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I’ve been deeply involved in the animal rights/vegan movement for about twenty years now. You’d think that in all this time, I would have reached some conclusions and know a thing or two.

Well… less than you or I might expect, I guess…

In fact, lately I’ve been having lots of new insights, while old ideas have been challenged or discarded. For one thing, this is because I’ve spent a lot of time writing and thinking for my blogposts and upcoming book. For another, I’ve been influenced by the philosophy of – and many people within – the Effective Altruism movement, as well as people from Animal Charity Evaluators, Faunalytics, and even people from the DxE (Direct Action Everywhere) movement.

So, here are some of the things that I’ve concluded (preliminarily, of course) or started to think about in recent times…

1. Welfare and suffering are important

Like many animal rights people, it used to be all about rights for me. Today, I believe rights are an abstraction and a means to an end, useful mainly in so far as they can help prevent beings from coming to harm. Somewhere along the way, welfare became a dirty word in our movement, but it shouldn’t be.

2. Chickens and fishes are the meat of the matter

By far, the biggest victims of our consumption habits are chickens and fishes. They are small animals; so, we eat a lot of them, and they suffer terribly. They deserve an important part of our resources.

3. Beyond vegan 1: wild animal suffering should be part of our focus

Animals are not just mistreated and killed by humans: many more animals suffer because of hunger, cold, predation, parasites and disease in nature. If we care about animals, we should care about wild animals too, and be open minded about what we can or will be able to do for them in the future. (see The extremely inconvenient truth of wild animal suffering)

4. Beyond vegan 2: there’s more to suffering than human and non-human animals

Still farther out: thanks to Effective Altruism, I’ve started to consider the terrible possibility of artificial sentience (yes) in the future. If we start thinking and acting about it in time, maybe we can prevent astronomical suffering in future centuries. After speciesism, there is… substratism: it’ doesn’t matter if you’re carbon based or not. What matters is sentience.

5. There are things much more important than being vegan

Yes, of course, we have an impact via what we put into our mouths. And by all means, be vegan. But being a well spoken and approachable advocate for animals may be much more important. (see The fetish of being vegan)

6. Money is one of our most crucial resources

We’re all very vegan, but how much do we give? We talk about veganism, but if we donate, do we talk about it to encourage other people to donate? With our money, we can have a much bigger impact than with our own consumption. And earning money to sponsor other advocates can be a very efficient way of meta-advocacy. (see Time to donate and Money Money Money in our Movement)

7. The vegan movement isn’t necessarily the main player anymore

It used to be just us, the vegan movement, fighting for the animals. But now, less directly, there is the great impact of the commercial sector: the Impossible Foods and the Hampton Creeks and the Beyond Meats… on their way to disrupt an entire industry and creating incredible change. (see What if the real push towards a vegan world did not come from vegans?)



8. Technology and GMOs to the rescue

Technological revolutions may lead to moral revolutions. We’ve already seen some really promising alternatives to animal products, but there is much more to come. One aspect I particularly changed my mind about is GMOs. I was against them, because I had never really examined the topic and was blindly accepting what my peers thought and chanted about it. Thanks to some friends, and to vegangmo.com, I’ve mostly changed my mind about them, and I can now see how they could be very beneficial in preventing animal suffering. “Natural” doesn’t really matter all that much. (see What about GMO’s and hi-tech animal food alternatives)

9. We should invest more in research

Because so many things are so uncertain, and there are constant opportunities to find out new things, we need to invest enough resources in research and see what actually works. We have to do this without dogma, open to whatever results that we may find. Which brings me to my last point…

10. Open mindedness is even more important than I thought

Looking at my list, seeing how often and in which important domains I have needed to update myself, I have to conclude that keeping an open mind is even more important than I thought. Conversely, I’m really allergic to dogma. While open mindedness and slow opinion are about always looking forward to learning new things and improving, dogma prevents one from learning and improving – which are very important when there is so much at stake.

All these open ended questions. This constant evolution, these doubts and these uncertainties should not paralyse us, however. There are several promising theories, strategies and tactics. We’re in this for the long haul, and we can slow down a bit to test them and research them, and then, with the best evidence we can find, update ourselves and give more attention to one strategy or another.

Being vegan means to stop eating animal products; it doesn’t mean to stop thinking.