I'd propose an extension: generate offsets by failing to be an animal farmer. Even at like a 10:1 ratio, it should be easy to justify suffering of an arbitrary number of animals, since there will be orders of magnitude of animals that don't even exist, and can't suffer. Or even allow self-offsets. Say you torture and kill 1000 pigs a month - you COULD have tortured and killed orders of magnitude more than that, so you're on net improving the welfare of the potential universe of animals.
In fact, with the knowledge advantage that activists have in factory farming, they can probably be MORE PROFITABLE at running their own farms than they can by selling the offsets. And these profits can be reinvested in more farming activities, now that we've shown them to be morally-positive (aka: earning to give, in addition to direct action).
2I'd propose an extension: generate offsets by failing to be an animal farmer. Even at like a 10:1 ratio, it should be easy to justify suffering of an arbitrary number of animals, since there will be orders of magnitude of animals that don't even exist, and can't suffer. Or even allow self-offsets. Say you torture and kill 1000 pigs a month - you COULD have tortured and killed orders of magnitude more than that, so you're on net improving the welfare of the potential universe of animals.
We have indeed considered this strategy, but we found it was in fact more cost effective to torture & kill >1000 pigs given rat-heroin offsets.
In fact, with the knowledge advantage that activists have in factory farming, they can probably be MORE PROFITABLE at running their own farms than they can by selling the offsets. And these profits can be reinvested in more farming activities, now that we've shown them to be morally-positive (aka: earning to give, in addition to direct action).
This would be correct if we were long-termists, but we in fact find we have fairly steep time discount curves. There will be a startup period, where we just focus on factory farming optimization, but due to security concerns we are unable to release how long that period will be at this time.
1Have you researched if heroin improves factory farming yields? Since you will have a supply of heroin and all this equipment anyways..
We have, this is against current US regulations in the industry, and would likely make the products of the suffering minds less tasty, and therefore less profitable.
Edit: It is also just more efficient to have rats on heroin, since we get more pleasured minds per smaller dose.
Sounds like you should fund a special interest group to get the legal maximum levels of heroin raised, which makes your factory farm more profitable, which funds your offsets more...
TL;DR: We are excited to announce the new animal welfare organization Suffering For Good, a new factory farming charity aimed at vegans, where we use our excess profits to buy suffering offsets--in particular, an enormous number of rats on heroin.
For decades, even centuries, us vegans have been trying but failing to get the world to stop eating & torturing sentient minds that can definitely feel pain & suffer. But the global number of such minds tortured & killed just keeps on increasing. We at Suffering for Good think its time we just gave up, and ask ourselves "how can we use this to our advantage?"
We realized something when we asked that question. After decades of fighting this fight, we know far more about the factory farming industry than virtually anyone inside that industry. In that period of learning, and attempted dismantling, we had learned basically all the industry secrets, strategically releasing only the most gruesome, and least cost-effective practices, so as to maximize the public's awareness of the pain, and minimize the spread of good ideas.
But it seems the public does not care about the suffering. Only we care about the suffering, and at the end of this long road we find our strength is in doing exactly what we hate most, but more effectively than anyone else.
After months of debate and math, calculating our expected profit margins, the logistics of the heroin suppliers, of keeping our rats alive & fed, and the legality of this operation, we found that no matter what our assumptions were, as long as they were reasonable, our numbers came out the same: Suffering for Good is not only a viable charity, but we feel morally compelled to work on it, no matter how personally disgusted we feel by the conclusion.
We unfortunately can't share the exact numbers publicly at this moment, however we will be sharing them with select funders.