Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square - we will congregate in the indoor seating area next to the Your Independent Grocer with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches (pic) at 7:00 pm for 15 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment's amenity room. If you've been around a few times, feel free to meet up at the front door of the apartment at 7:30 instead.

Description

This week, we'll watch and discuss two interesting videos from this year on animal welfare, and compare them to a more "traditional" animal advocacy documentary, Dominon (2018).

Here are the specific videos, if you want to pre-watch them on your own time (but no preparation is required for the meetup). All viewing is optional, and you can choose to sit out any or all of the videos during the meetup:

The "Ducks" section of Dominion (2018) (~8 minutes)
Content warnings: animal suffering, animal cruelty, violence towards animals, graphic animal death. If you imagine watching a horrific snuff film, you're in the right ballpark.

This is our traditional animal advocacy documentary. It's an Australian feature film length documentary with lots of drone and hidden camera footage, but the specific section that we will be watching is eight minutes long.

Daily Show Shrimp Welfare Segment (2025) (~6 minutes)
Content warnings: lots of dead shrimp in a way that's kind of jarring for a pro-shrimp piece, but in the normal food sense - shrimp cocktail, shrimp barbie etc.

An attempt by some EAs to crack the mainstream.

Existential Crisis in Class (2025) (~25 minutes)
Content warnings: verbal descriptions of chicken factory farming practices and wild animal suffering.

An experimental, mostly animated video.

Discussion

We'll have small rounds of discussion for each video, where we'll discuss:

• what specific claims or arguments did this video make, and through what methods?
• did the video attempt to evoke specific emotions? how did it do that? how successful was it at doing that?
• who is the implied audience for this piece, and what assumptions does it make about their values and knowledge?

Then we'll have a break, and then come back to do more holistic analysis of the relative strengths and weaknesses of each strategy:

• which video did you find the most compelling?
• which video do you think the average person would find the most compelling?
• how did your pre-existing views on animal welfare affect your reception of each piece? can you imagine how someone with different priors might react?
• what is the implicit theory in each video about how to create societal change? what potential failure modes or backfire effects might each approach have?