“Veganuary started in the UK in 2014, and I noted the production of broilers per person in the UK in January increased 4.27 times as fast from 2014 to 2024 as from 1994 to 2013.” 

A message to One Step:

I am currently doing a research fellowship ....

We are currently evaluating the promise of a new organisation running Veganuary campaigns. However, I suspect one explicitly focussed on decreasing the consumption of poultry birds may be more cost-effective. Do you know the cost-effectiveness of One Step for Animals in terms of kg of chicken consumption reduced per $?

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From our reply:

Tl;dr: One Step’s “About” page is the most important bit I have to offer.

I’ve worked for and with quite a few animal advocacy organizations in the past 35 years. (I’ve also been on the evaluative side at VegFund.) Having seen (and written) answers these groups have given to questions like yours (e.g., “Our surveys show 5 animals saved for every $100!”) and their budgets, factory farming should have ended and everyone should now be vegan. I’m not casting aspersions; as mentioned here, I did these projections back in the 90s. 

Yet as you know, the average person in the US and globally is eating as many factory-farmed animals as ever before. There is vastly more suffering on factory farms today than 10, 20, 30 years ago. Despite all the claims over the course of decades, the world has never been worse for non-human animals.

Also over the past 35 years, I have read arguments why “Our advocacy is different this time.” But the facts above should leave us more than skeptical about any claims of any “reduction per $.” 

For details on why there is more suffering despite decades of advocacy, please see Meat Reduction Hurts Animals and Good-Faith Advocacy Can Cause More Suffering.

When starting One Step for Animals, our number one priority was to avoid advocacy that, on net, actually causes more suffering. Making sure our advocacy was not causing more suffering was the focus of our previous survey. But of course, we can’t really trust those survey results, given response bias and the fact that any meaningful measure would have to be done over a significant amount of time.

Based on our experience and the lessons we have learned over the past 35 years, not causing harm on net is the only honest claim demand-side advocacy can make. (Welfare reforms like cage-free campaigns are different, but even there, history has shown many “victories” that didn’t actually translate to fewer animals in cages. Work on the supply-side – i.e., plant-based and cultivated animal products – has also not come close to fulfilling the projections and promises.) 

I would be happy to discuss any aspect of this with you further. But One Step won’t make any claims other than “do no harm.” Claims of efficacy simply do not match with reality. Even if not consciously dishonest, these claims are misleading to the point of being actively harmful to animals.

The person I trust most regarding animal suffering is Lewis Bollard at Open Philanthropy Project. He and I don’t agree on everything, but he is not trying to sell a certain story, promote his group or philosophy, or solicit support. He takes suffering very seriously. In addition to being extremely scrupulous and rigorous in evaluations, he constantly monitors himself for self-delusion.


From their reply:
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I agree [more suffering despite advocacy] is a concern. Veganuary started in the UK in 2014, and I noted the production of broilers per person in the UK in January increased 4.27 times as fast from 2014 to 2024 as from 1994 to 2013.

Follow-up

Learn more about how you can help animals efficiently 

If you would like to support work driven by these facts, please click here.

​The views expressed here are my own, not those of my employers. Thanks to Matt Ball for inviting me to write something on the trade-offs between animal welfare and greenhouse gas emissions of replacing chicken meat, and feedback on the draft.

I find myself eating less and less meat. I have a question: if we all stop eating meat or drastically reduce our intake, what happens to the animals? What happens to the farmers. I'm genuinely interested as to the long-term strategy? 


Thanks so very much for contacting One Step for Animals and for asking these questions in good faith.

The direct answer to your question is that animals are bred in response to consumer demand. Unless everyone stopped eating animals all at once, the market signals will determine how many animals exist at any point in the future. Chickens raised for meat don’t even live two months, so the market can respond to increases and decreases in demand very quickly.

A more nuanced question concerns the people who are involved in breeding, raising, and slaughtering animals for meat.  

It is probably best to hear directly from people who have changed away from raising chickens, which you can do here.

That’s probably enough; below is just additional information. 

(If you’d like to hear more about what it is like to be a “chicken grower,” here is a video about the industry from someone who clearly has no sympathy for chickens themselves.)

You ask specifically about the “long-term strategy.” The historical record is a good guide here.

When our grandparents were alive, more than half of the population in the United States were involved in food production. Today, it is less than two percent. In 1872, a U.S. farmer fed about four other people. Today, the average farmer feeds more than 150 people.

So agriculture has changed an incredible amount as technology has advanced and what people eat has changed. It is sure to continue to change in the future.

Finally: Most of the farmed land in the United States is currently used to grow soy and corn to feed to chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cattle. Those crops have become global commodities that, like factory-farmed chickens, are produced with razor-thin profit margins. Growing food for direct human consumption is more profitable, as discussed here, along with some correct commentary on land that can’t be used to grow crops. Here is more on grazing cattle on marginal lands, although this is not One Step for Animals’ focus. We are purely trying to reduce the suffering in the world. 

Related
Why Not Fish?
What About Insects?

Why does One Step focus on chickens?

From The Body: A Guide for Occupants:

Foodborne illness is America’s secret epidemic. Every year three thousand people, the equivalent of a small town, die of food poisoning in the United States, and around 130,000 are hospitalized. 

An investigation by the Food and Drug Administration in 2016 found that 84 percent of chicken breasts contained intestinal E. coli. According to a USDA study, about a quarter of all chicken pieces sold in stores are contaminated with salmonella. 

This Atlantic article not only makes the case for plant-based meat but for smarter real-world-based advocacy like One Step's harm-reduction efforts.

"For the past 50 years, Americans have responded to the case against eating animals mostly by eating more animals.

​"They have heard again and again about the moral and ecological costs of eating meat—from philosophers like Peter Singer and polemicists like Jonathan Safran Foer; from viral documentary footage of slaughterhouses and tortured poultry; from activist organizations like PETA and scientific reports on the fossil-fuel cost of producing a medallion of beef.
"The collective sum of all these books and films and eco–guilt trips has made little difference. The share of Americans who call themselves vegan or vegetarian hasn’t increased in the past 20 years. In the 1970s, the typical American ate about 120 pounds of meat each year. In the 1990s, she ate about 130 pounds annually. Today, she eats more than 140 pounds a year, or about 2.5 pounds of meat every week—a record high, according to government estimates.
…

"The case against eating meat is a case for the mass renunciation of real human pleasure. (Yes, this is coming from someone who delights in little more than a well-cooked ribeye.) Like the case for reducing our carbon footprint, the vegan argument requires that the large majority of people sacrifice their lifestyle for outcomes that are often invisible to them as individuals. A cultural or moral revolution designed around the elimination of pleasurable options and the restriction of individual human choice is a hard sell, particularly in a country like the U.S., where materialist choice has been elevated to a kind of civic religion."

We ran a survey via Survey Monkey asking this question:

If One Step's message has ever influenced you or someone you know, what is your (or their) current consumption of the following products?

​Here are the results, with each number being the percentage of respondents who gave each answer (e.g., 71% said that they now eat much less or no red meat, 51% saying they eat many more plant-based meals, etc.)::