This post is mostly about how animal welfare is less popular than global health but I don't really see the tie-in for how this (probably correct) claim translates to it being less effective. Taking the first argument at face value, that some people won't like being in some ways forced to pay more or change their habits, does not seem to translate to "it is not cost effective to do successfully force them (and one hopes eventually change their hearts and minds) anyway." This was precisely the case for a lot of social movements (abolition, women's suffrage, civil rights, worker's rights, the environmental movement, etc.) but all these movements were to various degrees successful.

It seems to me that in order for any of these popularity based arguments to hold water, you need a follow-on of "and therefore it is not cost effective to invest in them, and here is the evidence." However, I think we have a lot of evidence for cost-effectiveness in investing animal interventions. See cage-free egg campaigns for example. I similarly don't understand the relevance of other popularity-based concerns, such as being accused of being culturally insensitive. What is the implication for effectiveness if such accusations are made? Why does that matter?

Wild animals and weirdness

Section 4 ("The weirdest stuff will put people off the moderate stuff") argues that perceptions of the weirdness of a given cause or intervention "create blocks to uptake and prevents people from supporting the more moderate parts of the same movement." 

Insofar as this is true, it's important to know the degrees of perceived weirdness. To my pleasant surprise, I've found that wild animal welfare seems much less weird to most people than it does to most EAs. This is based on my experience working at Wild Animal Initiative for the last five years, hearing my colleagues' reports of their conversations with people (primarily scientists), and generally talking about it at every chance I get (both with EAs and non-EAs).

Apologies for the forthcoming generalizations about EAs. I'm trying to describe general patterns; I'm not trying to flatten everyone into one caricature.

How the idea is introduced

In my experience, EAs often explain wild animal welfare along these lines: "Nature is really brutal. The animals with the worst lives are the most numerous. We should destroy habitat or eliminate predators." 

In contrast, my colleagues and I have settled on an approach that's closer to this: "You seem like you care about animals. So do we. People talk a lot about human harms to animals, but there's so much we don't know about naturally occurring harms. We think it would be good to protect wild animals from things like disease or starvation if we could. But ecosystems are really complicated, so that's why we're focused on doing research first."

It turns out most people respond really well to that. In fact, our biggest communication challenge is not people thinking we're too weird, but rather people not thinking we're weird enough. That is, "reducing wild animal suffering" sounds a lot like "protecting endangered species." They get the overlap quickly; it's the differences that take longer to explain.

What things are discussed

In my experience, most EA discussions of wild animal welfare focus on extreme thought experiments, extreme interventions, and core philosophical principles. My hypothesis is that that's largely because of a temperamental inclination toward abstraction and consistency, which is why many of us (including me) like to steer conversations toward areas of deepest disagreement or highest uncertainty. 

Turns out there's no rule that says you have to single out whatever someone loves most and declare it must be wiped from this earth. The thought experiments and zany interventions are also of only limited usefulness, because they're almost completely untethered from the considerations that will guide the next steps of research and movement-building.

So we and other researchers in the field mostly discuss things that are both more palatable and more achievable in the near term (or at least representative of how we might do things in the near term, which "feeding lions cultivated meat via drones" is not): vaccination against diseases, contraception to prevent starvation, promoting habitats/land uses that host populations with higher total welfare than the alternatives, reducing sources of stress, etc.

Baseline attitudes toward nature

I think most people in the industrialized West like wildlife. It seems like the default is people seeing themselves on the same side as animals (e.g., happy to see them at all, sad to see them suffer), and exceptions come when people come into direct conflict with animals (urban pest species, predators of livestock, etc.). Crucially, these attitudes seem to be not just about preferences ("I like animals"), but also tied into identity at a very basic, nonpartisan level: "I'm the kind of person who appreciates wildlife," "Nice people are nice to animals," etc. I've singled out "animals" here, but in reality these preferences and identities tend to bundle animals and nature into one, and "nature" is what's mentioned more often: "Nature is beautiful," "I'm the kind of person who respects nature," etc.

Before I got involved in EA, I had only ever met a handful of people who disliked nature. (They were all kids -- I was also a kid -- who grew up in densely urban areas, and their main issue seemed to be with bugs, particularly mosquitoes.) Now that I'm deep in the EA bubble and talking about nature a lot, I've met tons of EAs who say they've always disliked nature: they thought it was obviously cruel, harsh, unwelcoming, gross, etc. (I even met one person who said they didn't even understand why anyone thought natural vistas looked beautiful until a psychedelic experience gave them that experience for the first time.) Either I grew up super sheltered (likely true), or EA has a way of attracting weirdos (definitely true -- again, I offer myself as evidence).

Another thing that causes many EAs to underestimate how willing -- how excited -- most people are to help wildlife is their experiences advocating for farmed animals. Most people have very different attitudes toward farmed animals than wild animals, and they have a vested interest in not changing what they eat or how our economy works. As Henry points out, mocking vegans is a cultural norm, and sometimes even part of people's identities. Fortunately, when asked to help wild animals, people don't interpret that as an attack on their integrity or their lifestyle, so they don't have the same defensive reaction.

Conclusion

That was wordier than I expected. All I really wanted to say is I know we can make "mass vaccination eco-engineering projects to limit unnecessary wild animal suffering from disease" sound pretty weird, but most people think "protecting wildlife from diseases" sounds like a pretty good idea. There are still lots of challenges to people fully understanding, accepting, and improving wild animal welfare, but we shouldn't make those challenges out to be worse than they are.

I'm surprised by how much of this post is in the future tense and framed as imagining what will happen if we do animal welfare reform. Animal welfare reform has been a part of EA for around as long as EA has existed, and there's now more than a decade of track record to look at. So when you say things like:

Where the intervention is imposed, there will be resistance and that will limit progress.

Discussions of banning cage eggs or regulations for shrimp welfare will quickly turn into conspiracies [...]

The argument that human welfare pales in comparison to chicken [...] will come across to many as cold, out-of-touch, privileged, classist. This will generate resistance to the animal welfare movement and EA more broadly.

[...] there will be accusations of cultural insensitivity [...]

my response is, well, we already did all this stuff, did we see these negative side effects or not?

Thanks so much for this excellent list Henry. Although I personally agree with only some of these as being major issues, I think it's the best collection of well structured arguments of problems with a potential shift towards animal welfare that I've seen.

Things I agree are major issues

• approximations are too approximate
• slippery slope argument moving towards pascal's mugging type scenarios
• the weirdest stuff can put people off the more moderate stuff, I've seen this already while introducing people to EA. It's a tricky issue to manage though as I think we need to be researching and working on the weird regardless if the impact is enough.

Things I personally don't think are a big issue

• Resistance, as many critically important stuff transformative movements in our time and before met huge resistance. Even things like giving free HIV drugs in Africa
• outcomes harder to measure. Often animal welfare has great success feedback loops, better than global health. Think shrimp stunners or battery farmed hens where you know pretty fast if you're winning or not. I agree the benefits are hard to measure with wide error bars, but as a global health guy I'm actually quite envious of animal welfare work feedback loops.
• from a Ugandan perspective at least I don't think there's much risk of being called "culturally insensitive", that's more of a Western liberal framework I think. People here just laugh at me or give me weird looks when taking about animal welfare. I haven't yet met someone who really cares, but I'm also not going to be accused of being culturally insensitive as that just isn't a framework people here really have.

8. Will be called culturally insensitive

Animal products are a core part of many cultures. EA Funds directs "grants to advocacy organizations working in 26 countries". Most of these are in Western countries currently. As time goes on (maybe already?) the majority of animals will be raised/killed/consumed in India, Southeast Asia and Africa.

Global health is less burdened with accusations of imposed Western Values because not dying of diarrhea, measles or lead poisoning and not having cataracts are mostly universal cultural traits

Plenty of work has been done outside the West, e.g. through the Open Wing Alliance. Several ACE recommendations work primarily outside the West. AFAIK, we aren't really being called culturally insensitive so far. So, this doesn't seem to be materializing, or at least not in a way that's seriously hindering us.

And costly welfare reforms will only go through where they are reasonably aligned with the values of the producers or consumers (possibly sometimes aligned only with end consumers in the West, not with the non-Western producers for imported products). I think EAA grantmakers and the EAA orgs they support are basically as sensitive to cultural values as they need to be. Outreach is usually carried out mostly by local advocates. Consideration of cultural values also affects organizational strategies, like what kind of outreach is done, e.g. less antagonistic in East Asia, if I recall correctly.

9. Outcomes will be harder to measure, we won't get feedback on progress

My understanding is that no one is seriously verifying how many deaths or disease cases GiveWell-recommended charities have prevented. Rather, studies of the effectiveness of the types of interventions these charities use are generalized, with adjustments for context. There's a risk that we're just missing something, say that the program isn't implemented as expected, or we've made the wrong adjustments for context. As far as I can tell, we're only tracking inputs, and then we're estimating the outputs. The cost-effectiveness analyses are effectively ex ante or prospective. (Maybe except for GiveDirectly, for which there have been RCTs.)

Animal welfare intervention cost-effectiveness analyses seem more ex post or retrospective. For corporate outreach, we track which companies have made commitments, and we track progress on those commitments, e.g. % of their eggs cage-free with EggTrack.

There is still the problem of assessing causal impact, of course, and there's been some formal (observational/non-RCT) research on this (Mendez & Peacock, 2022) and some more informal analyses, including fact-checking accomplishments and what the industry had otherwise planned.

We also do have analyses of the welfare effects of some major animal welfare reforms in terms of duration and intensity of suffering reduced through Welfare Footprint Project, and some other similar projects. But these are not specific to the work of specific non-profits, so not really ex post/retrospective.

2. Too socially acceptable to dismiss

Saving children from malaria, diarrheal disease, lead poisoning, or treating cataracts and obstetric fistula is hard to argue against without sounding like a bad person.

I think this is also true for some of the more moderate/less weird animal welfare reforms we ask for:

1. not keeping birds or mammals in cages or crates their whole lives,
2. not using breeds of chickens that grow so fast they have chronic pain, and
3. humane slaughter.

But this may be less true for plant-based advocacy, invertebrate welfare and wild animal welfare. Open Phil has stopped funding work in the last two.

"There seems to be movement towards animal welfare interventions and away from global health interventions."

What is this based on? I don't believe this tracks with e.g. distribution of EA-associated donations.

I strongly disagree that we should avoid doing a thing just because the optics/vibes of it might not be mainstream, or that it requires people to change what they're doing.

I am also strongly against "we shouldn't do this because it is culturally insensitive." There are lots of cultural practices I find abhorrent (e.g., female genital mutilation). I don't care if stopping it "offends" other people. Cultures are perfectly capable of promoting very bad practices. 

This is not trying to do the most good with limited resources. This is "trying to do the most good with limited resources, subject to the constraint of not making some people angry or seeming too weird." 

(For what it's worth, I voted fairly strongly on the side of spending on more on global health as opposed to animal welfare.)

I think this post is overall great, even though I favour animal over global health stuff right now, but doing stuff just for the optics feels really sleazy and naive utilitarian to me. 

I think you are too optimistic about how much the average person in the global north care about people in the global south (and possibly too pessimistic about how much people care about animals, but less confident about that). 

"Saving children from malaria, diarrheal disease, lead poisoning, or treating cataracts and obstetric fistula is hard to argue against without sounding like a bad person." 

The argument that you should help locally instead (even if the people making that argument don't do so) is easily made without sounding like a bad person. I live in the Netherlands and any spending on developmental cooperation or charity work tends to be very unpopular, our current government also pledged to cut a lot of that spending. Pushback on 'giving money to Africa' is something I certainly encounter, it might be less than for being vegan but I'm not sure and also not sure by how much. I would want better data on this, this piece seems to assume a big difference in how socially acceptable, moderate and politizised global health is compared to animal welfare. I would like to see better data on whether that assumption is true or not.

I find the slippery slope argument pretty weak, historically expanding the moral circle (to women, slaves, people of color, lhbtqi+ people) has been quite important and still requires a lot of work. It seems much easier to not go far enough than to go too far, and expanding the moral circle to animals or people in the global south is both an expansion. A core strength of EA is that there is a lot of attention to groups that are outside the moral circle of many comperatively affluent and wealthy people or institutions (the global poor, animals, and future generations). The slippery-slope argument is only meaningful if going down the slope would be bad, which is unclear to me.

The attempts by the Rethink Priorities Welfare Range Estimates project to create a framework for comparing animal suffering is necessary for doing the cost-benefit analyses we would need to decide whether the cost to humans of an intervention is worth the benefit to animals. Unfortunately these ranges have such wide confidence intervals that, putting aside the question of whether the methodology and ranges are even valid, it doesn't seem to get us any closer to doing the necessary cost-benefit analyses.

we have no objective way to measure animal suffering and compare it to our intuitive feelings about human welfare

This can also cut the other way if we're trying to ensure we have a positive impact (difference-making risk averse or difference-making ambiguity averse). We have no objective way to measure how much potential harm saving humans or improving their incomes does to nonhuman animals through the meat eater problem or wild animal effects.

Thanks for the post, Henry.

Unfortunately these ranges have such wide confidence intervals that, putting aside the question of whether the methodology and ranges are even valid, it doesn't seem to get us any closer to doing the necessary cost-benefit analyses.

Large uncertainty also means a high cost-effectiveness of animal welfare research which tries to decrease the uncertainty, given the high value of information.

The challenges you've identified regarding the shift from global health to animal welfare—such as resistance, politicization, and cultural insensitivity—largely stem from insufficient communication, which can be significantly improved with more funding. By investing in effective messaging strategies, we can make animal welfare interventions more relatable and acceptable to the broader public, thereby increasing their popularity and impact. Moreover, the Effective Altruism community risks reputational damage by advocating for animal welfare without adequately investing in public communication; without a strong messaging system, we may alienate potential supporters and undermine our efforts. Therefore, allocating more resources to both animal welfare initiatives and their communication is crucial—not only to address these concerns but also to enhance the movement's credibility and ensure our interventions are both effective and well-received.

I am willing to discuss (either in the comments or on a call) any of these arguments. I don't think any of them hold much water and I doubt that in total they are enough to shift the weight of what we should do.

I am glad @Henry Howard🔸 wrote them up, but to the extent there is now a big list of arguments I don't find compelling I am slightly more convinced. 

I agree with most of these points, but many of them don’t really argue against the forum question as posed. (Not that you were saying they do.).

The “should” in the question, in my mind, seems to rule out these second order image concerns, difficulty of garnering support, etc.

I agree with many of the points made in the above comment but do not plan to change my vote.  When one looks at current expenditures on public health (in the many $trillions of dollars) versus on animal welfare (around $9 billion in revenues annually in the USA), the marginal increase in the utility of grants in the animal welfare space are likely to be greater than those in public health.  Open Philanthropy's history project comments on the challenge of producing positive impact in the health space given the large amounts currently devoted annually to support biomedical research let alone the much larger amounts devoted to health treatment, disease surveillance, and prevention.  

Pressuring people and entities to do things they would rather not do (like incurring business expenses to improve animal welfare) can be a powerful mechanism of action (MOA), both because of leverage and because certain objectives may be hard to accomplish otherwise.

But it has some important limitations as well, several of which relate to your points. The reliance on consumer, social, or political pressure limits the range of viable targets, likely requires pulling some punches to maintain the public support needed for the MOA to work, invites countermeasures by opponents who can appeal to (e.g.) a higher power like the legislature, and so on.

Thus, it doesn't generally play well with (e.g.) an attitude of truthseeking-and-damn-the-torpedoes or something that looks like an epistemic precommitment to not caring what outsiders think. Those stances may work with bednets and conducting certain types of research where little third-party support/cooperation is needed, but I'd note how those interventions are not nearly as leveraged.

Executive summary: The shift from global health to animal welfare interventions in effective altruism may backfire due to various challenges, including resistance to imposed changes, social dismissal, politicization, and difficulties in measuring outcomes.

Key points:

1. Animal welfare interventions often involve imposed regulations, leading to resistance from farmers and consumers.
2. Animal welfare arguments are more easily dismissed socially compared to global health initiatives.
3. Animal welfare is more politicized, potentially generating conspiracies and opposition.
4. Extreme animal welfare arguments may alienate people from supporting more moderate positions.
5. Research on animal welfare faces significant measurement challenges and may yield few actionable results.
6. Expanding moral circles to include more animals risks slippery slope arguments and accusations of valuing animals over humans.

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.