You'd have to value animal suffering at least two orders of magnitude less to claim that poverty-related causes.
Value the suffering of 1 human over 100 animals? I would, and I think that's pretty common even among people who care about animal suffering. For example, upthread we have approximately 1:1000.
OK, I see. I just find this hard to defend, at least if we specify that we're talking about the same intensity of suffering. But I guess that this is the point where people declare the ratio a "terminal value" and then the discussion is over.
What I do understand is that some people think killing adult healthy humans is much worse than killing animals, because there you can conceive a clear difference in abilities that at least plausibly seems relevant to the badness of killing. But then for anti-speciesism they should also agree that killing ad...
I notice that a large fraction of Effective Altruism people are vegetarian. This makes sense: in general Effective Altruists take moral issues seriously, even when that means changing your lifestyle. I'm not sure it's a good balance, though.
One way to think about this is to convert it into money. How much would I need to be paid to give up eating meat? All animal products? How much money would I need to spend on myself to be about as happy as I would be with less money but continuing to eat animals? I'd probably be willing to go vegetarian for about $500/year, vegan for maybe $2000/year.
It turns out you can probably pay to convince other people to be vegetarian much more cheaply than that. I estimate the cost of a vegetarian-year at $4.29 to $536 while Brian Tomasik estimates $11 with better methodology (which I looked at). This is by placing ads on facebook for a site where people can watch an animial cruelty video and ideally become vegetarian or vegan.
If you would get more than $11/year worth of enjoyment out of continuing to eat meat, why not give $11/year to convince someone else to not eat meat for you? Or give $50/year and be on the safe side?
(While you're giving money, you should probably give it to the organization that you think will do the most good with it, which I think is probably one of GiveWell's top charities. The nice thing about money as opposed to actions is that it's easy to redirect.)
I also posted this on my blog.