I’d propose an extension: generate offsets by failing to be an animal farmer. Even at like a 10:1 ratio, it should be easy to justify suffering of an arbitrary number of animals, since there will be orders of magnitude of animals that don’t even exist, and can’t suffer. Or even allow self-offsets. Say you torture and kill 1000 pigs a month—you COULD have tortured and killed orders of magnitude more than that, so you’re on net improving the welfare of the potential universe of animals.
We have indeed considered this strategy, but we found it was in fact more cost effective to torture & kill >1000 pigs given rat-heroin offsets.
In fact, with the knowledge advantage that activists have in factory farming, they can probably be MORE PROFITABLE at running their own farms than they can by selling the offsets. And these profits can be reinvested in more farming activities, now that we’ve shown them to be morally-positive (aka: earning to give, in addition to direct action).
This would be correct if we were long-termists, but we in fact find we have fairly steep time discount curves. There will be a startup period, where we just focus on factory farming optimization, but due to security concerns we are unable to release how long that period will be at this time.
We have indeed considered this strategy, but we found it was in fact more cost effective to torture & kill >1000 pigs given rat-heroin offsets.
This would be correct if we were long-termists, but we in fact find we have fairly steep time discount curves. There will be a startup period, where we just focus on factory farming optimization, but due to security concerns we are unable to release how long that period will be at this time.