Cognitive biases and animal welfare (with Leah Edgerton)

1. Balance Emotion with Reason

Use evidence-based frameworks to address emotionally charged problems like animal suffering, preventing emotional overwhelm from debilitating effective action and enabling a clearer approach to problem-solving.

2. Minimize Reaction to Pain

When experiencing pain, focus on minimizing emotional resistance, upset, or negative reactions (the ‘second arrow’) to prevent exacerbating the subjective experience of suffering.

3. Cultivate Reactive Control to Pain

Develop the ability to separate the physical sensation of pain from the emotional reaction to it, allowing for a conscious choice in how to respond rather than an automatic, suffering-inducing reaction.

4. Avoid Victim Identity

While acknowledging challenges, avoid adopting a ‘victim mentality’ or over-identifying with identities that cause harm or marginalization, as this can psychologically impair one’s ability to make the best of a situation and pursue personal interests.

5. Use Evidence for Advocacy

When trying to help animals, apply evidence and reason to identify the most effective interventions, considering a broad range of philosophical views (animal rights vs. welfare).

6. Prioritize Impact in Advocacy

Focus efforts on helping animals that can be assisted most effectively with available time and money, such as farmed animals due to their high numbers and known effective interventions.

7. Consider Long-Term Impact

When evaluating interventions, look beyond short-term gains (e.g., small welfare improvements) and consider potential negative long-term returns, favoring transformational approaches (e.g., legal personhood, anti-speciesism advocacy) for greater societal change.

8. Build Sustainable Movements

Invest in developing strong organizational culture, reducing turnover, and instilling good norms (e.g., open science, impact assessment, DEI) to ensure the long-term effectiveness and sustainability of advocacy movements.

9. DEI for Effectiveness

Recognize that issues like sexual harassment or discrimination significantly impair organizational effectiveness, cause high turnover, and lead to advocates leaving the movement; therefore, implement DEI standards to maintain a healthy and effective movement.

10. Ensure Fair Hiring

To maximize effectiveness, ensure organizations can hire and retain the best talent by actively combating discrimination within the movement that might exclude valuable individuals from the talent pool.

11. Promote Inclusive Advocacy

Avoid creating an exclusive animal advocacy movement where only vegans are accepted or valued, encouraging diverse levels of participation and effort towards reducing animal suffering.

12. Integrate Plant-Based Alternatives

Actively try and incorporate affordable, tasty plant-based alternatives into your diet, experimenting with recipes to find suitable options and gradually reduce animal product consumption.

13. Reduce Fish Consumption

Minimize or eliminate fish consumption, especially farmed carnivorous fish, as their production involves the suffering and death of many smaller feeder fish, leading to a higher overall animal impact.

14. Avoid Fish & Chicken

Prioritize avoiding farmed fish and chicken products (including egg-laying hens) due to their generally lower welfare conditions and higher individual animal impact per calorie.

15. Prioritize Larger Animals

If unable to go fully vegan, consider consuming products from larger animals (e.g., cows) over smaller ones (e.g., chickens, fish) to reduce the number of individual animal lives impacted per calorie.

16. Consider Less Common Animals

If consuming animal products, opt for less commonly consumed animals (e.g., bison, water buffalo, ducks) as they are less likely to be factory-farmed and may experience better welfare conditions.

17. Optimize Pain Environment

Adapt your living and working environment (e.g., ergonomic furniture) to reduce daily reminders and physical triggers of chronic pain, helping to minimize its presence in daily awareness.

18. Engage in Flow States

Utilize activities that induce a ‘flow state’ (e.g., music practice, meditation) to become deeply engaged and temporarily unaware of chronic pain, providing mental relief.

19. Use Mindfulness for Pain

Practice meditation or mindfulness to increase bodily awareness, which can help identify specific triggers or activities that worsen or improve chronic pain, leading to better management strategies.

20. Flexible Pain Mindset

Understand that even without a definitive diagnosis or cure, the brain can adapt to live a worthwhile life with chronic pain, and improving one’s relationship with the pain can surprisingly lead to a better subjective experience.

21. Connect Animal & Human Suffering

When advocating for animal welfare, highlight the interconnectedness with human suffering, climate change, environmental pollution, and social problems (e.g., poor worker conditions, environmental racism) to broaden appeal and understanding.

22. Broaden Advocacy Engagement

Recognize that involvement in animal advocacy doesn’t require specific personality types or participation in traditional protests; it’s a moral and philosophical question open to diverse approaches.

23. Educate on Farm Practices

Inform people that animal suffering in factory farms is not due to isolated abuse but is inherent to standard, institutionalized practices in breeding, living conditions, and slaughter, challenging the belief that their purchased products are from ‘better’ farms.

24. Reduce Factory Farm Consumption

Encourage reducing or eliminating consumption of factory-farmed animal products to remove the need for self-justification and open the door for more nuanced societal conversations about human-animal relationships.

25. Address Cognitive Dissonance

Understand that people rationalize behaviors that conflict with their moral values; effective advocacy should aim to reduce the need for such rationalizations by offering viable, ethical alternatives.

26. Recognize Similarity Bias

Be aware of the human bias to treat beings more fairly the more similar they look to us, and consciously challenge this tendency to extend moral consideration more broadly.

27. Challenge Edibility Bias

Be aware that perceiving an animal as edible can subconsciously lower its moral status and perceived capacity for suffering, and actively challenge this bias when considering animal welfare.

28. Avoid Moral Halo Effect

Do not assume that strong moral engagement in one area (e.g., animal welfare) automatically translates to ethical behavior or values in other areas (e.g., treatment of employees); maintain vigilance across all ethical domains.

29. Pursue Interests Despite Challenges

Acknowledge and address specific challenges related to chronic pain or disability at a concrete level, but continue to pursue personal interests and goals regardless of these difficulties.

30. Balance Discourse & Inclusion

In truth-seeking and advocacy, foster open discourse to explore ideas and question the status quo, while also actively ensuring that all relevant stakeholders and diverse perspectives are included at the table.