Nice write up! Henry Bergh was awesome. I highly recommend a biography on him called "A Traitor to His Species". 

It's a treasure trove of fascinating anecdotes about early animal rights advocacy. It's been a minute since I read it, but these parts stuck with me:

• Bergh didn't start this work until he was like 52! Talk about a late bloomer. He spent the first 3/4 of his life drifting aimlessly about, dabbling in things but never making much of an impact or trying too hard at anything. That's great inspiration for anyone who has ever thought it's too late for them to make a change. 
• Bergh's first attempt at stirring up popular opinion in favor of animals was by arresting people who were importing live turtles in disturbing ways (turtles flipped on their back with fins tied up.) I would have guessed he'd go to bat for a cute and cuddly animal first. 
• The ASPCA once got a big donation from a guy who was dying and was terrified of being reincarnated as a draft horse. He'd worked intimately with draft horses and knew how bad their lives were, and I guess he felt guilty. The shocking conditions for draft horses were some of the saddest portrayals in the book. 
• A "sport" where dogs competed to see who could kill the most rats was very popular in late 1800's NYC. 
• At one point a method for euthanizing stray dogs involved rounding them up, putting them into a giant container, and lowering that container into the East River.
  
  
  
   

I think there is room for modeling multiple approaches to reducing unethical meat consumption, and one of them is the "80% is good enough" approach that I'm trying to practice. Big tent meat reduction?

Just in case it wasn't clear in my post, I am very interested in this approach as well! I applaud you for thinking along these lines. Every little bit helps. This Future Perfect article titled "the difference you make when you eat less meat" does a great job of showing how eating less meat can make a big difference in terms of animal welfare and climate concerns. 

I think basically all of veganism is just degrees of this harm reduction approach. Someone like Brian Tomasik might look at my supposedly vegan lifestyle and weep, seeing that I crunch springtails underfoot when I walk in my lawn, I buy some produce that was grown with pesticides, and I buy non-vegan products for my wife and other family members. 

If more people took your 80% approach there would be far fewer conscious animals tortured in tiny cages. Which would be a huge win. 

Done, thanks for the nudge. 

Excuse the delayed reply, but I wanted to make sure to say this comment made me happy! 

While a running physique might perpetuate a frail stereotype to the untrained eye, I know that y'all are actually packing a very strong punch in a smaller package :) 

'be fitter than almost every meat eater they know.'

Love this. Great workout motivation. 

Thanks for the interesting comment and dialogue! 

This part stood out to me, because I had the opposite reaction:

When meat eaters are trolling vegans, they sometimes justify their meat consumption by saying "meat is delicious!" On reflection, I actually do think that's the explanation for why I continue to eat it - food's one of the few hedonic pleasures I can access regularly in my otherwise spartan and sober lifestyle, I hate cooking, and it's easy to make meat taste delicious while using it as the primary protein source in a healthy, balanced diet.

I used to love eating meat. When I went vegan I realized I could get just as much satisfaction from any protein rich, umami-filled, sauce covered or well seasoned food. My pet theory is that what everyone mostly likes when they eat animals is the added sauces and seasonings, not the meat. Bland, unseasoned chicken breast is terrible. 

But like I said in my post, I don't have a refined palate, so maybe to those with better taste buds meat really is that delightful. 

This is great, thanks for sharing. The jacked influencer memeplex is soooo focused on animal protein, it can be really hard to step out of that sphere of influence.

I was also highly sensitive to the reports I read from people who stopped being vegan because it didn't work for them. There's a good lesson in there about making sure to try things for myself in the real world instead of reading endless reports and then simply assuming I'd have a certain outcome. 

I look forward to reading your post about eating more plants! 

 

I had the same thought. I enjoyed this, and I super appreciate the author writing it all up! Fascinating stuff. But it sort of felt like a home inspector telling me, “So your foundation is definitely going to crack and cause your house to fall into a sinkhole. I might tell you how to fix that in a few weeks. In the meantime, here’s an incredibly detailed analysis showing your roof is in good shape!”

That's a good point, thanks 

The likelihood of having a strong rebound effect when stopping THC use seems really bad, thanks for pointing it out.  There's definitely a lot to explore in this area. 

Can you explain more about what you mean when you say people are wrong about their subjective experience? To me, what you feel in your internal world simulation is what matters, whether or not time is objectively speeding up or down. 

And when referring to people, do you only mean humans? Seems like animals can have totally different subjective experiences of time that we should take into consideration when thinking about harms being done to them. 

I am basing that on an article linked to in the above Applied Divinity Studies blog post called The Subjective Experience of Time: Welfare Implications, where the author states: 

"convergent evidence from their neurology, behavior, and the temporal resolution of their senses indicates songbirds and honeybees experience 2-10 times as many subjective moments per objective unit of time as humans."