Why You Might Have Maximum Impact Helping Animals
Summary:
Dustin Crummett, Founder of The Insect Institute, recently spoke at our Conference in London. He discusses the ethical considerations of animal welfare from a Christian perspective, biblical views on animals, the practical ways Christians can engage in animal advocacy, and the ethical dilemmas between human and animal welfare.
A Biblical View of Animals
Dustin begins by addressing how Scripture presents animals as valuable to God. He highlights that God’s care extends to every creature, no matter how small:
“The birds of the air, the lilies of the field, he cares about those tiny, useless creatures... The value of animals to God is clearly demonstrated in scripture, because God cares about them”
He stresses that while humans are given dominion over creation, this authority comes with the responsibility of stewardship, not exploitation. As Dustin puts it:
“Dominion doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want... It means you’re called to steward it"
The Bird in the Cage: A Thought Experiment
Dustin introduces a thought experiment to frame the dilemma of animal cruelty. He asks us to consider a bird trapped in a cage for a month. Freeing the bird would cost just one penny, but the decision often feels difficult due to competing needs:
"If I told you, 'You could free the bird for just one penny,' most people would agree that they should. It’s not a hard call"
This simple scenario, which reflects the economic reality, highlights how easily we can alleviate suffering. It also illustrates how we often fail to act on a larger scale when it comes to supporting animal welfare campaigns. Dustin links this to the Humane League's efforts to end battery cage farming:
"You can free millions of chickens, right now, from battery cages, and it would cost you a few dollars a month to support the campaign"
Moral Trade-Offs: Prioritising Human and Animal Welfare
One of the most challenging ethical questions in animal welfare is balancing the needs of humans and animals. Given the widespread human suffering in the world, many people struggle with whether animal welfare should be a top priority. Dustin acknowledges this, but argues that the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive:
"We don’t want to just be about animals. We want to be clear that people’s needs matter too. But the trade-off in these things is real"
He emphasises that while resources are finite, Christians can and should address both human and animal welfare:
"There’s always going to be a trade-off. But I think we can help both humans and animals"
Animal Welfare In A Modern Context
The conversation then turns to veganism, with Dustin acknowledging the growing movement toward plant-based diets as a response to animal suffering. However, he points out that veganism, while a personal choice, might not be the most effective strategy for widespread change:
"You could be vegan and it’s a fine thing to do, but I think the bigger picture is that we should focus on laws and policies that change the system, not just individuals"
Dustin notes that while early Christians had a different relationship with animals, the modern industrial farming system presents new ethical challenges. The Bible doesn't mandate veganism, but it does call for responsible stewardship of creation:
"The circumstances that most of us live in are quite different from the circumstances of the people in the Bible"
Practical Advice: How Can Christians Make a Difference?
Dustin offers practical advice for Christians looking to make a tangible impact on animal welfare. He suggests engaging in policy work, noting that even small contributions could make a significant difference:
“You might try to work in policy, as a legislative staffer or a civil servant. It might seem like a tiny thing, but that one additional person working for animal welfare could make a huge difference”
He also highlights the importance of supporting animal welfare organisations financially, emphasising that compared to other problems, animal welfare remains neglected:
“Animal welfare is comparatively under-resourced compared to a lot of other things that people talk about at this conference"
Additionally, Dustin addresses neglected areas within animal welfare, especially the treatment of less charismatic species like insects. These creatures often suffer in silence, without much attention:
"There's a huge area of animal welfare that is neglected: insects, crickets…animals that most people don't even think about"
Closing Thoughts
Dustin concludes the session by reminding Christians that their faith calls them to care for all of God’s creation, including animals. The trade-offs may be difficult, but the biblical mandate remains clear: we are called to be good stewards of creation. As Dustin notes:
“God gave us dominion, but it’s dominion that comes with a responsibility to care, to steward his creation"
To summarise:
Biblical stewardship: We are called to care for all of creation, including animals, and to exercise dominion with responsibility, not exploitation.
Practical action: Engaging in policy, checking out animal welfare organisations such as Animal Policy Careers, and advocating for systemic change are key ways to make a meaningful impact.
Balancing human and animal welfare: While it’s important to address human needs, we are also obligated to alleviate animal suffering and consider both human and animal welfare.
Veganism is one choice, but not the only one: While veganism is a valid choice, systemic changes in agriculture might have a broader, long-lasting impact.
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Dominic 00:00:00 Welcome everyone to the talk ‘Why We Might Have Maximum Impact by Helping Animals?’. It’s the kind of talk that you won't get at many other conferences and I think it's really a massive privilege that Dustin is here to do it with us. I talked to a hero of mine this morning, the hero is Alex as he does so many things so well, and he said, well, Dustin just does everything that I do just better so he's like hero squared, but I think we we've been giving everything from above and
Dominic 00:01:48 We're now passing this on and we are very grateful for this. Dustin is a Philosopher and a Nonprofit Director. He's a good Philosopher, there was recently high-profile case of a Philosopher converting to Christianity and I can say that your paper was at least somewhat instrumental in that whole process. So he has worked on different things in Applied Ethics, in Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion. He's a co-author of Applied Ethics and his current work includes
Dominic 00:02:23 Improving animal welfare from the angle of addressing challenges accompanying insect farming. He recently launched the Insect Institute, a pioneer nonprofit in this space. SSo while Dustin speaks viewers can submit questions via Slido and and if you don't have the Slido link you can check it on SwapCard or the YouTube description for a link and please upvote your favorite questions so we can prioritize your favourite questions. So the floor is yours, thanks.
Dustin 00:03:02 Great. There are a lot of animals suffering in the world, many of them at the hands of human beings, so there are tens of billions of land animals that live in factory farms every year. If you think about aquatic animals and fish, shrimp and insects then there are many, many trillions of animals industrially farmed every year. I won't show you a bunch of distressing pictures of farms or whatever - you can look them up yourself, if you would like, but the conditions are quite bad.
Dustin 00:03:53 There are of course far more animals suffering out in the wild but we'll focus mostly on farmed animals right now. So the first thing I want to argue is that you should think that this is bad. All this animal suffering is bad, okay, but you could argue that lots of things are bad. What JD asked me to address was why you might have maximum impact by helping animals and so that this is a bad thing doesn't immediately mean that it's what you should focus on, because there may be other things that would have more impact for us to focus on right now. So we need somehow to
Dustin 00:04:36 Compare things you could do to help animals versus other things you can do that would be good, and you'll need to think about the scale of the problem. Are there useful things that you can do? Are other people going to do the useful things if you don't do them? Things like this. Because we're trying to make this comparison you might think a very important question is ‘How should Christians approach the interests of humans versus the interests of animals?’
Dustin 00:05:03 You might think Christians should think that humans, in some sense, are more important. The second thing I want to argue is that that actually is not that important of a question because we might agree that human interests are more important, but there might be other factors that are relevant to the decision besides that. So by way of analogy, sometimes if you tell people that they should donate to Global
Dustin 00:05:36 Health charities they might say “Oh aren't your strongest obligations to the people in your own community?” You might think that's really important and spend a lot of time figuring out whether your strongest obligations are people in your own Community but then maybe that's not that important because you might be able to do a lot more good for people who are not in your community and so even if you have stronger obligations to your own community
Dustin 00:06:01 The fact that you can do a lot more good for people not in your own Community might outweigh that right. I am going to argue basically, that the scale of neglectedness of animal suffering, and the fact that there aren't that many resources going into it, and not that many people working on it etc. means that you should seriously consider prioritising it. Your own career, your own donations etc. I won't try to argue that every one of you should do that - there are other things you need
Dustin 00:06:37 To think about. If you're thinking about your career, you need to think about your own questions of personal fit, your own skill set, your own passions. I just want to argue that you should probably at the least consider it seriously. Right, so like I said, first of all I want to argue that animal suffering is a bad thing. I don't think you need any complicated, convoluted argument for that. The things that are done on
Dustin 00:07:14 Factory farms would be illegal animal cruelty if they were done outside of a farming context. In some cases they might be illegal if they were done outside and so I think that ordinary moral intuitions tell us that keeping animals in very tiny cages, performing very painful operations on them without anaesthetic, making them sit in their experiment…all these sorts of things seem pretty bad sometimes. I think people are worried that maybe you're not allowed to say that if you're a
Dustin 00:07:57 Christian or something because perhaps we’re supposed to think humans are very important - we can do whatever we want to animals. I want to argue that there are good biblical and theological arguments as well for saying that you shouldn't mistreat animals. People often start talking about this in the context of the Dominion Command in Genesis - God makes the humans in His image and he gives them dominion over all the fish of the sea, the birds of the air
Dustin 00:08:37 Every living thing that lives upon the Earth. Sometimes people think that this is an argument against caring about animal welfare but if you read the next sentence, God tells the humans to be vegans right after. The human dominion God gives is to every plant yielding seed, the face of all the Earth, every tree with seed and its fruit. We should have them for food . He then tells the other animals to be vegans as well, which is kind of interesting. We’re not
Dustin 00:09:14 focusing now on whether you should be a vegan. The point is it can't be that the Dominion Command means that you can do whatever you want to animals because immediately after the humans are told to be vegans. If you think about it for a minute, usually if God gives you authority over another individual, that doesn't mean that you can do whatever you want to them. You're supposed to use that authority to serve God, to benefit them.
Dustin 00:09:46 Parents have authority over children, government leaders have authority over the citizens of the nation. But that doesn't mean that they can do whatever they want to their subjects. This is a job, and a responsibility. I've argued in some of my academic work that that's probably the way that we should think about the kind of dominion that humans have, and it's not a license to do whatever we want. Rather, it's stewardship. Predation by humans and animals begins later, after the fall so humans
Dustin 00:10:24 Are given permission to eat meat in Genesis 9 after the flood. This is alongside the institution of capital punishment for murder. Eating life blood is still not allowed which is interesting anthropologically but God does give them permission to eat meat um but then when he makes the covenant with Noah, it's not just made with Noah, but with all flesh. God says “I'm establishing my covenant with you, and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you
Dustin 00:11:00 The birds, the domestic animals,every animal of the Earth with you,as many as came out of the Ark. I established my Covenant with you that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood. Never again shall there be a flood to destroy the Earth. This is the sign of the covenant I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you”. It goes on, so God is actually making a promise to the other animals,so this has to be something that it makes sense for God to
Dustin 00:11:33 Do. So the animals must have some kind of standing where it makes sense to make a promise to them. It makes sense to then think that you have to keep this promise that you made and there also are suggestions that things went wrong, and now we're in this period of predation. But there also suggestions in the end that predation goes away again and people think that there's something in the Bible about lions laying down with lambs but that's not in the Bible. I think they think that
Dustin 00:12:09 Because of a painting a couple years ago. There's something about wolves lying down. The wolf shall live with the lamb, the shepherd will lie down with the kid. So it seems like the original plan is not killing the animal. Then we have this messy period in the middle where humans are given permission to eat meat because of something to do
Dustin 00:12:43 With our current bad situation. Then you might wonder, “Okay does this apply to us?”, but again I'm not focusing on whether you should be a vegan, I'm just saying there's some sort of moral status that's being assigned to animals here and the fact that they're now eating each other and we're eating them somehow is a bad thing. It's a departure from the ideal and furthermore there are plenty of places
Dustin 00:13:14 that command humane treatment of animals in Proverbs. “The righteous know the needs of their animals”. So that's an explicit statement that you should take good care of your animals. There are various fans in the mosaic wall that seem like they're probably motivated by concern for humane treatment of animals. Later rabbis extracted this into a principle. The Hebrew name of which I will try to pronounce, but the
Dustin 00:13:50 Teaching here is that you shouldn't cause unnecessary suffering. The story where Jesus gets criticized for healing people on the Sabbath and he says, “Well, if one of you has a child or an ox that's fallen into a well, will you not immediately pull it out on the Sabbath?” The implicit thing is that it must be okay to do certain sorts of good things on the Sabbath. So why are they criticising this healing? It seems that the
Dustin 00:14:34 Teaching about pulling the animal out on the Sabbath is an animal welfare thing. The reason to pull it out right away is just it's probably unhappy because it's stuck in the ditch . Jesus takes it, sort of for granted, that you should help the animal even though it's on the Sabbath, he expects the Pharisees to
Dustin 00:15:08 Do the same. There were people in Ancient Judaism who didn't agree with that. For instance, the Kuman Community where the Dead Sea Scrolls come from. We have their community rule which are rules that you had to obey if you live in the community. They actually take the opposite stance - “No man shall pump an animal in its delivery on the sabbath day and if it falls into a pitch or pit or ditch he shall not be raised on the Sabbath”.
Dustin 00:15:38 So apparently there was some sort of discussion about this, and different people took different stances. Jesus takes the more animal friendly stance, and expects the people he's talking to, to do the same. He also really likes metaphors involving animals and the thing is they're metaphors, but the metaphors make sense, and they only make sense if you think that people should take care of their animals. “I am the Good Shepherd, the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the Sheep”.
Dustin 00:16:10 “I am the Good Shepherd I know my own and I know me just as the father knows me, and I know the father and I lay down my life”. This metaphor only makes sense if you think that shepherds take care of their sheep, in fact might be willing to to die to protect their sheep.
Dustin 00:16:40 “I am the good operator of a factory farm”, will not be a comforting metaphor. “I'm I'm going to maximise profit by putting you guys in tiny cages”... that wouldn't be a comforting metaphor. “Two Sparrows sold for a penny yet not one of them will fall to the ground and even the hairs of your head are all counted so do not be afraid, you're of more value than many sparrows”. So the argument here is, God cares about sparrows, and you're of more value than
Dustin 00:17:14 the sparrow so surely God cares about you too right. It is worth noting this is a common form of argument in ancient times.
Dustin 00:17:46 The point when Jesus makes the point, he says “Look, God cares about the animals, so surely he cares about you too”. The alternative form of the argument is God doesn't care about the animals, and they only exist for us. So surely God will take care of us.
Dustin 00:18:22 Elijah asked a Rabbi why God created tiny insects and worms in this world. He replied, “When human beings said he looks on the lower form of creation and says if I sustain these tiny useless creatures, how much more must I preserve human beings who are useful”. Again, it's a similar form of argument but it's importantly different in so far as the the way that Jesus
Dustin 00:18:54 Presents this, assumes that God does care. Whereas some of the alternative ways of making the same point have some sort of dispute or different tradition. This story is slightly cheating because it is translated by Richard B. It’s from a manuscript and we have no idea where it came from, but I'll say why I included it in a minute. Anyway, it happened that the Lord left the city with his
Dustin 00:19:29 Disciples over the mountains and they came to a mountain and the road that led up it was steep. There they found a man with an animal, but the animal had fallen because the man had loaded it too heavily and now he beat it, so it was bleeding. Jesus came to him and said “Man, why do you beat your animal, do you not see that it's too weak for its burden and do you not know that it suffers pains?” But the man answered and said, “What is that to you? I may beat it as much as I please since it is my property
Dustin 00:19:58 and I bought it for a sum of money. Ask those who are with you, for they know me and know about this”. And some of the disciples, who of course never have any clue what's going on, said “Yes Lord, it is as he says, we have seen how he bought it”. But the Lord said “Do you then not see how it bleeds and do you not hear how it groans and cries out?” But they who, again, never have any idea what's happening answered and said, “No Lord, that it groans and cries out, we do not see” and Jesus was sad and exclaimed “Woe
Dustin 00:20:31 To you that you do not hear how it complains to the Creator in heaven, and cries out for Mercy”. He came up and touched the animal and it stood up and its wounds were healed but Jesus said to the man,”Now carry on and from now on do not beat it anymore”. This is an apoc story and we have no idea where it came from from so probably it was made it. But the point is that it is
Dustin 00:21:07 Interesting that someone in the tradition early on a very long time ago, thought that that was a point that was worth making. It’s not just a modern thing
Dustin 00:21:46 So I want to say there is a very good case for thinking about animal welfare matters. We have an obligation to treat animals well, we have an obligation to help animals and now there's this question about “How do we prioritize that versus other things?” You might be tempted to think it matters but that you should always help humans first, no matter the circumstances, no matter the tradeoff.
Dustin 00:22:27 I think you should probably believe things that are not consistent with that because anything involves tradeoffs, so if you think that there should be any animal cruelty laws, it means there should be some logs. For somebody torturing a dog in the street for fun, that takes resources to enforce that law and those resources can go to something else. But we should accept that that's a case where we should put resources in. The Bible
Dustin 00:23:01 teaches that we have obligations to animals, so these obligations are to take resources to meet need. So it is saying that sometimes you should put your efforts into helping animals, so the question is how we make these tradeoffs. Unfortunately the circumstances that most of us live in are quite different from the circumstances of the people in the Bible. They didn’t have factory farming, didn't have organizations fighting factory farming, they didn't have easily available other sources of
Dustin 00:23:35 nutrition. So it becomes a little difficult in my view to take direct guidance because we're just in a historically weird situation due to the existence of modern industrial farming. But I think that that's actually not that big of a problem in making a decision because I think that like any defensible way of thinking about how to prioritise these things will imply that you should put a high priority on animal welfare.
Dustin 00:24:15 So here's a thought experiment, this is from JD, who is running this thing but isn't here. Imagine there's a bird that's trapped in a very, very small cage and the cage is so small that it can barely move. The bird is going to be trapped in the cage for a month - you can free the bird but it will cost you one penny. To free it you'll need to use a power tool, and you have to charge it with one cent worth of electricity. To me, I think it's reasonable to
Dustin 00:24:57 think that you should free the bird. You could do other things with that penny, but the thing is that that experiment more or less reflects our real situation. During certain periods, our best estimates indicate that per dollar given to the Humane League's cage free campaigns of trying to get chickens taken out of battery cages, 7 to 10 chicken life years can be saved from being spent in battery cages for per dollar spent.
Dustin 00:25:39 These battery cages get very tiny - each chicken has less space than a sheet of paper. So the trade off, if you do the math, is like a penny for a month during this period. It’s not clear if a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked by now so cage free campaigns may not be that effective anymore but there are other things that may be more effective now. If you are thinking
Dustin 00:26:30 about prioritizing an area, you might try to work in policy as a legislative staffer or a civil servant. In the US there may be a couple Congressional staffers who are willing to seriously put effort into this, but there are very few and so adding even one more might be very impactful. Depending on your skill set, try to do scientific work on alternative proteins, on welfare biology, on other fields that are relevant to animal welfare. You might try to earn to give
Dustin 00:27:16 To just make money and then donate it. Animal welfare is comparatively under resourced compared to a lot of the other things that people talk about at this conference so comparatively more money is needed. You might work for an organization recommended by a charity evaluator. There are organizations that focus specifically on this sort of stuff and animal advocacy careers. There’s an organisation
Dustin 00:27:50 Called Animal Policy Careers, I think they're at least mostly focused on the US but even if you're not earning to give you can still donate to a charity. You could become a vegan but donating will probably do more good than becoming a vegan, so if you're only going to do one. You could try to avoid or reduce your intake of the animals that are subject to the most to suffering so
Dustin 00:28:25 Products that come from small animals usually involve more suffering because you need way more. And treated works, so chicken eggs, fish, shrimp You might also consider focusing on neglected issues like suffering order because, again, those tend to have less resources. So that's a bit of practical advice, and that's what I had to say
Dominic 00:29:15 [Applause] Thanks very much for being here. Really fundamental insights and practical advice. So we'll we'll start with questions from Slido but there will also be space for those people who aren't on Slido. If you want to ask questions, please enter them on Slido. I’ll take the first two questions together. You’ve partly answered them if they're related, so there were people who really asked about 21st century context - if you could say more about the difference to the Biblical context. One person specifically asked what does this mean for being vegan. You were kind of holding back saying yes it could be a good approach. But the big question is the scriptural context is so different from our context
Dustin 00:29:46 I sort of said some things already. If you were living in a coastal community in Palestine 2000 years ago, the options available to you were totally different right. So it wouldn't be wild to think maybe this person doesn't need to be vegan, but I do think that the animal movement has focused too much on trying
Dustin 00:30:23 to get people to become vegan, which usually doesn't work very well, and is not the most impactful thing you can do anyway. So, if if you're only going to do one thing, it wouldn't be the thing that I tell you to do, but it is a perfectly fine thing to do. You might also argue the fact that if you're eating meat, in some sense, you're directly contributing to the system.
Dominic 00:30:58 I like how you put the emphasis on certain things so you're not just answering the question, you keep coming back to this thing - if you're only doing one thing then set the right priorities. I, unfortunately, I'm not hopeful about people doing that. There were questions from people who asked what percentage of animals are actually intensively farmed
Dustin 00:31:43 Almost all of them. If you're in the UK, I don't know the exact percentage, but unless you know for a fact that it wasn't, then it pretty much was
Dustin 00:32:35 So the next question is here for you - Do you put different value on different animals? For example, is it worth more resources to pay for farmed animals than a cricket? Maybe I can also ask you for a number for this question - not just a yes or no answer, but how much more.
Dustin 00:33:18 So if a dog was drowning, and a cricket was drowning. It's true, I wouldn't flip a coin. I would say the dog. The exact number? Some people think about priorities and they carry out this thing called the Moral Weight Project where they try to assign point estimates to the capacity of different animals to suffer.
Dominic 00:34:01 If I can push you, because you founded the Insect Institute, and so I'm personally very enthusiastic about that. Has it ever come to the point where you are worried that it might take away resources from animal activists? Perhaps less resources for cows and more for insects?
Dustin 00:34:39 We are very far away from the point where insects get too much attention relative to cows and chickens. I wasn't worried about resource tension.
Dominic 00:35:38 Someone asked about the Genesis passage, and your argument was more focusing on the general context of this passage, but not about the translation where some people make a big point out of dominion being translated to stewardship. This person asks if it's translated as stewardship even though this differs from the original Hebrew. Do you have a view on this?
Dustin 00:36:26 I don't think it matters. I think it's fine to translate it as the King has dominion over the subjects, and that doesn't mean you can eat them. So dominion doesn't mean you can do whatever you want so people may want to translate it to stewardship because they think that that leads to better outcom es what's involved or something like that but I I don't think anything
Dominic 00:37:00 I like that response because over the years I've seen people discuss this over and over. I feel like every couple of months I Google again the correct translation. You say, actually, it doesn't matter because the context makes it all clear. So someone else asked about the title of the talk - why you might have maximum impact by helping animals - and with the framework consumptions you gave, would this actually be true? Would we have maximum impact by helping animals?
Dustin 00:37:37 The title was why you might so I think there is a pretty good argument that if you're in the situation with the bird in the cage, the best thing you can do with that penny is get the bird out of the cage. Then, if you scale that up, that would imply that it looks like a good case for having maximum impact. But, again, it also depends on the person.
Dominic 00:38:14 I'll ask my own question. So I think to me, there's a psychological challenge. So I'm so confused about how much weight to give animals like insects or even chickens relative to humans and this confusion is not philosophical, but psychological. It’s burdening so I just say “I'll just have this simple rule of thumb and help humans” so this gives me some psychological peace of mind because as soon as I start to help animals there's so much risk of giving much too little much or too much. But I'm asking you now the psychological question, almost like a therapist - do you have any thoughts on this?
Dustin 00:38:56 Like I said, if you think seriously about the sort of effect you could have doing animal work, it actually probably doesn't matter that much the specific number you assign it. You can do a lot of good for little. As a psychological matter, it's true that this might, even within the animal movement, most resources and work goes towards the most charismatic animals. So, yeah, it's true that psychologically it's going to be hard for a lot of people to do this but that's almost a reason to do it because what that means is that you should expect that
Dustin 00:39:39 this is going to get sub-optimal investment. The things that people really don't feel like doing are the things that are probably not being done enough in a lot of cases and terms of how to handle it psychologically, I don't know.
Key Takeaways on Impact in Animal Cruelty Careers:
Work necessitated by the fact that there are tens of billions of land animals that live in factory farms every year.
Per dollar spent on successful cage-free campaigns , 7-10 years can be added to a chicken’s life outside of a battery cage.
Animal welfare is generally very under-resourced relative to other problem areas so there is potential for significant progress with additional resource input.
