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
I think high amounts of concern for wild animals is actually a bit of a defect in utilitarianism. A quite compelling reason for caring more about factory farmed animals is that we are inflicting a massive injustice against them, and that isn't the case for wild animals generally. We do often feel moral obligations to wild animals when we are responsible for their suffering (think oil spills for example). That's not to say wild animals don't matter, but they might be further down our priority list for that reason.
I think the visualization is great. I think the exploding red dots is very powerful, demonstrates just an immense amount of bloodshed.
But couldn't you say that, for instance, the forces of evolution are inflicting an even more massive injustice against wild animals? Assuming injustices are more relevant because our species happens to inflict them doesn't seem 100% convincing to me. From the animal's point of view, it probably doesn't matter very much whether its situation is caused by some kind of injustic... (read more)