Animal Millionaires

Hello to all my loyal blog readers. First of all, I would like to apologize for the long hiatus between posts. I started working at a new job in mid-December, and while this has been able to meet many of my needs, it has kept me away from updating this blog for the past couple months. This blog is certainly a project I wish to continue however, and I hope to get back into fairly regular updates as I settle into my new position.

Recently, as I was getting to bed at my new early bedtime, I decided I should put together a list of goals for myself. I wrote down all of one item on this list before I got distracted and eventually fell asleep. The one item I put down on my list was, “Become an animal millionaire”.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term it is one that Erik Marcus brings up fairly regularly on his vegan.com blog. An animal millionaire is someone who, through their actions, has led to a million animals' lives being saved.

What would it take to become an animal millionaire?

Some people choose to foster animals to help save them from certain deaths in shelters. I imagine I could probably foster roughly 15 cats or dogs at a time, over their roughly 15 year life spans. Given that I likely have roughly 60 years left to live myself, I could probably save 60-ish lives by fostering animals. This would also come at a cost of tens, possibly even the low hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Another technique many have chosen to take for the animals is illegal direct action. Supposing I chose to put my direct action directly towards saving animals (as opposed to causing property damage), my most optimistic projection would be that I could rescue a few thousand animals before earning an extended sentence in my own cage.

This is at least far better than the marginally legal direct action group Sea Shepherd, which manages to get Japan to miss their whaling quota by a few hundred in a good year (out of a quota of roughly 1000 whales). This comes at a cost of millions of dollars to the animal rights movement, and a crew of what appears to be dozens of people. Sea Shepherd's activism comes at a cost of roughly $10,000 per whale saved and saves a mere 10 animals per person-year of work by the crew.

Legislative challenges vary greatly depending on the piece of legislation. California's proposition 2 will likely impact the lives of billions of animals once it goes into effect; although, it is unclear how many, if any, lives will ultimately be spared by this piece of legislation. This came at a cost of roughly $10 million from the YES side, and required perhaps a couple thousand person-years of work. Missouri's proposition B on the other hand will influence the lives of no more than a couple hundred thousand animals per year. It came at a cost of $1.7 million in support to the YES side and likely several hundred person-years of work.

What if we spent our time trying to get as many people as possible to go vegan? If we really put our energy into it, we could talk to several hundred, perhaps even a couple thousand people per week. Obviously the vast majority of people would not make a large lifestyle change from their brief conversation with us, but out of speaking with a few thousand people, it is not unreasonable to think we could get at least one to make a change (along with hopefully pushing many others in the right direction). In a wealthy nation like the United States, getting just one young person to go vegan will typically save the lives of roughly 2000 animals over the remainder of that person's life. Vegan Outreach makes conversing with this many people on a regular basis entirely possible. They print out booklets that, in addition to presenting information to people in a clear and effective manner, also serve as excellent conversation starters with interested people.

Using Vegan Outreach materials, one of their leafleters, Vic Sjodin, managed to pass out booklets to over 100,000 people in a single semester. You may not be the veritable leafleting god that Vic is, but any person donating a full year of their labor to the cause, could most likely get out 100,000 booklets over the course of that year. Depending on how effective of communicators we are on behalf of the animals, it is entirely reasonable that we could get 50-100 people to go vegan over this time period, at a cost of no more than $12,000 to print those booklets (plus perhaps a few thousand more in gas costs). Getting a mere 50 young Americans to go vegan would amount to a million lives saved.



All of the figures in the above table are admittedly very rough estimates. Reasonable error bars on these would be as much as a factor of ten in either direction. Yet even admitting that much uncertainty, there is a clear winner if we are interested in doing what is best for the animals, and that difference is so much so, that using this method, any one of us could easily become an animal millionaire multiple times over within our lives.

Imagine yourself taking just one day every other week to leaflet at a college campus or a concert that young people will be attending. Similarly, imagine yourself setting aside just a couple hours worth of work from every paycheck to donate to Vegan Outreach. Taking these two small steps will set you up to easily reach the goal of becoming an animal millionaire within a decade. I challenge all of you to see which of us can accomplish this simple task the most times over.

Environmental Impact of Leafleting

I got a lot of positive feedback in response to my previous post on whether being vegan is worse for the environment. One of the few objections raised in response, however, was the question of what the environmental impact of leafleting is (and reposting my link Vegan Outreach's leafleting totals). This is an excellent question.

As with almost all things, printing booklets has an environmental impact in a large number of areas, but the objection I hear most often when leafleting is that people don't want to waste the paper because of the trees that need to be cut down to create that paper. This creates an interesting dichotomy, since those of you who have read Livestock's Long Shadow or even the related press release will recall that the majority of land deforested in recent years is now being grazed by livestock. If only we had some way to compare any potential decrease in deforestation due to a decrease in livestock consumption from leafleting, with whatever deforestation may have been caused to print the booklets.

The fact regarding deforestation given in Livestock's Long Shadow is that, “By 2010 cattle are projected to be grazing on some 24 million hectares of Neotropical land that was forest in 2000.” This did not actually originate with the Livestock's Long Shadow report, but is actually attributed to an article published in the journal Global Environmental Change titled Projecting land use changes in the Neotropics: The geography of pasture expansion into forest. Since this article is only focused on neotropical areas, and the fact we are given relates to only grazing cattle, not all deforestation related to animal consumption is being included in the figure we have been given, but we will use it as a baseline for the minimum amount of recently forested land now being used to support our demand for animal products. 24 million hectares in the last decade, or 2.4 million hectares per year.

According to the USDA, worldwide production of beef and veal in 2010 is expected to be around 7.2 million tonnes. This is a slight decrease from a peak of around 7.6 million tonnes in 2007, but serves as a fairly accurate yearly estimate for the past decade. This means that for every tonne of meat, 1/3 of a hectare of neotropical forest is deforested ([2.4 Mha/yr] / [7.2 Mt/yr]), or 3.3 square meters per kilogram of beef.

I leaflet exclusively in the United States, where the total beef consumption in 2009 was 26.9 billion pounds, or about 40 kilograms per person. This means each person in the US contributes to about 130 square meters (40*3.3) of neotropical deforestation per year through their consumption of grazing beef and veal alone.

How many sheets of paper would be in that same 130 square meters of forest? Assuming Pokomoke State Forest in Maryland can serve as a fairly typical example of forest, I calculate that there is roughly 7300 board feet of wood per acre there. That would be roughly 1.8 board feet per square meter. (Pokomoke is mostly brushy forest as opposed to tall trees, which probably explains the low number). Doing some online research I see numbers ranging anywhere from 2000 to 76000 board feet per acre, with just under 10,000 seeming like a fair middle ground, so I will use the more pessimistic Pokomoke number in order to continue to favor beef in all of our estimates. One board foot of wood would weigh roughly 2 kilograms, which we will pessimistically estimate yields only 1 kilogram of paper. A typical density for printer paper is 20lbs (9.1kg) per ream (500 sheets). This would be equal to 55 sheets per kilogram. We have turned each square meter of forest into 1.8 kilograms of paper, so this would be 100 sheets of paper per square meter.

Out of that same 130 square meters deforested for beef production we could typically harvest roughly 13000 sheets of paper. Each booklet I hand out contains the equivalent of 16 sheets of paper, so even if out of every 100 booklets passed out, only one person reduces their consumption of beef by a mere 1 part in 8, our forests will still have come out on top.

I have reached this conclusion making every estimate along the way as beneficial to the pro-beef conclusion as could be reasonably argued. I have even left out important considerations in favor of printing booklets. Booklets are printed on lighter paper than printer paper, paper is predominantly made out of otherwise unusable wood scraps and recycled paper bits with only a fraction coming from newly harvested wood, and land used for logging is replanted once logging is completed. We have ignored land demands for non-grazing cattle and deforestation from cattle that wasn't caused in neotropical regions. No matter how I look at the problem, I am forced to come to the conclusion that leafleting for Vegan Outreach is ultimately beneficial in preventing deforestation as well.

Methodological Shortcomings

One aspect the methodology I have used cannot take into account is the motive for the deforestation. It is entirely possible that cattle farmers are merely taking advantage of land opened up by the logging industry, or that timber harvesters are merely collecting wood off of land that is going to be opened up for grazing in any case. Additionally I have treated world beef as if it is a single commodity, all bearing equally in any deforestation it may have caused, when in reality there is a huge variety in impact attributable to any given producer. The numbers used have been averaged and speak well to the average consumer, ignorant of the details in their food choices, who is being leafleted.

Once again, I would like to emphasize that I am not trying to promote veganism for environmental reasons, but I feel this example speaks well as to why the free distribution of information on paper nearly always outweighs any potential environmental cost.

Why Vegan?

Answering questions regarding why we ought to care about anything can be quite difficult. From the perspective of our universe as a whole the intentions of a few self aware lumps of water and carbon, inhabiting a single pale blue dot, orbiting one of hundreds of billions of stars, in just one of billions more galaxies, couldn't be more trivial. However, to us, the inhabitants of that pale blue dot, those intentions determine our very existence.

A great deal can be gleaned about why we act the way we do from evolution by natural selection. In a large portion of social encounters in which we can expect a large number of future interactions with another individual, the strategy that will yield the best expected outcome for ourselves is a tit-for-tat strategy, which means we act generously in our first encounter with the individual and then in all future encounters act toward them the same way they acted toward us in our previous encounter. Members of past populations who happened to possess genes predisposing them to using this strategy were more likely to pass on their genes to future generations.

While evolution can do an excellent job of explaining why we act in the ways we do, it has nothing to say about the way we ought to act. On some occasions our own interests will come at odds with what is most likely to propagate our genes. Maxing another character in WoW is unlikely to improve your chances of reproduction, yet people continue to attempt this task by the millions.

Many people choose to act in whatever way they feel is most in their own self-interest. Often times self-interest will still include some cooperation, but the ultimate goal is still the most personal benefit. As an individual making a personal decision for oneself, this decision is quite understandable, but as a conclusion on how we ought to act, it seems to place an unjustifiably high importance on solipsism. For each of us, our own interests are what is important. We also have every reason to believe that for everyone around us, their own interests are held in that same high regard. If we ignore the solipsism for a moment, the decision that would be of the most combined importance between all lumps of water and carbon would be to act in whatever way we could to maximize the fulfillment of interests.

Humans are by no means the only species with interests. If you have ever seen a baby pig squealing and writhing as its tail is being docked, you would say without doubt there is an animal expressing a strong interest. Similarly, the pig likely has a similar interest, that it is not yet aware of, in not suffering the medical consequences of leaving the tail undocked in factory farming conditions.

If we are to live up to our goal of acting to maximize the fulfillment of interests, then this cannot include only the human species. In the case of non-human animals our efforts can often go much farther than they would with humans. For less than a cent donated, Vegan Outreach estimates they are able to save a life. Compare that with the roughly $100 it would cost to save a human life in some of the poorest countries. This is still a tiny amount when compared to the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars many people expect in medical care in first world countries.

Many humans still suffer a great deal of pain which could be treated, but in comparison to the lifetimes of confinement and often torturous cruelty most non-human animals endure in today's factory farming conditions, this human suffering is a walk in the park. When combined with the relative simplicity of merely changing our diet, veganism clearly becomes an ethical imperative.

If you have not yet read the Why Skeptic question to our blog, I recommend doing that now as well.