I made a visualisation trying to demonstrate the scale of animal agriculture (and the suffering caused by it). Unfortunately I can't embed it in a post; go have a look at it here.
Interested to hear what people think of it, and whether this sort of thing is likely to be useful as a persuasive tool. It's nothing groundbreaking - just a re-imagining of some existing graphs published by ACE plus some fancy animations. But anecdotally, some people seem to find it quite powerful.
Henry
This isn't something I'd thought about at all - I guess wild animal suffering is one of those things you just accept as unfortunate but inevitable.
Still I wouldn't say the absolute scale (# of suffering farm animals vs. # of suffering wild animals) makes much of a difference, rather the scale of what can be accomplished with a given resource investment. Suffering in factories seems like a much easier problem to solve, and I'd expect the amount of suffering reduced per dollar invested to be far higher.
Also, I would feel a lot more hesitant about large-scale interventions on wild animals, since they are part of complex ecosystems where I've been led to believe we don't have a good enough understanding to anticipate long-term consequences accurately. Farm animals are situated in a fairly simple living situation where I'd feel much more confident about the long-term suffering reduction of various interventions.
Maybe I'm missing some obvious high-impact interventions though? Or maybe the area is unexplored and there are big potential benefits from spending some effort figuring out if there are high-impact interventions?
I think that's pretty much it. Right now, there aren't many known concrete promising interventions to my knowledge, but the value of information in this area seems extremely high.
Using the standard method of rating cause areas by scale, neglectedness and tractability, it seems wild animal suffering scores a lot higher on scale, much higher on neglectedness (although farm animals are already pretty neglected),... (read more)