Quick takes

EA Animal Welfare Fund almost as big as Coefficient Giving FAW now? This job ad says they raised >$10M in 2025 and are targeting $20M in 2026. CG's public Farmed Animal Welfare 2025 grants are ~$35M.   Is this right? Cool to see the fund grow so much either way.

More good news! Norwegian meat industry announced that they will stop using fast-growing chicken breeds by the end of 2027. These breeds are source of immense suffering due to the toll such rapid growth takes on animal's body. This will be the first country to stop using them. More here: https://animainternational.org/blog/norway-ends-fast-growing-chickens

One happy news for the world - Poland just banned fur farming. The legislative battle is over, the president of the country signed the bill, which is the last chapter of the process.

Independent of whether their approach is net positive or negative for factory farming, I feel like FarmKind missed an obvious slogan opportunity: "Have your steak and eat it too!"

Should GiveWell offer Animal Welfare regrants on an opt-in basis? The GiveWell FAQ (quoted below) suggests that GiveWell focuses exclusively on human-directed interventions primarily for reasons of specialization—i.e., avoiding duplication of work already done by Coefficient Giving and others—rather than due to a principled objection to recommending animal-focused charities. If GiveWell is willing to recommend these organizations when asked, why not reduce the friction a bit? A major part of GiveWell’s appeal has been its role as an “index fund for charities.” While ACE and similar groups offer something comparable for animal causes, GiveWell has a much larger donor base, and donors often prefer to consolidate their giving into a single recurring contribution. An optional Animal Welfare allocation could serve those donors better while remaining consistent with GiveWell’s stated reasoning.

I built an interactive chicken welfare experience - try it and let me know what you think Ever wondered what "cage-free" actually means versus "free-range"? I just launched A Chicken's World - a 5-minute interactive game where you experience four different farming systems from an egg-laying hen's perspective, then guess which one you just lived through and how common that system is. Reading "67 square inches per hen" is one thing, but actually trying to move around in that space is another. My hope is that the interactive format makes welfare conditions visceral in a way that statistics don't capture. The experience includes: * Walking through battery cage, cage-free, free-range, and pasture-raised systems * Cost-effectiveness data based on Rethink Priorities' research on corporate campaigns * A willingness-to-pay element leading to an optional donation to THL via Farmkind I'd welcome feedback: * Any factual errors I should correct? (The comparative advantage of early adopters here! Most of the fact-finding and red-teaming was done by LLMs.) * What would make it more useful to you personally? (You'll probably give me more useful feedback this way than if you try to model other users.) * What would make it work better as an outreach tool? (I built this with non-EA audiences in mind.) Try it: https://achickens.world/. (Backup link here if that doesn't work.) PS thanks Claude for the code, plus THL, RP, Farmkind for doing the actual important work; I'm just making a fun tool. This was a misc personal project, nothing to do with my employer.

Hey folks! I wanted to share a quick update on fundraising for the Center for Wild Animal Welfare (CWAW), as the year draws to a close, and as people consider finalising their end-of-year giving.  Our original forum post, announcing the launch of the Center and setting out the giving opportunity, is here.  We’ve had a great response, and have successfully raised our core Year 1 budget - whoop! The $60,000 1:1 donor match has been fully used up, so further donations to CWAW won’t be matched.  We are still gladly accepting donations, which will be used for ‘stretch’ items in CWAW’s budget - things such as public polling and focus groups to inform comms and policy development, contracting experts for advice on specific policy areas, subscriptions for parliamentary and media monitoring, joining professional and policy networks, running events such as policy report launches, improving our website, and expanding our capacity for ‘mainstream’ fundraising. We think that these items offer substantial value for money at the margin.   If you’d like to support our mission, it’s super easy to donate, and there are a variety of tax-efficient giving options (for various countries). Please see the original forum post for full details.  If you’re considering making an end-of-year gift, and have any questions - whether to help you weigh up the strength of CWAW as a giving opportunity, or on logistics - please feel free to reach out to Ben and I at team@wildanimalwelfare.org.  I’m also delighted to share that we will be launching a newsletter to keep people up to date about CWAW’s work. Whether you’re a donor or not, if you’d like to receive this, please do sign up here.  Cheers, and happy new year! 

An informal research agenda on robust animal welfare interventions and adjacent cause prioritization questions Context: As I started filling out this expression of interest form to be a mentor for Sentient Futures' project incubator program, I came up with the following list of topics I might be interested in mentoring. And I thought it was worth sharing here. :) (Feedback welcome!) Animal-welfare-related research/work: 1. What are the safest (i.e., most backfire-proof)[1] consensual EAA interventions? (overlaps with #3.c and may require #6.) 1. How should we compare their cost-effectiveness to that of interventions that require something like spotlighting or bracketing (or more thereof) to be considered positive?[2] (may require A.) 2. Robust ways to reduce wild animal suffering 1. New/underrated arguments regarding whether reducing some wild animal populations is good for wild animals (a brief overview of the academic debate so far here). 2. Consensual ways of affecting the size of some wild animal populations (contingent planning that might become relevant depending on results from the above kind of research). 1. How do these and the safest consensual EAA interventions (see 1) interact? 3. Preventing the off-Earth replication of wild ecosystems. 3. Uncertainty on moral weights (some relevant context in this comment thread). 1. Red-teaming of different moral weights that have been explicitly proposed and defended (by Rethink Priorities, Vasco Grilo, ...). 2. How and how much do cluelessness arguments apply to moral weights and inter-species tradeoffs? 3. What actions are robust to severe uncertainty about inter-species tradeoffs? (overlaps with #1.) 4. Considerations regarding the impact of saving human lives (c.f. top-GiveWell charities) on farmed and wild animals. (may require 3 and 5.) 5. The impact of agriculture on soil nematodes and other numerous soil animals, in terms of total population. 6. Evaluating the backfi