological research that backs this up. For example, there is research that shows that people who eat vegetarian or vegan diets are more likely to attribute sentience and moral status to farmed animals, and people who eat animal-based diets are less likely to attribute sentience and moral status to farmed animals. Now, obviously, it can be a little bit unclear figuring out in which direction the causal arrow goes. Is it that attributing sentience and moral status makes me eat less meat? Or is it that eating less meat makes me feel more open, because of removing cognitive dissonance, to attribute sentience and moral status? But one way or the other, we do see that correlation.
And to answer your question, this is why I think it helps to strike a balance in the animal advocacy movement and more generally in the vegan advocacy movement with respect to how much you focus on individual consumer change versus broader types of advocacy and policy work. Because a major obstacle has been there has been so much focus on individual consumer change that people then feel like we have this major hurdle to overcome — going vegan — before we can even identify with the movement and participate in the movement, and that makes a lot of people feel uncomfortable, like they don't belong in the movement.
But then I think that there could be risk of overcorrecting too, for exactly the reason that you mentioned. When you go vegan, not only is it a way of reducing your complicity in the system that causes a lot of harm, but it is also a way of socially reinforcing for others and psychologically reinforcing for yourself the importance of this issue. It paves the way for participating in this advocacy and policy by removing the cognitive dissonance. And so my attitude is that we should de-emphasize vegan outreach and advocacy as part of the vegan movement and emphasize general advocacy and policy more, like outreach to corporations and governments. But vegan outreach should be somewhere in there because I think it really is important for us to align our behavior with our values and our goals in a way that positively reinforces what we are trying to do and removes that cognitive dissonance.
Where do you see guilt coming into play? Because I, you know, I've seen some animal advocates that use guilt to try to get people to change their behavior and others that think it's like completely ineffective or maybe even worse than ineffective. It actually pushes people away.
Yeah. I don't have a strong view about this, but my colleague Jennifer Jacquet at NYU has done some interesting research on guilt and shame, and some other people have done some interesting research as well in the social sciences. And my impression of what their research shows is that a little bit of guilt and shame is just about right. You want to avoid guilting people a lot and making that your primary focus in advocacy, because then people really do shut down and become defensive and resistant and experience the conversation in an adversarial way. But you also want to avoid applying zero guilt and shame whatsoever. Saying 'I'm okay, you're okay, this is just a preference I have and a preference you have and we can share our preferences with each other' — that would be not honoring the gravity and the importance of the issue.
And so I think finding ways to discuss it that are friendly, are constructive, are productive, find solutions, ways for people to contribute no matter where they are on their quote-unquote vegan journey — that is great. But still discussing it in a way that emphasizes the importance for animals, for public health, for the environment, the role that we all have to play in that, and that does frame it as a matter of living up to your values, so that there can still be like a little twinge of guilt, the right amount that can be motivating instead of demotivating.
I don't know how you think about this, but I think there are some people where it like actually doesn't make sense to them for them to avoid eating animals from the point of view of their own values. Like they just assign no value to animals or what have you. Whereas many people actually, they do assign value to animal suffering, and I've run surveys on this and I found that tons of people, quite a high percentage actually, think that it's wrong to cause animal suffering. It's even wrong to cause suffering to farmed animals, and they think you need a pretty good reason to do so. And I'm just wondering how you think about it for those people that like, well, they just don't place animals in their value system at all. They just assign them no worth.
Yeah. In general I think good ethics and philosophy, but then also good advocacy and policy, meets people where they are. I never want to simply shout my values at people. I want to talk with people about what their values are and see what types of actions and practices and policies make sense in light of their values. And my experience and my hypothesis is that at least for many of us, the more informed and coherent we become, the more we do at least partially converge on a shared set of values that involve, for example, the idea that at least many animals are sentient. And when someone is sentient, we should at the very least reduce and repair the harms that we cause them where possible, etc.
So I can go into conversations asking people what they care about, talking with people about what they care about, sharing the evidence and arguments as I see it, and then seeing where they land. And then for many people we might find that we have, if not full consensus, then at least partial agreement that we care together about the animal welfare impacts and or the public health impacts and or the environmental impacts. And wherever we have that partial agreement, we can find some policies that we both care about and we can agree to at least work together on that, even if we might continue to disagree about some other aspects of the policy portfolio. And then we can fight about that along the way.
Now, there might every now and then be what philosophers call the rare, ideally coherent Caligula — the rare individual who, if fully informed and ideally coherent, still loves casually torturing people for fun or torturing animals for fun. And to the extent that such a person exists, it might be that now we just have to engage in politics against them, and there is not all that much to be said. But I still want to open conversations with an optimistic presumption that there will be some common ground we can find.
Much the same way that we find, at least in the US, many people actually do care about animal suffering to a degree. I found that many people do care about utilitarianism to a degree even if they're not utilitarian. And I'm the same way. Like I think utilitarianism forms a chunk of my value system. It's not my entire value system. But I tend to find as I talk to people that it seems to form a chunk of almost everyone's value system. Not literally everyone, you know, and some people will place other values much higher, but it seems like almost everyone cares about reducing suffering, at least until it bumps up against other things, right? Like, yeah, they'd rather not have that random stranger suffer than have them suffer, right? Even if they would place their family much higher on the hierarchy. And so I also wonder about that, whether there might be more room for increasing people's sort of understanding of their own sort of latent utilitarianism that's untapped because they sort of haven't reflected on it.
Yes, absolutely. And I think sometimes philosophers can be at a disadvantage in these conversations because — so I have a background in philosophy. My training is in philosophy, and when you take a lot of ethics classes, the different ethical traditions are often framed in a binary, mutually exclusive way because the question is really what is the true foundational theory of morality? And perhaps there can be only one, except for pluralists. And so you are taught to ask, is it utilitarianism and welfare, or deontology and rights, or virtue theory and good character traits, or feminist care ethics and good relationships and just social structures?
But in practice, in everyday life, for all of those traditions, all of those different kinds of values matter at least indirectly or instrumentally. We should all, for one reason or another, care about improving welfare, care about respecting rights, care about cultivating virtuous character traits, care about cultivating caring relationships and just social structures. That lifts all boats to have that in the mix. And when we talk with people in everyday life, in advocacy and in policy, I think that too is a place where we can ask them what they care about and figure out what language they use when they talk about their values. Is it more welfarist? Is it more rights-oriented? Because I think there are ways of coming into this conversation that invoke all of those concepts — welfare, rights, virtue, care, justice, anything. And we can start from that and build from that and then draw the connections with the others.
Regarding suffering, can you just talk a little bit about if your plan were to succeed, how much suffering are we talking about that would be reduced? And I know it's like hard to quantify, but I just kind of want to get a sense of it.
Well, it is difficult to even count how many animals are farmed each year and then to break it down by species or taxa, in part because in some industries where the numbers of animals are the highest, they measure the amount of meat by weight as opposed to by the number of individual lives involved. But just to give you a sense, if you focus on vertebrates, there are definitely more than 100 billion vertebrates per year being farmed across both terrestrial and aquatic contexts. And so that includes cows, pigs, chickens, and fishes. And chickens and fishes in particular are where those numbers mostly come from.
And just to put that in perspective, in the entire history of humanity, there have been about 110 to 120 billion humans. So that means every year we farm more vertebrates — and that includes mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, especially birds and fishes — than the total number of humans who have ever existed. If we then bring invertebrates into the picture, and that might include the nascent octopus farming industry, but then also especially lobsters and shrimps and insects. We farm 400-plus billion shrimps per year. And this is not counting the trillions we kill in the wild. We farm more than a trillion insects per year. It could be as many as 50 trillion by the end of the decade. So these are huge numbers, orders of magnitude more animals per year than the total number of humans who have ever existed.
What is hard, as you say, is quantifying the amount of suffering because so much is still unknown about exactly what the welfare range or capacity of these different types of animals are — how much a cow suffers versus a pig versus a chicken versus a fish versus a lobster versus a shrimp versus a black soldier fly larvae, assuming they suffer at all. So we are still doing research on that issue, but I think we can speculate that in the aggregate, in expectation, it is an unimaginable amount of suffering that we are causing unnecessarily.
Would your bet be that it's like the expected value of the suffering reduction per year is like more than the total suffering humanity has ever faced?
That is a really good way of phrasing it. I am inclined to say yes, but I think I need to sit with the question beyond this conversation.
Obviously, there's a lot of uncertainty.
If I have to guess yes or no right now, I would guess yes, and then take some more time to think about it. That is a great, great question.
You know, we're talking about huge amounts of suffering. Let's talk about even bigger amounts of suffering. Let's talk about wild animal welfare. And you know, to put my cards on the table, when we're talking about wild animal welfare, I'm always a little bit uncomfortable with the topic because, you know, it's hard enough to get people to like take action to care about, you know, the factory farm in their backyard, you know, that's in their local area where animals are like living absolutely horrendous lives and they're, you know, animals they can relate to. When you go to wild animals, it feels like it gets, you know, even much more difficult for people to sort of relate to or view it as not crazy. So I feel like it's a bit of a treacherous territory. But gee, can you make the case like about why should wild animal welfare be kind of a focus area?
Well, wild animal welfare should be a focus area first of all because it is hugely important, hugely neglected, and at least possibly tractable. Hugely important because there are many more wild animals alive than farmed animals alive. And that is already a staggering number. Hugely neglected because there are way fewer people and organizations working on wild animal welfare than working on farmed animal welfare, which is already not that much, as you know. And then at least possibly tractable, and this is where, as you suggest, wild animal welfare is a little bit fraught.
With farmed animal welfare, we know what to do. It is hard, but we know what to do. We need to phase down industrial animal agriculture and phase up plant-based alternatives. That will be intergenerational work, but we can take it on. With wild animal welfare, we face major bottlenecks, including epistemic, practical, and motivational. Epistemic: we still know so little about what they need and what is better and worse for them. Practical: we lack the resources and infrastructure for giving them even what we know they need. And then motivational, and this is what you emphasized: we lack the political will to really give them what we know they need.
So my attitude is that we should be working on this, we should be investing in this, because given how staggeringly important and neglected it is, and given that the tractability is unclear at this stage, it merits at least an investment in investigating the tractability, in taking a decade or two to do some serious research and advocacy and policy work to see if we can start to overcome those obstacles and make a little bit of progress and figure out how tractable the issue really is.
Yeah, I think that's well argued, and it reminds me of actually the second reason that this topic makes me a little uneasy, which is I feel like it's so hard to even know the sign of an intervention — like is it making things better or worse? It's like, you know, it's like literally, are we causing harm or helping? Like you think about the complexity of like, let's say you do something that helps a certain type of animal, well, like does that mean it eats more of this other type of animal, and then right, then that means that those don't eat as many of the type that they eat, and you know, it's wild, literally.
Yes. Yes, it is. It is literally, literally wild. Which is why I think with this issue, as with so many issues, including some that we might talk about later in this conversation, a really helpful first step is just to acknowledge the importance and the difficulty of the issue at the same time. Because when you acknowledge the importance, it can make you resist acknowledging the difficulty because you want to believe you can do something. And then when you acknowledge the difficulty, it can make you resist acknowledging the importance because when something is hard, you really wish it was not your responsibility to take it on. But this is just one of those issues that is both really important and urgent and really difficult and complex. And it can help clarify our task when we start by acknowledging that those are both true at the same time.
And in my view, for wild animal welfare, what follows when we acknowledge that those are both true at the same time is that we should not try to find the perfect solution right now. We should not advocate for large-scale irreversible interventions about which we have a lot of confidence right now. But what we can do is take small-scale reversible actions that are at least plausibly good for some animals, and then we can monitor the effects, and we can implement them in a way that builds a little bit of knowledge, builds a little bit of institutional infrastructure and resources, builds a little bit of political will, so that we can have a little bit of a better sense of what to do in five years and a little bit more momentum towards doing more in five years.
And so I think about, for example, bird-safe glass in urban contexts or fertility control in urban contexts. These are interventions where, first of all, plausibly bird-safe glass is at least good for some birds. Plausibly fertility control is at least better for some rodents in comparison with being poisoned, for example. These are not huge population numbers affecting interventions, so to some extent it brackets some of those other unknowns, even if not fully. And people can wrap their heads around it and are already quite motivated to do those kinds of interventions, and then we can monitor the effects and learn more.
So at NYU we recently launched a wild animal welfare program with what we call the WILD Lab — Wildlife Inclusive Local Development — and we are trying to partner with private and public actors to monitor the welfare effects and do better quantified estimates of the welfare effects of, for example, infrastructure changes, so that we can actually develop a little bit more of an understanding of this. And I think that would be a helpful next step.
It seems to me like an area where very high-quality work could potentially be really good and important, but I would be very concerned about like a bunch of too many groups that are doing low-quality work getting involved. Like it just, there's too many things that could go off the rails. There's too much risk of actually causing harm by accident. What do you think about that? Is it sort of unusual in that way? Would you agree with me?
Yeah, there is always this pair of risks that you have to trade off against each other. One risk is being too cautious and another risk is not being cautious enough, right? So you can be too cautious if you think, well, we need so much more knowledge before we can be confident about our recommendations, and we need so much more infrastructure before we can implement them, and so much more political will before we can get support for them. And so we should take 80 years to build a scientific field and build a lot of knowledge, and then take 80 years to build the institutional infrastructure, and then take 80 years to do the education and advocacy. I think that would be too cautious, too deliberate. We would be allowing way too much status quo-based harm to occur along the way, and so much path dependence would get set up and so on.
But then you could go in the other direction and you could strongly recommend all of these interventions that are really ineffective and counterproductive, and then people anchor to them, governments anchor to them, they become embedded in policies, and that becomes really difficult to change. And then you might get stuck on this really bad path because you were frantic and reckless and enacted too soon and without knowing exactly what the solution is. I would just like to try to strike a balance between those mistakes. I would try to, you know, summoning Aristotle, find the mean between those excesses and take a deliberate enough approach without getting stuck in the muck and never being willing to try something and monitor the effects.
Yeah, it just seems to me that there are some kinds of interventions where you're trying to improve something where if you fail, almost certainly you do like zero effect, right? You know, so like the failure case not so bad. You're like, okay, you go to zero, fine. But there are other areas where the failure case is like actually really negative, like either because you've actually caused harm directly in your failure, or maybe it's a reputation. Maybe you've like tarnished the whole field in a way that like now people can't work in it or can't raise money in it or whatever. And so, you know, if you were to like rank order different fields in this way, some might be safer in these dimensions and others might be much riskier. Right? If you're like giving people an experimental new drug, there's always a risk that you like kill someone, right? If you're repurposing something that's been used for many years, you're probably not going to kill anyone. Worst case scenario, it doesn't help the disease, right? Does that make sense? And I just feel like wild animal welfare has this weird combination of like being at the high end of risk for these kinds of things relative to other fields.
Yeah. Wild animal welfare is not easy, which I think is part of why it is as neglected as it is. And we are still in such an early stage of building the field. With that said, these are not one-size-fits-all issues, right? A lot depends on which interventions you would like to explore and a lot depends on how you go about exploring them. And I think if the field of wild animal welfare research does start with the types of interventions that I was noting — the WILD Lab at NYU focuses on bird-safe glass and fertility control and these other very relatable, very familiar issues where people appreciate, oh, these are animals with whom we share community and these are animals on whom we are imposing harms and these are ideas about how we can reduce and repair these human-imposed harms on our fellow urban residents — these are quite relatable ideas that people are actually pretty excited to get on board with.
And I think if you start there, as opposed to, oh, should we kill all predators to stop the harm of predation in forests and oceans, then already that removes a lot of that risk of reputational effects and people getting the wrong idea. And then moreover, if you talk about the issues in a way that signals your humility and uncertainty without being paralyzing, then that also undercuts a lot of the risks of, for example, learning over time that you made the wrong recommendations and having to update them or iterate on them.
If I right now go to governments — which is exactly what we are doing — if I right now go to governments and say we have some good reason to believe that bird-safe glass and fertility control would on net be good for wild animal populations as well as human populations. We are not totally sure, however, because these are really complex issues. Though we are confident enough that we would love to partner with you to implement these in an experimental way and then monitor the effects and see what we learn and then build and grow from there. If this is our messaging, then it seems fine and part of the process. If in five or 10 years we learned, oh, you know what, this intervention was a little bit more counterproductive than we thought it might be, and we should change it up, that would then just be part of what we were trying to discover, and that would be a good outcome of what we had been working on.
I don't know if you see yourself this way, but I see you as someone who thinks deeply about these complex topics and then just says what you think is true because you think it's true and important, not really thinking about the sort of marketing side of it. That you view that as sort of a separate thing that's for someone else. And do you agree with that?
Yeah, good question. Well, I am happy that you see me as someone who is honest and candid about what I think. I hope I am that way. And at the same time, I think being that way can be compatible with being thoughtful about messaging with different audiences. And I would like to think that I am thoughtful about messaging with different audiences. So obviously I might have one version of a conversation in a seminar room with my fellow researchers, but then I might have another version of that same conversation with companies, with governments, with the general public, with political opposition. And I never am dishonest or deceptive, I would like to think. However, I might focus in on different aspects of the conversation, try to find common ground, speak in different languages that I think might be more familiar or relatable to different audiences.
So if talking with effective altruists, I might a little bit more casually lean in to big-picture questions about the future of predation and so on without endless caveats and qualifications that would prevent misunderstandings and miscommunications. But with the general public or talking with companies and governments, I would probably start with bird-safe glass and fertility control and emphasize the co-benefits for humans. And if the conversation drifted to the harms of predation, I probably would add lots of caveats and qualifications to prevent misunderstanding and miscommunication. So I think there are ways to be both very honest and candid and thoughtful about messaging and effective in messaging with different audiences. And I try to learn how to do that and embody that, though obviously I still have a lot of learning to do.
Yeah. And just to be clear, I'm not saying you don't adjust your message to the audience. I definitely think you do that. What I mean more is that, so imagine, you know, someone's running an animal advocacy group, right, and they're like, oh, should we put out a white paper about, you know, the effects of removing predators on the environment? Like that itself, the fact that even if it's incredibly nuanced and they say this is not something we should do because there's too much uncertainty, even that itself could make them seem like a crazy radical fringe group to some people, right? They're like, oh, they're talking about killing all predators or whatever, you know, like you see how that could be spun.
So it's like, to me, I see you as not a marketer. I see you as someone who's trying to spread ideas that you think are true. But of course many animal advocacy groups, they're like a big part of what they do is marketing. Effectively, they're trying to change minds, right? And I'm just wondering like, do you see it as a sort of marketplace where there's like lots of different actors needed and some need to just be like incredibly marketing savvy and that's sort of their focus, and there are other players like yourself that are like, you know, hopefully always going to say what you think is true. Yes, you might change the messaging for a different audience, but you're not going to like not publish that paper because, you know, it has a radical idea in it, right?
Yeah, absolutely. I do think that there should be a large network of actors and again a kind of systems approach here, and that might include people with different talents and different areas of focus, but it might also include people with different values — some radical actors who really are pushing the boundaries and then some moderate actors who are a little bit better positioned to engage with companies, governments, decision makers.
I do however think that the line between pure research and pure marketing is a little blurrier than your question suggests, and it might have just been the phrasing of your question. But for example, while I always do try to say what I take to be true, yes, of course, phrasing it in different ways for different audiences, there still are decisions to make about what issues to prioritize in the early days of a new field, what interventions to prioritize in the early days of a new field, and then of course say what you take to be true about them. And since I do participate in communities that are building relatively young fields, I do take myself to have a responsibility to in the early formative years focus on issues and interventions that perhaps will be a little bit more familiar and
relatable to researchers in other fields and companies and governments. And so that focus on, for example, bird-safe glass and fertility control in the case of wild animal welfare. And then there will be similar examples in the case of AI we might talk about later in this conversation. I do think that is both a more feasible and tractable set of issues to discuss with companies and governments. But also on my mind is that I would like to introduce the field of wild animal welfare to people who are not already in it in a way that invites them in and makes them feel welcome instead of like instantly alienating them on day one. And then once the field is a little bit more robust and is a little bit more defined and is a little bit more diverse with more actors in it, I think it becomes safer and safer for there to be then be the occasional paper or special issue of a journal or talk or big conference about some of these more fringe issues too because now those are part of a broader ecosystem and are not necessarily defining it for newcomers.
