This announcement was written by Toby Tremlett, but don’t worry, I won’t answer the questions for Lewis.
Lewis Bollard, Program Director of Farm Animal Welfare at Open Philanthropy, will be holding an AMA on Wednesday 8th of May. Put all your questions for him on this thread before Wednesday (you can add questions later, but he may not see them).
Lewis leads Open Philanthropy’s Farm Animal Welfare Strategy, which you can read more about here. Open Philanthropy has given over 400 grants in its Farm Animal Welfare focus area, ranging from $15,000 to support animal welfare training for two veterinary researchers, to a three-year-long $13 million commitment to support Anima International.
Lewis has a BA in Social Studies from Harvard and a Law degree from Yale. Before starting at Open Philanthropy in 2015, he worked as, amongst other things, a Policy Advisor at the Humane Society of the United States.
Things I recommend reading/listening to to find out more about Lewis’s work:
- Lewis Bollard on the 7 most promising ways to end factory farming, and whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals - 80,000 Hours Podcast.
- Lewis’s previous Forum AMA.
- A written interview with Current Affairs, outlining why Factory Farming is a moral priority.
- Lewis’s Farm Animal Welfare Research newsletter. Recent posts have been crossposted to the Forum as:
Consider asking Lewis about:
- Lessons he has learned from historical activists.
- How Open Philanthropy chooses its focus areas: why chicken and fish?
- How you could most effectively help animals with your time or money.
- What he’s most excited about in the farm animal welfare space.
- What he thinks is behind the decline in plant-based meat sales.
- How he thinks about moral weights and tradeoffs between species.
- How he thinks EA has influenced the animal welfare movement.
- How he thinks AI may affect animal welfare.
- How to build career capital for a career in animal welfare.
But, as always, ask him anything!
I have in mind several different examples of cultural strategies that are well known in France, but probably less so (or not at all) in the US.
- One very effective cultural strategy is that of Paris Animaux Zoopolis / Projet Animaux Zoopolis (https://zoopolis.fr), which deals with wild animals (not RWAS) and liminal animals, but also recreational fishing and farmed fish for restocking rivers, and which, by changing the public's image of animals (e.g. rats), undoubtedly has a general cultural impact that changes the public's view of animals. PAZ uses the cultural (media) impact of its battles to put pressure on political figures (mayors, MPs) and achieve greater cultural effectiveness or even new laws (its other objective): I've written a description of the work of this association, and how it uses cultural struggle very effectively to bring about concrete, sometimes legislative changes. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cj2w9xd9vNjNBGuTpe_WNjIi816E_2roIx_FnK6cvug/edit
- A cultural strategy that would be more effective if it had a bit more funding: the organisation of the World Days for the End of Fishing (and Fish Farming: https://end-of-fishing.org) and for the End of Speciesism (https://end-of-speciesism. org), in which about a hundred organisations from all five continents participate each year (Africa is still poorly represented), and whose aim is to penetrate the culture of the animal advocacy movement by proposing that it take part in these World Days and that once a year (while waiting for something better!) it adopt a discourse centred either on the denunciation of speciesism or on the question of aquatic animals (fish, shrimps), elements that the movement hardly takes into account spontaneously. The strategy is cost-effective (one full-time staff member can reach two times a year hundreds of organisations, some of which will then carry out campaigns), but suffers from its limitations: one full-time staff member can't organise each year more than two days of action, nor can he or she better monitor and advise the organisations. The ideal situation would be to organise real campaigns throughout the year, or over two weeks, etc. In short, to have a full-time worker more. See more here:
https://end-of-fishing.org/en/theory-of-change/
https://end-of-fishing.org/en/plans/
https://end-of-fishing.org/en/kpis/
- One cultural and community-building strategy is the Réseau Sentience (Sentience Network), a network of student associations focused on challenging speciesism, promoting sentientism and effective altruism, and vegetalizing university canteens. It currently exists in France, but it would like to export it to the US, India and elsewhere. The network is now run by a small team, and each local branch is autonomous but linked to the network and run by students on a volunteer basis (and the branches are to some extent funded by their universities!) The number of actions carried out is significant, the aim is to occupy cultural space, and many students train as activists and then remain part of the movement, either joining existing organizations or creating new initiatives. See its Theory of Change: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tpaIfaUrG_7Wyach3O64iYE1fJnai-pgadyyswiXksw/edit
There are other examples, of course, such as annual meetings that are important for the movement itself, magazines and so on.
I think the work done by organizations like Animal Think Tank or Animal Ask, or Social Change Lab, is also very important, in terms of research into cultural change (often linked to political struggles and insitutional change).