Thom Norman

Thank you to everyone who came to our stand and events at #Lab25. We’re pushing the government to deliver on the promise for the biggest boost in animal welfare in a generation, and are grateful for the great support we’ve had at Conference.

Something crazy about hens in the US: most spend their lives in a cage with the space of an iPad, unable to spread their wings. Thankfully, almost half are already cage-free. If you want to help reduce this needless suffering, check out: farmkind.giving/cagefree (donations boosted 50% this week) #cagefreeWFAD

A hen spends her life in a cage no bigger than an iPad , unable to spread her wings . This #WorldFarmAnimalsDay , let's change that . For less than a pound , you can help free a hen , and your donation gets a 50% boost all week long . With your help, we can free 100,000 hens . Let's do this: farmkind.giving/cagefree

With your help, we can free 100,000 hens. This #WorldFarmAnimalsDay, join me in helping free hens from cruel cages. A gift of a dollar frees a hen, and all week your donation gets a 50% boost! Get involved: farmkind.giving/cagefree?promo… #CageFreeWFAD

This month @farmkind_giving helped raise over $2M for farmed animals 🐔🐟🐖 I spoke to Vox’s @KennyTorrella about the fundraiser + our (spicy) “moral offsetting” idea: vox.com/future-perfect…

"Going into this, I would’ve been happy if [Giving Multiplier] was one step above bake sale." In the latest Changed My Mind podcast episode (co-hosted by @FarmKindThom), @Harvard Professor Josh Greene is interviewed about his fascinating career journey. After studying moral dilemmas in the lab, he decided to apply his research to address real-world issues, co-founding Giving Multiplier to promote high-impact charitable giving and more recently launching Tango, a two-player quiz game that bridges partisan divides.

🎧 You can find the episode here: 🟢 Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/6kl4fW… 🍎 Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why…

Changing people's minds isn't about facts and logical arguments - it is so often about identity and stories. In the latest episode of Changed My Mind we chat to Dr Melanie Joy about the power of story telling and how one dodgy burger completely changed her life.

🎧 You can find the episode here: 🟢 Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/5v7tlY… 🍎 Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wha…

Your brain is literally "Velcro for bad experiences but Teflon for good ones." This negativity bias served our ancestors well, but today, not so much. In our latest pod ep, Dr. Rick Hanson shares how to intentionally rewire your brain for greater resilience, and happiness.

"Changed My Mind" is a new, soon to be top tier, podcast that resonates with @sentientism because: 1) It's about changing our minds (using evidence & reason)! 2) Non-human sentient beings are part of every conversation. Congrats @FarmKindThom & Aidan. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/cha…

🎧 You can find the episode here: 🟢 Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/2EwKko… 🍎 Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cha…

Working 60 hours a week making PowerPoints that no one reads? @rcbregman thinks we could use our fancy degrees to actually help people instead of making rich people richer. Crazy, right? Find out more on the latest episode of Changed My Mind

@RichardHanania Hey! My org, @farmkind_giving is linked in this article. We also built an offset calculator for your diet so you can 'offset' not just your shrimp eating but all your animal products if you want. You can have a look here: farmkind.giving/compassion-cal…

*THE CASE FOR REPARATIONS TO SHRIMP* I’ve written about my struggles with animal rights before. On the one hand, every ethical argument in favor of veganism is correct. On the other, I want a diet that is high in lean protein and satisfies my taste, and that means eating a lot of chicken and seafood, which are among the worst options from the perspective of minimizing suffering. Luckily, there’s a way to make myself feel better. Bentham’s Bulldog writes about the Shrimp Welfare Project, which gets corporations to stun shrimp before they are killed and promise not to crush their eyes in order to increase fertility. One can save from an agonizing death an estimated 1,500 shrimp per dollar per year through donating to this charity. I had been thinking for a while about paying reparations to the animals I’ve wronged but hesitated, figuring it would be tax deductible. This would mean I’d have to save the receipt and do more paperwork. I probably would’ve been more likely to seek out something like the Shrimp Welfare Project sooner if charitable donations weren’t tax deductible at all. The fear of paperwork exerts a stronger pressure on my psyche than either the thought of losing money or the guilt I feel about my sins against the shrimp. Anyway, this is very dumb, so Bentham’s writing on this motivated me to just give $1,000 to the Shrimp Welfare Project. This means I have now personally saved 1,500,000 shrimp in one year alone from an agonizing death. The problem with going full utilitarian is that you can always demand more of yourself. I estimate that I eat perhaps 40 shrimp a week x 52 weeks = 2,080 shrimp a year. I could easily put my shrimp-saving ledger even more in the black by not doing that, finding a cheaper source of food, and donating any money I saved to helping more shrimp. Pure utilitarianism strikes me as madness, but so does the idea that we should reject the ethical arguments against torturing animals because they’re too depressing to think about, so I end up somewhere in between. A thousand dollars once in a while seems like a good compromise, covering well more than I could ever eat. I’ve always felt that in a cosmic sense I had a kind of debt that I owed to shrimpkind. They are now better off because of my existence. It seems like I should do something for the chickens too, even though Bentham says that the same amount of money goes a lot further when it’s put towards saving the shrimp. Should I consider that I have a debt to each individual species, or animals as a whole? How about breaking them up into two categories: those on land and those in water? These are all things worth thinking about. But a thousand dollars is a nice round number, and me and the shrimp are now more than even. There’s a Korean market I sometimes go to where there’s a tank full of shrimp that I just look at and feel sad about. Now I can walk by them, give a knowing nod, and somehow try to communicate the message that I am not the problem. If I could get some of you to donate money to the Shrimp Welfare Project with me, that would be even better.

Labour is using its first animal welfare policy since entering government to dilute standards by legalising the harmful practice of carrying chickens by their legs 😢 . Read more: 🔗 bit.ly/4dTqV9x 🔗

Beak to tail, the number of chickens in the UK would go around the world 12.5 times. And yet these animals are hidden away, suffering on factory farms.

@deane_ag @JamieWoodhouse @farmkind_giving @sentientism Why do you think they misrepresent what a factory farm is here? And why do you think welfarism and abolition are so mutually exclusive? To quote you back at yourself, "what's you citation?" :)

@FarmKindThom @JamieWoodhouse @farmkind_giving @sentientism So to be clear, you are relying on data from the Sentience Institute that claims 99% are factory farmed (not 98%)? And that data misrepresents what a CAFO is. I don't think welfarism and abolition can coexist. Abolition hides behind welfarism.

"That system will be history... Our job is just to speed that up" - @FarmKindThom of @farmkind_giving joins me for episode 215 of the @sentientism podcast and YouTube - find our full conversation there and don't forget to subscribe!

I really enjoyed speaking with @JamieWoodhouse on how we can end factory farming and the ethics that drives me to work on this problem with @farmkind_giving - check out the full podcast!