On Boycotting Veganism

Be an animal advocate, not just a vegan.

Yesterday was the first annual Shrimp Welfare Day on this corner of Substack, a magical day when a ragtag group of early twenty-somethings and a few heterodox essayists raised at least $13,070 for the Shrimp Welfare Project, about 3% of the organization’s annual budget and enough to spare 19.6 million shrimp per year from an excruciating death.

Unlike some of my posts, yesterday’s article proclaiming an annual “International Shrimp Welfare Day” wasn’t in jest. I intend to organize a coordinated blog-based fundraising effort for November 15, 2025 — and hopefully many years thereafter — and I’d appreciate help from people with connections to some prominent bloggers to lobby them to participate. Please get in contact by sending me a DM on Substack if you want to write a fundraising post, help organize the effort, or think you could convince a blogger with a large following to participate.

One of the reasons I’m so excited about this new way of fundraising for shrimp welfare is that it’s an extraordinarily efficient way to reduce animal suffering that doesn’t involve talking to people about veganism. Even though yesterday’s campaign was an anti-shrimp slaughter campaign — that’s [anti-][shrimp slaughter], not [anti-shrimp][slaughter] — the only person to invoke the dreaded “V” word was non-vegan Richard Hanania, who acknowledged that “every ethical argument in favor of veganism is correct,” but said he still doesn’t want to follow a plant-based diet.

You might think this is deeply puzzling. The reason shrimp are slaughtered in the first place is because people want to eat them. It’s common to hear that being vegan is the “most important thing you can do” to reduce animal suffering, or that your consumer choices are the primary lever you have to influence the livestock industry. Until recently — about a decade ago — the primary mode of activism for farmed animals in the United States was to hand out pamphlets on street corners and college campuses promoting plant-based diets and educating people about speciesism. The leading organizations, including today’s leading “welfarist” orgs like The Humane League and Mercy For Animals, purported to show that for every few hundred or thousand people who took a pamphlet, X number of them would go vegan.

This all makes it unclear why we shouldn’t just talk to people about veganism. Why focus on merely improving the treatment of farmed animals — which might achieve less and runs the risk of making people think it’s okay to consume animal products that are raised “humanely” — when we could ask them to go vegan instead?

The short answer is that focusing on vegan outreach just doesn’t work. Diet is a core part of a lot of people’s identity, and to a random person walking down the street (or browsing the metaphorical street online), being approached by a vegan activist asking them to “simply” stop eating animals is a major imposition. They’ll probably think the activist is telling them what to do, and most people don’t like being told what to do.¹ As a result, even after orgs have spent decades talking to people about veganism and distributed over 30 million pamphlets, the number of vegans and vegetarians per capita has barely changed.

Welfare campaigns, like the Shrimp Welfare Project, are different. They cast corporations and the government, rather than individual consumers, as the actors at fault for animal suffering. And by leading with a message focused on suffering and systemic change rather than diet and individual choices, they manage to raise public awareness of factory farming while actually boosting support for the total abolition of animal agriculture. This is true even when they successfully curtail egregious factory farming practices that one might think would catalyze opposition to animal agriculture.

Multiple research teams have tested how welfare campaigns affect support for animal product consumption and abolitionism by presenting survey participants with either a news article about a new corporate or government animal welfare policy or a control article. They consistently find that participants who are shown the treatment article say they’re more likely to reduce their consumption of animal products, and sometimes by wide margins. As law professor and researcher Justin Marceau remarked at one of the leading animal advocacy conferences this year, participants in a yet-unpublished study “who learned about the fact of a Prop 12 type [animal welfare] law [in their state] were about twice as likely to think that pigs should have more rights, and to say that they were less likely to eat pig.”

For all the good you can do by going vegan — or talking to people you know personally about veganism (as opposed to random people on the street) — you can do even more good by supporting or raising money for corporate and political campaigns to improve farmed animal welfare. Corporate pressure campaigns to stop companies from using eggs laid by hens who are confined in tiny cages can improve between 9 and 120 years of animal life for every dollar spent, while cage-free ballot initiatives improve about 5 years of life per dollar spent, without even accounting for their effect on public opinion. Yesterday’s highlighted charity, the Shrimp Welfare Project, estimates it can help 1,500 shrimp per dollar. If the average person in the United States gave just 1% of their disposable income to effective animal charities or volunteered an equivalent amount of their time, they could help at least hundreds of chickens and thousands of shrimp per year — far more than the average person eats.

This point was made, albeit in a more incendiary manner, in a 2007 article by animal rights lawyer and activist Wayne Hsiung titled “Boycott Veganism.” Hsiung argued that the vegan paradigm, focused on diet change, completely obscures the object of the animal protection movement — which is a social and political revolution in ideas about animal rights, rather than just a change in how individual people behave as consumers.

I doubt Hsiung’s argument would strongly resonate with someone like Hanania, who’s not nearly as radical and probably doesn’t want to spend his time doing gauche things like attending protests and submitting comment forms and customer service calls to companies like Target to pester them to keep their cage-free commitments. But Hsiung is absolutely right that supporting animal-centered activism — including with your money — is more impactful than going vegan and spending resources asking other people to go vegan as well.

Hanania estimates that by going vegan, he might save around 2,000 shrimp per year. By writing an article asking others to go vegan, maybe he would convince one or two of his readers and save another 4,000. It’s unlikely that he could save many more by giving his time to an animal protection charity, since they rely mostly on paid staff with highly specific skill sets. But by donating just $1,000 to shrimp welfare, he can spare about 1.5 million shrimp per year from suffocating to death while freezing in ice slurry.

That’s an extraordinary amount of good — at least the equivalent of a dozen Hananias never eating shrimp again for the rest of their lives. Hanania should still listen to Connor Jennings and try out a vegan diet, too, but there’s an entire world of ways that he and the rest of us can help animals that go above and beyond simple lifestyle change.

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1. See the question “Personal choice” on the linked survey. Ninety-six percent of respondents agree with the following statement: “Whether to eat animals or be vegetarian is a personal choice, and nobody has the right to tell me which one they think I should do.”