Unintended Consequences, Personal Edition (How I hurt animals, but you don't have to)

I came across the above story in Google News while writing the post below. This isn’t the mainstream media laughing at some extreme vegan – this is what the vegan media choose to discuss in public.

 

Preface: This post is not fishing for compliments or trying to get you to disagree about my work’s overall impact. (I’ve had that discussion plenty.) Rather, this post is an offer for others to learn from my mistakes.

When the great Robert Sapolsky was asked why he wrote the explicitly “there is no free will” Determined, he answered (paraphrasing): 

After I wrote Behave, [X person] said, ‘Oh, wow, this could make people doubt free will!’ And I thought, ‘Doubt? DOUBT?’ I was too subtle!’

 So I wrote Determined to spell it out very clearly.

That came to mind when someone was surprised by this post (specifically, “I spent most of my professional life making the world a net worse place”).

So please let me spell it out very clearly. There are two ways I made the world worse:

1. At least in the United States, the word “vegan” hurts animals, as documented for years and featured in Losing (“The End of Veganism”). Yet I let an explicitly animal advocacy organization (Animal Liberation Action) be renamed and refocused as a veganism advocacy organization. Then I spent decades promoting this organization.  😞

2. Regardless of the exact word used, on average, vegetarian / vegan advocacy hurts animals, for the five reasons spelled out here. 

In short: the arguments veg advocates promote (health and environment especially) lead people, on net, to eat more factory-farmed chickens. (Which I’ve noted for decades, spelling out as one of the first posts on this blog, more than ten years ago.) We’ve seen this happen even outside the United States.

Heck (and this blew my mind), even One Step for Animals' message of “Please don’t eat chickens” has as much impact on people’s consumption of red meat as it does on their consumption of birds!

Those two reasons are simple and straightforward, making it entirely clear to me that my net impact on the world has been negative. (I don’t even need to mention that, as a utilitarian during those decades, I was fundamentally philosophically mistaken, as per “Biting the Philosophical Bullet” in Losing.)

Again, this post is not about me or the past. It is simply noting mistakes in an attempt to make the world less bad in the future.

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