Earlier this month, a fundraiser for nonprofits that fight to end factory farming went a little viral — at least in one corner of the internet.
Dwarkesh Patel, the influential tech podcaster, announced on his show that if his listeners donated a collective $250,000 to FarmKind, an organization that distributes money to anti-factory farming charities, so would he. They did — and then some.
So far, Patel and his listeners — including Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, professional poker player Liv Boeree, and popular Substack writer Noah Smith — have raised over $2 million. For the global anti-factory farming movement, which works on a shoestring budget to fix one of the most challenging and neglected social issues of our time, that’s a lot of money.
The movement spent around $260 million last year in its effort to help tens of billions of abused land animals and a trillion or so fish (to put that into perspective, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art spends far more annually to collect, store, and display art). So, Patel helped raise the equivalent of almost 1 percent of the entire global movement’s yearly budget.
His pitch was simple: This is a really big problem, and charities have been able to make meaningful progress on it with little money, so by injecting even a relatively modest amount of extra funds into the cause, you can make a big difference. The organization that will distribute the money, FarmKind, makes the same pitch, but with a twist that Patel only hinted at: If you feel bad about eating meat but don’t want to go vegan, you can have the same impact by donating to charity instead.
“It’s like carbon offsets, but for your diet,” FarmKind’s website states. (Carbon offsets allow people to pay for an environmental good — like planting trees that absorb carbon dioxide — to offset a high carbon-emitting activity, like traveling by airplane.)
The concept makes intuitive sense. Most people think the factory farms that produce the vast majority of America’s meat, eggs, and dairy are bad, but decades of vegan advocacy have failed to persuade more than 1 percent of Americans. Calls to just eat less meat have proven largely ineffective, too. If sympathetic consumers are unwilling to change their diets, the thinking goes, they could still help by supporting cash-strapped organizations working to reduce animal suffering on farms and make plant-based eating more accessible.
But I also worry that FarmKind’s approach, known as “moral offsetting,” might absolve consumers — who individually and collectively hold power to reduce the number of animals factory-farmed for food — of personal responsibility.
So, can you actually offset your meat consumption with a donation? And more importantly, should you?
The wonky math behind offsetting your meat consumption
Each year, the average American eats around 33 chickens, eight fish, 228 shrimp, one-third of a pig, and a tenth of a cow — for a total of 269.5 animals. According to FarmKind, it’ll cost you $23 a month to offset the suffering those animals experience on factory farms.
That’s about “the cost of a monthly Netflix premium subscription,” Thom Norman, FarmKind’s co-founder and director of outreach, told me.
This doesn’t mean that if you donate $23 per month, you save 269.5 animals or guarantee that someone else will go vegetarian in your stead. Rather, FarmKind estimates that, with an extra $23 per month, the animal advocacy charities that receive your money can reduce animal suffering by an amount equivalent to the suffering experienced by 269.5 animals on factory farms.
Take egg-laying hens, for example. More than half of egg-laying hens in the US are indefinitely confined in tiny cages, a practice that represents some of the worst animal cruelty in our food system. Animal advocacy groups have successfully pressured hundreds of corporations, along with many state governments, to ban these cages. One of the leading cage-free advocacy groups, the Humane League, estimates that for every 85 cents they spend on these campaigns, they manage to get one hen out of a cage.
Animal welfare experts have estimated that one-third of an egg-laying hen’s total suffering can be attributed to their confinement in cages. With this in mind, getting three hens out of cages — which would cost the Humane League $2.55 — is, according to FarmKind, the equivalent of ending the suffering of one factory-farmed hen.
FarmKind uses similar analyses that attempt to quantify the suffering of pigs kept in tiny cages, and the suffering inflicted by other cruel practices on factory farms.
The organization acknowledges that there’s a degree of uncertainty in these calculations, and it uses more conservative estimates to account for it. For example, it’s hard to estimate the degree to which nonprofits that work to make plant-based eating more accessible translates to less animal suffering in the long run.
And there are more fundamentally unknowable questions — like, given that we don’t know what it’s like to be a chicken, do we really know that cage confinement accounts for one-third of a hen’s suffering? There are more practical unknowns, too, like whether a charity that has been effective in the past will be effective in the future — after years of success, their campaigns may hit diminishing returns.
It’s easy to dismiss these uncertainties as misleading, and I could further quibble with FarmKind’s calculations. But what is clear is that the resource-poor anti-factory farming movement could make a lot more progress with more money, whether it’s labeled an “offset” or not.
Still, there’s the thornier question as to whether a social movement should encourage people to donate to offset the harm they’re causing, rather than to stop participating in it directly.
The case for and against meat offsets
FarmKind’s answer to that question is an unequivocal “yes,” and it’s one rooted in ruthless pragmatism.
“We know that people overall are actually really on board with the idea that factory farming in particular is terrible,” Norman of FarmKind told me. And animal advocacy groups tend to give consumers one thing they can do to help: reduce or eliminate their meat consumption.
It hasn’t worked. In the US, rates of vegetarianism have stagnated. And while many people say they’re actively reducing their meat intake, most are probably lying or fooling themselves. American per capita meat consumption has increased in recent years.
In a better world, it would be easier to persuade people to change their diets. But in the world we’ve got, the next best thing, according to Norman, is to enrich the animal advocacy movement so that it can win more campaigns to reduce animal suffering on factory farms.
As to whether meat offsets let people off the hook, morally speaking, Norman said he’s uncertain. He doesn’t know whether donating might make people who otherwise would’ve reduced their meat consumption refrain from doing so or even increase their consumption. But he says that people donating to FarmKind aren’t deciding between going vegan or donating to offset their meat consumption. “Typically, they’re thinking, ‘Should I offset or should I do nothing?’” Norman said Plus, he added, getting people to donate as a first step might make them feel a part of the movement and lead them to take other actions, like eating less meat or volunteering.
I posed the question of offsets to Tyler John, a philosopher and philanthropic advisor who’s thought deeply about animal ethics, philanthropy, and carbon offsetting. John is sympathetic to FarmKind’s strategy and agrees that the animal advocacy movement needs to give the public more options to participate beyond just changing their diets, and that donating to the cause should be one of them. But whether or not that can truly offset an individual’s meat consumption, he said, is “a very complicated empirical question.”
He worries that the idea of meat offsets could further reinforce how little humans value the lives of animals raised and slaughtered for food. Few people would consider it morally sound to abuse a dog and offset that harm by donating to an animal shelter, but this is essentially what meat offsetting entails.
“In cases where we’re morally outraged, we don’t think that offsetting can wipe away the problem,” John said. “It’s only in cases where we’re morally disengaged and don’t care that much about the moral issue that we think offsetting is okay.”
We also can’t “offset our way out” of the factory farming problem, John said, because even if everyone were to offset their meat consumption, the meat industry would still raise and slaughter tens of billions of animals — albeit in modestly better conditions — every year.
The dispiriting reality that meat offsets force animal advocates to reckon with
When I first learned about FarmKind, I instinctively winced at the idea that the suffering of farmed animals could be offset with a donation equivalent to a monthly Netflix subscription. I still wince at it when I think about the nature of that suffering. Billions of animals are trapped in cages — their tails, testicles, and beaks cut off with no pain relief — and overcrowded into noxious warehouses, forced to live in their own waste. I think that should be met with a bigger response than parting with $23 per month.
But, then, I think about how the project to end factory farming, drastically reduce meat consumption, and shift the world toward a more plant-based food system will likely be a centuries-long one, and I can see meat offsets in another light.
We’re only about 50 years into the modern animal rights movement, and the current political, economic, and social conditions are such that the movement’s primary goals are still far out of reach. What is in reach is reducing the suffering of animals unlucky enough to be born into the factory farm system and slowly normalizing plant-based eating. But those can only be achieved by a bigger, better resourced, more powerful animal advocacy movement. A sympathetic public could, at the very least, chip in to build that movement, and the success of Dwarkesh Patel’s fundraiser suggests there are a lot of people eager to help in this way.
I don’t know if you can truly offset the suffering and death of one animal on a factory farm by making many others suffer a little less. But I know that to be an advocate for animals in 2025, you have to accept that most people agree that factory farming is terrible but are unwilling to do what is needed to end it. You then have to meet them where they are, which is painfully far from what animals need.
A few years ago, carbon offset expert John Holler told Vox that it’s more helpful to think of carbon offsets as simply “a tool for routing money toward good things,” like green energy and forest conservation, rather than as a true offset of your own carbon footprint.
“You’re purchasing carbon credits to contribute to global decarbonization,” he said, “not making a claim against your own emissions.” We should think about meat offsets in the same way. They don’t — and can’t — absolve humanity of its abuse of billions of animals, but they do help to build a better world that many of us want to see but can’t yet bring ourselves to realize.
The post You feel guilty about eating meat. Can a donation fix your dilemma? appeared first on Vox.
