[ve55]

If you're going to complain about the ethics related to Chik-Fil-A, it would probably be better to start with the fact that they raise and kill a billion chickens every year rather than that they have donated $120,000 to organizations like the Salvation Army (example from above article).

[sincerely]

Eh, regardless of my personal thoughts on the topic, the ethics of eating animals are a lot more controversial among the HN crowd than LGBTQ rights.

[ve55]

Chik-Fil-A is not an arbiter of LGBTQ rights. Their small 6-figure donations to organizations that focus on other issues do very little in the grand scheme of things.

Do you really think Chik-Fil-A is directly causing more suffering by donating to a few charities in amounts this small than by raising in captivity and then killing billions of chickens? I see no way to reasonably argue that.

[benatkin]

Chick-Fil-A is just the service provider, if not for Chick-Fil-A people would get their chicken elsewhere. If they were raised in a place that felt less like captivity, that would probably be worse for the environment, in terms of using more natural resources per pound of chicken produced. There are trade-offs to everything.

Chick-Fil-A isn't really in the meat business, they're in the restaurant business, and given that they aren't in a very tiny niche, their menus feature meat. They sell plenty of soft drinks and fried potatoes which reduce the amount of meat as a percent of the total calories.

Finally if you're going to get people excited about animal rights, it's probably better to mention cows than chickens. To me, Chick-Fil-A's ads suggest eating chicken as a lesser of two evils, without ever saying that eating chicken is evil. We also don't have a separate word for chicken meat like we do for cow or pig meat, which I think serve as euphemisms.

[bovine3dom]

You may well already know this, but the separate words for meat and animal are likely because of the Normans; the richer French speakers cooked and ate the animals, so they got French names; the poorer "English" raised the animals and called them by their English/Germanic names.

We do have a word with a French root for chicken, by the way: poultry. As to why the separate name didn't catch on, I can only speculate that it's because chicken are cheap to keep and so the English may have eaten them themselves.

Not all languages have separate words for meat - German perhaps being the most famous. It's slightly disconcerting to walk around a supermarket and see schweinefleisch being advertised.

[leesalminen]

> Finally if you're going to get people excited about animal rights, it's probably better to mention cows than chickens. To me, Chick-Fil-A's ads suggest eating chicken as a lesser of two evils, without ever saying that eating chicken is evil.

I posted this article to our company #random channel and that was the first reply- better chicken than beef!

[ve55]

Most effective altruists would agree with you (and thus disagree with a possible takeaway from Chik-Fil-A's advertising) that eating chicken is better than cows, as cows provide significantly more meat than a chicken, with ratios being up to 50 chickens per every 1 cow, as far as quantity of meat for normal portions go. In other words, someone eating only chicken may kill X chickens, but someone eating only cows may kill 1/50X cows. Of course there are other variables involved like weighing the differences between these animals, their treatments, lifespans, etc., but it is nonetheless a point with notable weight. Although this isn't quite the area I was getting at, just that the most significant things should be looked at first, all else constant.

[jsgo]

pretty sure the ads are just a joke to not eat hamburgers, but to eat chicken whether it be nuggets or sandwiches or whatever which is essentially the menu for Chick-fil-A.

[psychometry]

The "other issues" that organizations like Focus on the Family are concerned with are just a reprehensible as their anti-LGBT bigotry.

[sincerely]

Again, regardless of my personal beliefs:

If I thought Chick-Fil-A shouldn't be supported for either their treatment of animals or for their anti-LGBTQ corporate giving, and wanted other people to stop supporting the business, I would focus on the latter in my messaging, because I suspect it would be more effective on the audience. Attempting to draw conclusions about which of their behaviors I personally think cause more suffering from this is not a good use of your time.

[ve55]

If your audience cares significantly about the charitable donations and not at all for animal suffering, and your goal is to only to convince them to be against the company, then sure, go for it.

But any effective altruist should have their goals set higher than this, at actually reducing the insane amount of suffering that's created. It does very little good if everyone stops supporting Chik-Fil-A only to flock to another chicken company, which will be the same in almost every way, possibly minus some donations, possibly one which treats animals even worse. Effective altruism is a very different beast than simply appealing to or signaling the crowds' most popular views on ethics in order to persuade.