So far we’ve reviewed what you can do to help out your fellow human beings, and also what you can do to help nonhuman animals. If you already feel strongly about one or the other, then your way forward is pretty clear, as there are excellent charities you can donate to (for example, the Against Malaria Foundation and the Humane League, respectively). If you’re an extreme speciesist, for example, then just donate to the most effective human causes. The rest of this chapter is for people like me who believe that animals should get some moral consideration.
But if you’re an optimizer, you’ll want to know which of these causes are better. If what we really care about is increasing good feelings and decreasing bad feelings for all entities that are capable of feeling, then we want to know whether we should donate our money to help humans or animals. Even if humans can suffer more than animals, it might be more efficient to focus on helping animals if it’s cheaper to do so.
Let’s start by looking at lives saved. One of the most effective charities for reducing animal suffering is the Humane League. The website Animal Charity Evaluators has a report on this organization and estimates that a donation of $5,000 saves the lives of 35,000 animals, mostly chickens.1
This is a ballpark estimate, but it can help you decide where you want to put your efforts. Let’s use the estimate that effective charities can save a human life for $5,000.2 That’s thirty-five thousand times more expensive than sparing an animal. Do you think that the average fish or chicken is worth more or less than one 35,000th of a human? Or, another way to think of it is: Would you rather save 35,000 animals or one human? For the most effective charities we have, the costs are about the same. If you choose one human, then you might want to invest in relieving human suffering. If you chose 35,000 animals, then you might want to invest your charitable donation in an effective animal welfare organization.
But, as we’ve seen, saving lives is a bit of a crude measure—what’s better is looking at the number of years of life saved. Specifically, DALYs averted for humans, and the equivalent of years of human life saved for animals.
One of the most effective charities for saving human life is the Against Malaria Foundation. Estimates suggest that for $78, they can save one healthy year of human life.3
What is an animal life saved? We’ll focus on chickens, because they are the main focus of animal welfare charities. Where saving a human life means adding years of life to a human, saving a chicken means they are not raised at all: factory-farmed chicken lives are so bad that we consider them better off to never have lived. Chickens live about 0.1151 years before slaughter (42 days).4 Saving 7,000 chickens means preventing 805.7 years of chicken existence. This existence is worse than nonexistence; we assume that each year of chicken existence is 0.25 times as bad as going from a healthy human life to nonexistence. Then we multiply by the suffering discount rate of 0.0038, leading to the conclusion that $1000 donated to the Human League means stopping the moral equivalent of 0.765 human life years ceasing to exist. So we can estimate that the Humane League saves (the animal equivalent of) 1 year of human life for the cost of $1306.50, and the Against Malaria Foundation can do the same for $78.
Now we’re talking! We have, in U.S. dollars, how much it costs to avert one human life-year’s worth of suffering. Using the most effective charities we have, you reduce almost 20 times as much suffering per dollar spent fighting malaria than fighting factory farms
There is a side benefit to donating money that discourages people from eating so much meat—not only is it better for animal welfare, but it’s better for the environment. Raising animals, especially cows, uses up a lot of resources. Much of the plant-based food we grow is used to feed animals, not human beings directly. So reducing meat is a double-win.
In contrast, helping more humans stay alive is great for them, but has unfortunate side effects: more humans means more environmental destruction, and more eating of meat. When you save a human life, more animals will die because that human will continue to eat meat. This reduces the good done by saving a human life. By how much, though?
A Nigerian can be expected to eat 5.91 kilograms of meat every year, or about 1.8 animals. Let’s suppose that as a result of your donations, you help someone live twenty more years of life in Nigeria, where 97 percent of the population is at risk from malaria. This means that an expected thirty-six more animals will die because of your intervention.5 This is assuming that some other person would not take their place if they died. If you’re saving an American life, then after twenty years 600 more animals would be expected to die, but saving American lives is so expensive we’re not considering that. So in terms of animal welfare, if you think a human life is (roughly) more than thirty-six times more valuable than animal life, then you’d want to invest in preventing malaria, rather than helping out with animal welfare. We should think that human life is more than thirty-six times more valuable than animal life if we go by the sentience discount rates.6
According to my calculations, in terms of doing the most good, you should help humans instead of nonhuman animals.