A scenario lab for the end of factory farming

Which future for farmed animals are you betting on?

By 2033 humans will farm about six trillion animals a year. Advocates agree on the problem and disagree on how it ends. Set what you believe, put money to work, and watch fifty years play out. Every answer updates the results as you move it.

Start from a theory of change

Weighted suffering: animals alive × share of life in serious suffering × your moral weights, in billions of human-equivalent years. Dashed grey is the status quo. The dotted line is where things stood before your last change.

Animals farmed per year, by group. Grey is the status quo, colour is your scenario with its 10th–90th percentile band. Scales differ: insects and shrimp are in the trillions.

Share of simulated worlds in which weighted suffering is below the same-year status quo by the stated amount (solid), or below today's absolute level (dashed). The status quo grows, so holding flat is already a win.

How much your score moves when each answer is pushed to its 10th and 90th percentile with everything else held. The top rows are the beliefs your result depends on.

Your portfolio through other people's eyes

The same allocation scored under each theory of change's beliefs and values.

Their portfolios under your beliefs

What each theory of change would buy, scored by you.

Distribution of your score across the simulated worlds. A long left tail means much of the money rides on things that may not happen.

4Under the hood

A model with real numbers in it, not a forecast. Every input is tagged: measured, published estimate, or structural guess you are free to disagree with.

How the simulation works

  1. Baseline. Seven farmed populations grow from 2025 FAO and Rethink Priorities counts along tapering curves. Insects follow a logistic curve calibrated to Rethink's 2033 forecast band.
  2. Suffering. Each year: animals alive × share of each life spent in serious negative welfare × your moral weight × (for insects) whether they turned out to be sentient in this world.
  3. Interventions. Each strategy has a saturating spend curve, a lag, a ramp, a ceiling on the share of each species it can reach, and a probability of working at all. Welfare strategies cut the suffering share. Replacement strategies cut the number of animals. Political infrastructure and research multiply others.
  4. Your beliefs scale those ceilings and probabilities. Displacement and additionality gate every replacement strategy, follow-through gates campaigns, political feasibility gates laws, and the cultivated parity year is drawn from your probability.
  5. Score. Discounted cumulative reduction in weighted suffering and in weighted animals farmed, blended by your suffering-versus-lives slider. The Monte Carlo reruns everything three hundred times with random draws on success, ceilings, growth, sentience and parity.

What it leaves out

  • No general-equilibrium economics: no prices, trade leakage or rebound beyond a displacement fraction.
  • No interaction between species markets (cheaper chicken from beef displacement, for example).
  • No wild animals, climate co-benefits or human health.
  • Sandcastles' fourth rung, non-sentient animals, is too speculative to give a number.

Species inputs

Sources and evidence grades