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Adele_L comments on Pay other people to go vegetarian for you? - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's a similar idea, but one thing my partner and I have is a rule that if we eat mammals (we care more about mammals than other types of animals, although we may try extending this rule at some point), then we have to donate $50 to an efficient charity. Otherwise, we don't worry about it. The consequences of this rule is that we eat less meat from mammals, and we donate more. We also can feel good about donating, or not eating mammals, while also not feeling very restricted.
Eating more chickens (maybe fish too) instead of mammals is a very bad thing. They are smaller (than the mammals people usually eat, pigs and cows) and have less meat per individual, which means more individuals live under conditions worse than death and then get killed per pound of meat. Julia Galef and Brian Tomasik have done estimates of deaths per calorie and suffering per kilogram, and come to basically the same conclusions.
Are all animal lives equal? I would think you need to weight for sapience or conscientiousness or whatever. By the metric of "lives taken of any kind per calorie" worms are a much worse form of of animal food, even though they have a very primitive nervous system.
I don't think so, but with a difference of 2 orders of magnitude between how many cows and chickens you would kill per calorie, the numbers are most important in this case, I think.
If you're concerned about eating meat for ecological reasons, raising cows has more impact on the environment on a per-calorie basis.
Not necessarily, at least if you're considering it on a negative basis. Allan Savory's work suggests raising cows (or similar animals) has a net positive impact if done properly in the correct regions.
(Not to mention there are more parts of the world suited to grazing than to farm agriculture.)
Does he consider the climate change implications of methane from cows in that analysis?