[Linkpost] “Are we wrong to stop factory farms?” by Ben Stevenson

This is a link post. I'm sharing an article by Rose Patterson from Animal Rising (AR), which responds to an EA criticism of AR's campaigns to block new factory farms in the UK. When we started our Communities Against Factory Farming campaign to stop every new factory farm from being built, we thought it would be a crowd-pleaser! Who in the animal movement could argue that this could actually be a bad thing? However, we’ve heard it repeatedly over the past year, particularly coming from some in the Effective Altruist community: “The production will just move to other countries, where conditions are even worse.” This argument reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how social movements work and what we’re actually trying to achieve. Let me explain why. Rose goes on to cover several counter-arguments: that some lives will be "saved" before production elsewhere scales up, that campaigns to block new factory farms can be coupled with campaigns to prohibit low welfare imports, and that the campaigns help to build the animal movement and set an important precedent. I think that the piece is discussing an important criticism. As context, here's a version of the argument from Martin Gould at Open Philanthropy: [...] --- First published: November 4th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Lx9NEjTvvhQkaQR8e/are-we-wrong-to-stop-factory-farms Linkpost URL:https://animalrising.substack.com/p/could-stopping-new-factory-farms --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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