Animal suffering is larger-scale and more neglected. As explained in my post on 'Seeking Ripple Effects', I'm especially moved by the possibility of transformative innovations (e.g. economical lab-grown meat) improving human values at a key juncture in history, even though I think it's very unlikely.

OTOH, I'm a big fan of global health & development on more general and robust 'ripple effect' grounds, which is why I'm close to the center on this one.

1. The basic case for chickens is very strong, even under views that are sceptical of small animals having a high chance/degree of sentience, because it's so easy to affect their lives cheaply compared to humans, and their lives seem v easy to improve by a lot
2. $100m in total is not a huge amount (equiv to $5-10m/yr, against a background of ~$200m). I think concern about scaling spending is a bit of a red herring and this could probably be usefully absorbed just by current interventions

I'm a bit of a Benthamite "The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?'"

For any plausible (to me) guess about which non-human animals are capable of suffering, there are far far more non-human animals living in terrible conditions than humans in similarly bad conditions, and there just seems to be so many underfunded and underexplored ways we could help reduce that suffering. I've also seen some cost-effectiveness estimations that indicate you can help thousands of animals a lot for the same cost as helping one person a lot. ("a lot" being very vague!)

The only reason why I'm not at 100% agree is because helping humans become healthier might cause larger positive flow on effects, and this might add up to more impact in the long run. That's super tentative and could go either way - e.g. it seems possible that helping animals now could lead to our species being more ethical towards sentient beings in the long run too.  

How does marginal spending on animal welfare and global health influence the long-term future?

I'd guess that most of the expected impact in both cases comes from the futures in which Earth-originating intelligent life (E-OIL) avoids near-term existential catastrophe and goes on to create a vast amount of value in the universe by creating a much larger economy and colonizing other galaxies and solar systems, and transforming the matter there into stuff that matters a lot more morally than lifeless matter ("big futures").

For animal welfare spending, then, pe... (read more)

I basically endorse this post, as well as the use of the tools created by Rethink Priorities that collectively point to quite strong but not overwhelming confidence in the marginal value of farmed animal welfare.

I don't really know... I'm suspect some kind of first-order utility calculus which tallies up the number of agents which are helped per dollar weighted according to what species they are makes animal welfare look better by large degree. But in terms of getting the world closer on the path of the "good trajectory", for some reason the idea of eliminating serious preventable diseases in humans feels like a more obvious next step along that path?

You'd have to value animals at ~millionths of humans for scale and neglectedness not to be dispositive. Only countervailing considerations are things around cooperativeness, positive feedback loops, and civilizational stability, all of which are speculative and even sign uncertain

I'm philosophically a longtermist, but suspect better evidenced short termist interventions are comparable to if not much greater than 'direct longtermism' in expectation. 

In the long run I think a thriving human descendant-line with better cooperation norms is going to lead to better total phenomenal states than reduced factory farming will.

I agree with Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare by Ariel Simnegar 🔸, as some others have already referenced.

Open Phil spent around $100M on animal welfare in each of 2021 and 2022.

An extra $100M for animal welfare would be best spread across multiple years, given organizational constraints to scaling. I'd mostly have in mind outreach/campaigns/lobbying targeting corporations, certifiers, institutions and governments, and ballot initiatives for animal welfare policy change.

There might be more direct ways to purchase animal welfare that would scale and still beat global health, but we could probably do much better with higher leverage policy interventions.

Some cost-effectiveness analyses here, here and here.

• Cost-effectiveness estimates generally suggest that, for most reasonable assumptions about the moral weight and degree of suffering of animals, animal welfare interventions are most cost-effective
• Animal welfare is more neglected than global health, but not (again for reasonable assumptions about how much animal wellbeing matters) proportionally less important

Animal welfare getting so little^[1] EA funding, at present, relative to global health, seems to be an artefact of Open Phil’s ‘worldview diversification,’ which imo is a lacklustre framework for decision-making, both in theory and in practice (see, e.g., Sempere, 2022).

Cost-effectiveness analyses I’ve seen indicate that animal welfare interventions, like cage-free campaigns, are really excellent uses of money—orders of magnitude more effective than leading global health interventions.

Though not central to my argument, there’s also the meat-eater problem, which I think is under-discussed.

1. ^{^}

   Surprisingly (to me), I wasn’t able to quickly find a more up-to-date breakdown of funding by cause area. (There’s this spreadsheet, but the cause areas are broken into sub-areas.)

• AW seems clearly more neglected in terms of funding inside the effective giving space and on net. *There is plenty of room for funding in the AW space, I would be surprised if this couldn't easily be spent down over the next 10 years in the AW space at > 50% of the cost-effectiveness of the current marginal dollar (on average).
• Most of my uncertainty comes from some credence that human lives are vastly more important than non-human animal lives, or medium-term growth being accelerated by GH interventions which could make GH work much more leveraged.

Most serious EA analysis I've seen seems to conclude helping animals is much more effective (i.e. Rethink Priorities work for example), so that's the view I currently weakly hold. Also, helping humans harms animals via the meat eater problem, reducing its value on meat, but there is no large effect the other way. Very open to changing my mind.

I want to note that this is more consensus than I thought in favour of the proposition. I would have guessed the median was much nearer 50% than it is. 

In terms of EA charities most commonly cited in these areas only, I think global health charities are much more well evidenced.

I think the most effective animal welfare interventions are probably more effective, I'm just much less sure what they are.

Animals win on scale & neglectedness while humans win on my (and maybe God's) speciesism bias (but if God exists I think He would appreciate us trying to help out animals i.e. His creations).

Humans kill about 1 trillion animals every year. https://sentientmedia.org/how-many-animals-are-killed-for-food-every-day/#:~:text=Chickens:%20206%20million/day,existed%20is%20just%20117%20billion. Many of them lead harsh, painful lives in factory farms and/or die a brutal death. And this doesn't even touch on wild animals suffering from non-human causes. 

To contrast, there are only 8 billion humans on Earth. 

8 billion is less than 1 trillion.

Large scale animal funding is in a worse state compared to global health. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GFkzLx7uKSK8zaBE3/we-need-more-nuance-regarding-funding-gaps 

Human welfare seems much less neglected than the welfare of factory farm animals. Even just an egg may represent many hours of suffering to produce. If insects are not so much less sentient than humans, their welfare could be a huge deal too.

So I favor animal welfare. But it's even better when it's backed by strategic thinking and a clear theory of impact. The total number of future sentient beings could be many orders of magnitude greater than the number of existing ones. We are unable to "feel how big" those numbers are, but it matters a lot, and it's no... (read more)

Animal welfare has much higher EV even under conservative assumptions. IMO only plausible argument against is that the evidence base for animal welfare interventions is much worse, so if you are very skeptical of unproven interventions, you might vote the other way. But you'd have to be very skeptical.

Another meta thing about the visuals is that I don't like the +[number] feature that makes it so can't tell, at a glance, that the voting is becoming very tilted towards the right side

Agree strongly with Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare

The numbers speak clearly to me with animal welfare dominating global health. That global health receives so much more funding than animal welfare from OP at the moment feels very strange to me.

Somewhat neutral, though I concur that animal welfare is more neglected and that a straightforward shortterm calculation is on the animal welfare side. However:

With AI, ensuring longevity for many people may be a better use, though I'm uncertain about the exact costs. Animals are more interchangeable than humans, and will die within not that long regardless, which means that ensuring more humans live longer lives is more valuable. The more people that live longer, the more that are able to participate in a possible longevity escape velocity.  (Theoret... (read more)

I'm pretty confident (~80-90%?) this is true, for reasons well summarized here.

I'm interested in thoughts on the OOM difference between animal welfare vs GHD (i.e. would $100m to animal welfare be 2x better than GHD, or 2000x?)

• I am directionally sympathetic to the arguments in this post.
• Good Ventures dropping out of some AW focused areas makes me think there might currently be promising gaps to fill (although it sounds like immediate gaps in some shrimp + wild animal orgs might be covered?)
• I'm not marking myself as higher mainly because I don't have good taste on how good the marginal AW focused funding proposals are right now, vs the marginal GH focused ones.

I think animal welfare is much more cost-effective, my slight skepticism comes from the idea of positive feedback loops and the knock-on effects in other cause areas.

The vast majority of sentient beings are non-human animals, and the problem of animal suffering is far more neglected compared to global health.

By my count, animal welfare is 100x more neglected than global health. I'm unsure how much bigger it is in scale (given that making trades between humans and animals is hard) — but I'd guess it's very very much larger in scale.

I am very convinced by the arguments presented in Ariel Simnegar's "Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare". I still have uncertainty in moral weights so am not 100% agree

I genuinely just don't know

Seems likely correct. I'm not fully certain because I wouldn't be that surprised to be wrong. It is much easier to help animals than people on the margin.

I update a bit more because I haven't read good arguments against and have seen some possible arguments debunked.

1. Causing unnecessary suffering is morally bad. Causing intense unnecessary suffering is morally worse.
2. Non-humans have the capacity to physically and psychologically suffer. The intensity of suffering they can experience is non-negligible, and plausibly, not that far off from that of humans. Non-humans have a dispreference towards being in such states of agony.
3. Non-human individuals are in constant and often intense states of agony in farmed settings. They also live short lives, sometimes less than 1/10th of their natural lifespan, which leads to loss of welf

seems like the marginal value is much higher

I currently agree pretty strongly, because the basic case for the quantity of animal suffering in factory farms is very strong. My uncertainty is over the tractability, and I hope to learn more about that, and adjust my vote, during the week. 

It seems plausible animals have moral patienthood and so the scale of the problem is larger for animals whilst also having higher tractability. At the same time, you have cascading effects of economic development into better decision making. As a longtermist, this makes me very uncertain on where to focus resources. I will therefore put myself in centrally to signal my high uncertainty.

I'm very unsure, but slightly lean towards animal welfare due to the heuristic that the further outside typical moral circles the more neglected are the opportunities

Animal welfare is much more neglected than global health (though maybe a bit less tractable).

Since animal welfare is highly related to the reality of human health like that of diet and pathogenic diseases, animal welfare is an important issue to tackle with.

The main reasons for going as far to the animal welfare side as I did:
-I suspect there are more unexplored opportunities to have an outsized impact on the animal welfare side due to neglectedness.
-The scale of the problem is very larger (~100 billion lives a year in meat production, and that's not even the entire problem).
-The meat eater problem plays a part as well. If you save someone and they go on eating meat, that could have a negative impact as well. However, this line of argumentation might be a can of worms.

Global health still has some weight due t... (read more)

Animal welfare is more important and more neglected, although tractability is less clear.

My soft sense is that great opportunities in the animal space face greater funding constraints than in the global health space. 

I support both clauses. I see a moral argument or at least a reasonable justification for favoring humans over animals, holding measured 'ability to feel pain constant'.

However, I'm convinced by the evidence that funding to support programs like corporate campaigns for cage-free eggs are likely to be effective, and have vastly higher welfare gains per dollar, by most reasonable measures of relative chicken/human welfare.

The animal welfare space has very little funding and $100 million is likely to make a substantial positive difference, both directly/immediately, and in shifting cultural and political attitudes.

(Placement confidence: fairly low) 

I'm envisioning putting the $100MM in a trust and (as an initial strategy) spending ~$15MM extra a year until expended.

I think others have stated the general case for animal welfare as particularly neglected (although I do not agree with many of those posts asserting an astronomical difference for various reasons). So I'll focus this comment on why I didn't initially place further along on the animal-welfare side:

(1) I tentatively think AW work can be particularly high effectiveness because it is often so leveraged; ... (read more)

In a nutshell - there is more suffering to address in non-human animals, and it is a more neglected area.

No clue, tough question

As several posts here have already highlighted, the total suffering endured by animals is far greater than that experienced by humans—unless we consider animal moral weights to be hundreds or thousands of times less important than our own.

Moreover, as shown by the Rethink Priorities researches, the cost-effectiveness of the best animal welfare organizations could be a lot more effective than the best short-term alternatives for humans.

Yet, funding for animal causes represents only a small fraction of Open Philanthropy's budget, which seems inconsistent.

If ... (read more)

I recently learned that the animal welfare accounts for only 3% of EA's funding, which seems far from proportional to other causes, taking into account the number of people affected, the degree of certainty that the pain exists (it's not hypothetical) and the intensity of the pain experienced. It therefore seems to me to be too neglected.

I based my vote on the fact that I have close to 0 doubt about the fact that antispecism is true (the fact that you can't discriminate someone on the base of his specie). 
If you consider antispecism true, you have to take in consideration that humanity is a really small part of all animals living. Moreover, we have pretty good reasons to think that animals are living in worse conditions than humans (pretty obvious for farm animals that live in industrial farms, more challenging intuitively for wild animals but many studies make us things that sufferin... (read more)

I read somewhere that around 2% of EA donations are allocated towards animal welfare. I don't know what an ideal world's split would be, but it would have AW funding at a lot higher than 2%. 

Animal welfare is (even) more neglected than global health. My sense is that $100M being spent in a coordinated manner would have an outsized effect on the field. It would help catalyze future organizations and future funding to a greater extent than it would if spent on global health.

Animal Welfare is so neglected... it is just mind-blowing. 

Animal welfare seems likely more tractable, substantially more important, and vastly more neglected. 

I am quite receptive to caveats about how easy it is so scale current orgs and interventions, but that seems more of a practical issue (than can partially be solved through more money?).

Other than that, I just think it's a crazy scale of very neglected suffering and the sooner we figure out how to make significant changes to the system the better.

I tend to agree with Ariel Simnegar's "Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare", however I still have some uncertainty in moral weights.

The $100m is much more likely to make irreversible progress on solving animal welfare issues than it is on global health, because the latter is way less neglected.

99 % of sentience is non human animals + the worst suffering in the world are the animal ones.

Several factors make me confident regarding the importance of this choice : the sheer scale and intensity of the suffering involved, the lower cost of helping nonhuman individuals in farms compared to humans, and the comparative small size of the aniimal welfare / advocacy movement giving $100m a potentially more important long-term impact.

In analyzing the $100 Million Dilemma—whether to prioritize saving human lives or endangered species—a more profound conceptual framework can be developed by integrating several underexplored dimensions that transcend the typical ethical and ecological perspectives.

1. Ecological Economics of Sustainability vs. Externalities of Anthropocentrism 

A key tension in this debate stems from the difference between immediate, human-centered interventions and systemic, ecosystem-centered conservation. The decision is framed as a zero-sum choice, when in reality,... (read more)