EA - Tyler Johnston on helping farmed animals, consciousness, and being conventionally good by Amber Dawn

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Tyler Johnston on helping farmed animals, consciousness, and being conventionally good, published by Amber Dawn on March 10, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This post is part of a series of six interviews. As EAs, we want to use our careers or donations to do the most good - but it’s difficult to work out what exactly that looks like for us. I wanted to interview effective altruists working in different fields and on different causes and ask them how they chose their cause area, as well as how they relate to effective altruism and doing good more generally. During the Prague Fall Season residency, I interviewed six EAs in Prague about what they are doing and why they are doing it. I’m grateful to my interviewees for giving their time, and to the organisers of PFS for supporting my visit.I’m currently working as a freelance writer and editor. If you’re interested in hiring me, book a short call or email me at [email protected]. More info here.Tyler Johnston is an aspiring effective altruist currently based out of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Professionally, he works on corporate campaigns to improve the lives of farmed chickens, and is interested in cause prioritisation, interspecies comparisons, and the suffering of non-humans. He’s also a science-fiction fan and an amateur crossword puzzle constructor.We talked about:his work on The Humane League’s corporate animal welfare campaignshow he became a vegan and animal advocatewhether animals are conscioushow being conventionally good is underratedOn his work at The Humane LeagueAmber: Tell me about what you’re doing.Tyler: I work for The Humane League. We run public awareness campaigns to try to get companies to make commitments to improve the treatment of farmed animals in their supply chains. This strategy first gained traction in 2015, and was immediately really powerful. Since then, it has got a lot of interest from EA funders.Amber: Did The Humane League always do that, or was it doing something else before 2015?Tyler: It was a long journey; The Humane League’s original name was Hugs for PuppiesAmber: Aww, that’s very cute!Tyler: Yeah, I feel like we’d be a more likeable organisation if we were still called that. They started doing demonstrations around issues like fur bans, and other animal welfare issues there was already a lot of energy around. They then switched to focussing on vegan advocacy, which involved things like leafleting, and sharing recipes and resources.Amber: So the strategy at that time then was to encourage people to go vegan, which would lower demand for factory farming, which would mean there were fewer factory-farmed animals?Tyler: That’s right. There was some early evidence that showed this was promising, and it also just made sense to them, since most vegans would attribute their own choice to be vegan to a time in the past when they heard and agreed with the arguments. So they thought, ‘why wouldn’t this export to other people?’Amber: But you said the strategy is different now - it’s to lobby actual food producers to treat the animals that they’re farming better. Say more about that.Tyler: That’s our dominant strategy now, yeah. It’s part of a broader shift in the [animal advocacy] movement toward institutional change rather than individual change. If for some given company, you either have to change the minds of, like, 10 million consumers, or a dozen executive stakeholders - the latter is just a lot more tractable. It started with running small campaigns to persuade companies to source cage-free eggs, and it turned out that this worked. Around 2015 there was a sharp turning point in the number of farmed birds that are cage-free - before 2015, the percentage was growing very slowly, from 3% to 5%, but between 2015 and today, the percentage went up from 5% to 36%. And people attr...