Quick takes

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!"

FarmKind is openly hostile towards veganism, which makes no sense. See this stunt here: https://www.gbnews.com/news/veganuary-actvist-meat-eating-campaign and this social media video in which they refer to people being "tricked into going vegan": https://www.instagram.com/p/DQuPg0VjMJf/ Obviously discouraging veganism is completely antithetical to reducing animal suffering, because: the vegan movement is the best pool we have for effective animal advocates; opposing veganism while ostensing to advocate for animals sends a weak moral message that reduces moral pressure on industrial farming; being non-vegan = funding industrial farming. What is the point of this?

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! 

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.

Quick math: In terms of total expected suffering averted, inviting a group of friends to a barbecue where the main meat is beef is probably more impactful than eating a vegan meal by yourself. According to Faunalytics' Animal Product Impact Scales, a serving of chicken requires approximately 10 times as many days of animal life to produce as a serving of beef (not adjusted for quality of life or moral weights). Additionally, most seafood is much, much worse than this. If this meal prevents your friends from going and eating those other foods, tricking them into eating beef will likely do more good than eating a vegan meal by yourself.  Still, this may not be as impactful as saving your money and donating it directly to impactful charities. Saving a single dollar on food and donating it to the SWP will probably do more to reduce suffering than hosting a barbecue.  Also, you might expose yourself to various forms of value drift by hosting a barbecue, but I could see this happening in a net positive (hosting more barbecues in the future) or a net negative (giving up on veganism entirely/permanently failing to convince any of your friends to give up meat) direction.

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, Vaso 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 backfir

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.

On sparing predatory bugs. A common trope when it comes to predatory arthropods is, e.g., "Don't kill spiders; they're good to have around because they eat other bugs."[1] But, setting aside the welfare of the beings that get eaten, surely this is not people's true objection. Surely this reasoning fails a reversal test: few people would say "Centipedes are good to have around... therefore I'm going to order a box of them and release them into my house."[2] What is implied by the fact that non-EA people are willing to spare bugs based on reasoning that is, by their own lights, thin? I think it indicates that many (most?) people have some instinctive empathy even for arthropods and when they are given the choice to kill one, they will look for reasons to avoid it. So, while I think there may be better reasons to avoid killing bugs, their reasons may be a positive sign that people can be persuaded to be more pro-animal when animal suffering is made salient to them. 1. ^  For example: an article titled "Why you should never squash a house centipede" states: This post is not intended to be for or against squashing centipedes or spiders; I don't have a strong take on that topic. 2. ^ If you only care about reducing the total amount of bugs in your house and not about the welfare of those bugs, surely the optimal thing to do is to squash the centipedes and then also do things to prevent other bugs.