What's Your Counterfactual Impact on Animals?

Finding leverage in the fight against factory farming

The scale of factory farming is so enormous and seemingly impossible to fix that historically, most people thought the only way to make even a tiny impact was to change their own behavior. But is this framing missing the potential good we can do?

There’s a better way to think about individual impact: your counterfactual impact i.e. what would happen if you vanished overnight, would your absence be felt by the animals?

Counterintuitively, for the vast majority of people who’ve focused primarily on individual actions, the answer is “not really.” If you’ve already cut out most animal products from your life, you’re avoiding a lot of harm to animals. After all, the lowest harm you can get to in the best case scenario is zero!

Rutger has a good quote about this in his latest book Moral Ambition (highly recommend reading it):

"In some circles, you’d think the highest good is not to have any impact at all. A good life is defined by what you don’t do. Don’t fly. Don’t eat meat. Don’t have kids. And don’t even think about using a plastic straw. Reduce! Reduce! Reduce! The aim is to have the smallest footprint possible, with your little veg garden and your tiny house. Best-case scenario? Your impact on the planet is so negligible, you could just as well not have existed.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s a fine idea to align even your smallest deeds with your biggest values. (And not eating meat from factory farms seems to me a moral minimum.) But surely a good life consists of more than what you don’t do? One would hope that on your deathbed, you can chalk up your life’s work to more than simply all the harm you didn’t cause?"

- Rutger Bregman

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Not doing harm is great, aligning your actions with your values is also great! But it’s worth thinking beyond that to figure out actions that could actually help even more animals.

The Leverage of Systemic Change

Consider what happens when highly effective advocacy organizations run corporate campaigns. A single successful campaign can change conditions for millions of animals across an entire supply chain.

For example: The Humane League recently won its cage-free campaign against Subway. This may not seem like a big deal, but as a result of this single campaign, 22,000+ Subway outlets will phase out eggs from caged hens by November 1st, 2025, which impacts 340,000+ hens per year each of whom currently lives their entire 12-18 month lives in tiny battery cages.¹ That’s significant progress! (If you are skeptical about the impact of going cage-free, I recommend checking out this Our World in Data article: Do better cages or cage-free environments really improve the lives of hens?)

But here’s the remarkable part: if you were a volunteer for THL, this required roughly 1-2 hour of advocacy every month for about ~6 months to win this campaign. Think about that! ~6-12 hours of your time could help improve conditions for 340,000+ hens each year, over their entire lives. No other personal action comes close to this kind of leverage.

Something else I found surprising at the Animal and Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit earlier this year is that the farm animal movement runs on roughly ~$200 million per year globally.² To put that in perspective, that’s 1/20th of what Americans spend on halloween costumes annually! According to Animal Advocacy Careers, there are only about ~800 full-time jobs in animal advocacy worldwide on their job board annually.

This means your contribution, whether it’s money, time, or skills, can have an outsized impact simply because the movement is so resource constrained. Every additional dollar or hour of work can help significantly expand what’s possible.

Lewis Bollard recently gave a TED talk on reforming factory farming and posted a list of actionable steps for individuals interested in making a difference:

1. Advocate: tell the companies you buy from that you expect them to adopt and implement better animal welfare policies. Sign up to advocate with The Humane League here: https://t.co/rWNShuMhpY

2. Lobby: ask your politicians to end the cruelest practices. For Americans, ask Congress to not wipe out state farm animal welfare laws in the upcoming Farm Bill. Take action here: https://t.co/i7SoIgmWCk

3. Donate: fund effective advocacy that is driving changes. One good option is the FarmKind Giving fund: https://t.co/DUN2Jx2V68

4. Work on the issue: devote your career to fighting factory farming. Animal Advocacy Careers is one good resource: https://t.co/z0TwGL66Il

5. Learn more: educate yourself on factory farming and what you can do about it. Watch videos on YouTube, quiz ChatGPT on details, read a book like Animal Liberation Now. Here’s a good video to start with: https://t.co/spZ5yfbXdo

6. Buy fewer factory-farmed products. In the US + Europe, almost all chicken, eggs, and pork are from factory farms. Choose pasture-raised or plant-based alternatives instead.

7. Talk about factory farming. Share videos and podcasts. If you have a public profile, post about it. Factory farming thrives in the dark. So one of the best things you can do is to shine a light on it.

Focus on maximizing your counterfactual impact

When it comes to individual lifestyle changes, your counterfactual impact is capped by the number of animals you personally would have consumed. But in addition (or instead), if you contribute to systemic change through advocacy, donations, or career choices, you can multiply your impact by many orders of magnitude.

I highly encourage you to take action on some of Lewis’ recommendations above. If you have suggestions on how to maximize counterfactual impact, I’d love to hear them!

1. The Humane League won its campaign against subway: https://thehumaneleague.org/article/subway-campaign-victory

2. Farm animal advocacy funding landscape: https://faunalytics.org/funding-dynamics-in-farmed-animal-advocacy