Effective Altruism and Measuring the Effects of Our Vegan Activism w/Casey Taft PhD

You've probably heard of the Effective Altruism (AE) movement before, and the effort to apply effective altruism to animal advocacy work and reducing suffering of animals. But do you know what it actually is? And is effective altruism all it's really cracked up to be??

I have seen countless debates within the animal advocacy movement about what the "best" type of activism is, with many people pushing everyone to do one single thing. In the last few years things like animal welfare legislation (focused on bigger cages, and "humane slaughter") and reducitarianism have been pushed on the movement by several well-known AE philanthropists and non profits as the end-all-be-all of evidence based "effective activism".

But can we even measure the effects of our vegan and animal rights activism in the first place? How do we know what will really end speciesism, save animals, and turn the world vegan in the future? And what role should science and data actually play in social justice movements and especially animal rights work?

I discuss all that and more in this episode with Casey Taft who wrote the brilliant book 'Motivational Methods for Vegan Advocacy: A Clinical Psychology Perspective'. 

Casey Taft is the co-founder and manager of Vegan Publishers and is a Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine. He is an internationally recognized researcher in the areas of trauma and the family, winning prestigious awards for his work from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, the Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He has published over 100 journal articles, book chapters, and scientific reports, and has consulted with the United Nations on preventing violence and abuse globally. He sees the prevention of violence towards animals as a natural extension of this work.