Against Lyman Stone On Animal Welfare

Photo by Máté Molnár on Unsplash

Demographer Lyman Stone writes:

Today I have three more arguments about why the shrimp should die.

1. Animal welfarism taken seriously requires extreme anti-human views and easily justifies forced sterilization of humans

2. Shrimp welfare advocates are engaged in basically con-man type activities and you should regard them as quite dubious persons

3. Even if shrimp have some value, there are obviously higher value uses of limited charitable funds

Unfortunately, all of Lyman’s points are wrong and he should return to writing about demographics, a subject about which he often has intelligent opinions.

Lyman says:

I won’t bore you with every step but the TL;DR is because of the shift towards smaller animals in factory farms alongside rising protein consumption from animals, while human welfare (rising life expectancy + rising population + rising GDP per capita while alive) has risen a ton, falling animal welfare has supposedly eliminated HALF of the true gains in human welfare. According to this story, we should be willing to swap HALF of global GDP to return suffering-from-animals-for-food to the levels of observed in 1800.

This is called the meat eater problem and animal advocates have been talking about it for fifteen years. The fact that Lyman seems to have independently invented the concept says good things about his fluid intelligence and bad things about whether he has any idea what he’s talking about.

The meat eater problem is legitimately troubling. “Should we wipe out half of global GDP to return suffering-from-animals-for-food to the levels in 1800?” is not troubling because no one can do that. But if taken literally, the meat eater problem does suggest that global health and development charities are far less cost-effective than naive calculations would suggest, and may be net harmful. Of course, no animal advocate likes “it’s wrong to save children’s lives because they might grow up and eat meat.”¹ It feels morally unconscionable to let children die to save animals—as it should be.

It’s not obvious how big an effect the meat-eater problem really has; the people we’re targeting with our donations don’t eat much meat in the first place! One estimate suggests that increasing a poor person’s income by $1000/year adds several weeks of farmed-animal misery; most effective animal advocates, in my experience, would consider this to be net positive.

The best resolution I’ve seen is to support global health and development while also supporting groups like Animal Advocacy Africa, which work to keep factory farming from taking root in the developing world. For example, animal advocates can push for farmers to produce cage-free eggs from the beginning, preventing a costly transition later. I also know some people who choose to donate to charities working in India or Southeast Asia, which have strong traditions of vegetarianism and concern for animals.

But Lyman Stone is not here for this kind of calm, evidence-based analysis. He writes:

Animal Welfarists Are Con Men

If animal welfarists believed what they say, they would not just be vegans. They would be uniformly ardent anti-natalists, and also advocates of forced sterilization. If humans are as bad as they say (i.e. if human life creates as many forcible, nonconsensual harms as they say), then the moral argument for forcibly sterilizing humans is extremely compelling. But while many animal welfarist extremists do make this argument, most don’t, because they don’t actually believe their own math.

Do we have other evidence animal welfarists are con men? Yes, we do…

At every level, what’s going on with animal welfarism is people who do not actually seriously believe that animal welfare is as bad as they say it is, but saying it’s that bad has very considerable payoffs in terms of money, status, social returns in unique social circles, etc. It is an almost perfect performative belief.

We are apparently postulating a world where animal advocates have the power to forcibly sterilize large numbers of human beings, but can’t force them to eat tofu.

Now. Lyman Stone is a member of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, which he himself says “is doctrinally committed to the idea that hell is real and people who don’t have faith in Jesus go there when they die.” Presumably, to the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Hell is not a picnic with a fun game of Ultimate Frisbee. Lyman Stone has also written about how religious identification is heritable: Christians produce Christians (at least nominal ones); atheists produce atheists. He can’t plead ignorance about this.

And yet Lyman Stone is a pronatalist activist. He has never, to my knowledge, made the slightest effort to differentially increase the fertility of Christians over non-Christians. He has advocated for policies to increase the birth rate, knowing that the majority of the people created by them will go to Hell. This is not some piddling little “chickens that are so big their legs break when they try to walk, and then they get ammonia burns from lying in their own waste” issue. We’re talking eternal torture. And unlike animal advocacy—where, again, the entire problem would be solved if people ate tofu instead—Lyman has no peaceful alternate solution available. You can’t force people to believe in Jesus.

So what is it, Lyman? Are you a con artist, or are you going to convert to ardent anti-natalism and forced sterilizations, or do you think it’s a good and desirable thing that I had a son who, if he died tonight, would be tortured forever?

This is hitting below the belt, I know. But he’s talking about people I know and love. You can check Animal Advocacy Careers’s job board: people do not make a lot of money doing farmed animal advocacy. People regularly take 50% pay cuts to work in the field. Many work for free, supported by their friends or spouses, because their organizations can’t afford to pay them. And Lyman’s accusing them of being con artists because… why?

First: PETA runs an animal shelter that euthanizes animals. I hate to find myself defending the honor of fucking PETA. But a lot of people seem to assume that animal shelters that euthanize animals do it for shits and giggles. In reality, there are far more dogs and cats than people are willing to pay to take care of. No-kill shelters either turn away animals that aren’t “adoptable” (often causing them to live on the street) or become overcrowded and stop taking in new animals. PETA’s shelter takes in any animal, no questions asked—and so it has a relatively high euthanasia rate.

Why do they do this? To quote a Vox article about the history of PETA:

Nonetheless, a long-time movement insider told me that “PETA euthanizing animals is absolutely a detriment to PETA’s image and bottom line. From a reputation, donor, and income vantage it is the worst thing that PETA is doing… Everyone would prefer they don’t do this. But Ingrid [founder of PETA] just won’t turn her back on the dogs.”

You know, as you do, if you’re a performative hypocrite who doesn’t care about animals and is just doing it for money and social status.

Second: The Shrimp Welfare Project buys shrimp stunners and it is conceivably possible that the two companies that manufacture shrimp stunners are donating to the Shrimp Welfare Project.

Do we have any evidence for this claim? No. Did you know that you can just claim that anyone donated to anything? Personally, I think that the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod is Marxist-Leninist because of all the donations they get from Zombie Stalin.

Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla, the CEO of the Shrimp Welfare Project, used to work in investment banking and private equity. As we all know, running a private equity real estate fund is a notoriously poorly paid profession, which people only work because it was their childhood dream to be a private equity real estate executive. So it only makes sense that, as he got older and his parents stopped paying his rent, Zorrilla chose to make a career change to the highly remunerative field of lobbying for shrimp stunner manufacturers. Sure, he has to pretend to care about shrimp. But at least he’s raking in all that sweet, sweet shrimp stunner manufacturer money. It’s the greatest grift since memecoins!

Third: the blogger Bentham’s Bulldog gets a lot of likes and restacks when he writes about animal advocacy. Lyman adds:

Heck, I see it in my own engagement! I’m not writing this post because I care, I’m writing it because animal stuff gets you weirdly higher rates of restacks and thus draws in more new subscribers!

Well, I get way fewer likes and restacks on my animal advocacy posts. In fact, on my last reader survey, my readers told me to write less about animal stuff. It is almost as if different people have different audiences with different preferences.

This is the only piece of actual evidence Lyman provides that any animal advocates selfishly benefit from animal advocacy. As far as I can tell, the proposed con is that PETA, the Humane League, the Humane Society of the United States, Mercy for Animals, Farm Sanctuary, the Good Food Institute, Direct Action Everywhere, and everyone else in the animal advocacy movement is working long hours for low pay doing a job that makes everyone hate them, purely in order to juice up Bentham’s Bulldog’s engagement numbers (but not mine). You would think they could save some time by pressing the like button themselves!

Look. You don’t have to care about farmed animals. It’s perfectly legal. But if someone donating to the Shrimp Welfare Project makes you flail around for random, evidence-free accusations—they’re con artists! they like forcibly sterilizing people! they’re more likely to torture humans!—well, it kind of looks like you care. It looks like your conscience is whispering to you that torturing animals is wrong—not because it says something bad about the torturer as a person, but because animals are thinking, feeling beings who suffer the same way we do—and so to silence it you’re desperately grasping for something, anything, that would mean that animal advocates are the real baddies after all.

I don’t know Lyman Stone as a person (although I enjoy his Substack). But I have met so many people who are in that place—who dunk on vegans and reskeet “PETA kills animals!” because on some level they know that what we do to animals on farms is wrong. And if you are in that place, and by some chance you’re reading this: to help farmed animals, you don’t have to quit your job, throw out all your leather boots, turn down Grandma’s turkey at Christmas, and start living exclusively on lentils. Every little bit matters: voting for pro-animal ballot propositions, writing retailers to ask them to make cage-free pledges, sharing videos on Facebook, having conversations with your equally omnivorous friends, or (yes) donating to help buy stunners for shrimp. Please listen to the part of you that knows that animal cruelty is wrong.

1. Only anti-PEPFAR advocates think like that.