Quick takes

I would advise being careful with RP's Cross-cause effectiveness tool as it currently stands, especially with regards to the chicken campaign. There appears to be a very clear conversion error which I've detailed in the edit to my comment here. I was also unable to replicate their default values from their source data, but I may be missing something. 

I was going through Animal Charity Evaluators' reasoning behind which countries to prioritize (https://animalcharityevaluators.org/charity-review/the-humane-league/#prioritizing-countries) and I notice they judge countries with a higher GNI per capita as more tractable. This goes against my intuition, because my guess is your money goes further in countries that are poorer. And also because I've heard animal rights work in Latin America and Asia is more cost-effective nowadays. Does anyone have any hypotheses/arguments? This quick take isn't meant as criticism, I'm just informing myself as I'm trying to choose an animal welfare org to fundraise for this week (small, low stakes). When I have more time I'd be happy to do more research and contact ACE myself with these questions, but right now I'm just looking for some quick thoughts.

In America, dining services influence far more meals than vegans' personal consumption Aramark, Compass Group, etc. each serve billions of meals annually, and even the largest individual correctional facilities, hospital campuses, school districts, public universities, baseball stadiums, etc. each serve millions of meals annually to largely captive audiences

Are you an EU citizen? If so, please sign this citizen’s initiative to phase out factory farms (this is an approved EU citizen’s initiative, so if it gets enough signatures the EU has to respond): stopcrueltystopslaughter.com It also calls for reducing the number of animal farms over time, and introducing more incentives for the production of plant proteins. (If initiatives like these interest you, I occasionally share more of them on my blog) EDIT: If it doesn't work, try again in a couple hours/days. The collection has just started and the site may be overloaded. The deadline is in a year, so no need to worry about running out of time.

I saw the following quote from Bill Gates in an interview that he recently did with Dylan Scott from Vox: "The idea of these chickens that lay a lot of eggs or cows that make a lot of milk, the beauty of that is once you improve the genetics of the African cows, that’s a gift that keeps on giving. That’s a teaching a man to fish type thing where, as we mix the super productivity of Western dairy cows together with the heat and disease tolerance that African cows have, you can get something that’s 75 percent as productive as a [dairy cow], which is four times the milk productivity of the cows that are in Africa today. It’ll take five years before, say, half the cows in Africa get that, but that’s a gigantic thing because that’s income for women, that’s milk for the kids where malnutrition, vitamin deficiency, and protein deficiency are gigantic. Cheap eggs, cheap chickens, and cheap milk are a big part of this. We’ve already cut the cost of eggs in Ethiopia in half. We see the poorest households actually using twice as many eggs as they used before because they’ve become a lot more affordable. Those egg factories and milk factories, getting those into Africa in the hands of the smallholder farmers, that’s pretty powerful." This seems like a worrying and salient example of the meat-eater problem. It also seems like there are lots of cost-effective Global Health & Development interventions that don't involve this trade-off with animal welfare that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation could be pursuing.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/ is a great American nonprofit resource: New Incentives in particular seems poised to spend much more after large ~Givewell cash grants

For a different kind of FarmKind post:  FarmKind includes an offset calculator on its website, the results of which are roughly 1-3 orders of magnitude higher than some of the offset calculations I've seen on-Forum (e.g., here and here).   I'm personally skeptical about offset arguments for various reasons. But -- although I haven't dug under the hood too much -- FarmKind's calculation (of $23/month for an average omnivore) seems to at least mitigate many of my objections as a practical matter.  Why the differences from other approaches? Some of this may be due to using a bucket of interventions to calculate offset, which may mitigate some negative effects that can flow from focusing heavily on certain types of interventions which score best on perceived cost-effectiveness. However, some of the difference also appears to come from a design choice that has the effect of pushing up the figure (i.e., the idea that if you consume a certain type of animal or its output, then your offsetting activity should reduce an equivalent amount of suffering in that species, rather than any morally equivalent amount of farmed-animal suffering). In the end, I suspect my own computation would be even higher than FarmKind's for various reasons (e.g., I suspect they still give too much "credit" to the donor in the context of offsetting).[1] But it strikes me as at least in the right direction, and mitigates some practical concerns with publicizing and internalizing very low offset numbers.[2] I've put a specification of those reasons and concerns in footnotes to keep this a quick take and keep it somewhat more focused on FarmKind's work than my personal musings about offsets.     1. ^ In more detail: * Many theories of change in farmed-animal welfare end up placing additional costs on third parties. When we are deciding where to spend our charitable dollar, that's fine! But in an offset situation, I don't think it is proper to spend $1 to influence action that

Striking paper by Anant Sudarshan and Eyal Frank (via Dylan Matthews at Vox Future Perfect) on the importance of vultures as a keystone species.  To quote the paper and newsletter — the basic story is that vultures are extraordinarily efficient scavengers, eating nearly all of a carcass less than an hour after finding it, and farmers in India historically relied on them to quickly remove livestock carcasses, so they functioned as a natural sanitation system in helping to control diseases that could otherwise be spread through the carcasses they consume. In 1994, farmers began using diclofenac to treat their livestock, due to the expiry of a patent long held by Novartis leading to the entry of cheap generic brands made by Indian companies. Diclofenac is a common painkiller, harmless to humans, but vultures develop kidney failure and die within weeks of digesting carrion with even small residues of it. Unfortunately this only came to light via research published a decade later in 2004, by which time the number of Indian vultures in the wild had tragically plummeted from tens of millions to just a few thousands today, the fastest for a bird species in recorded history and the largest in magnitude since the extinction of the passenger pigeon.  When the vultures died out, far more dead animals lay around rotting, transmitting pathogens to other scavengers like dogs and rats and entering the water supply. Dogs and rats are less efficient than vultures at fully eliminating flesh from carcasses, leading to a higher incidence of human contact with infected remains, and they're also more likely to transmit diseases like anthrax and rabies to people. Sudarshan and Frank estimate that this led to ~100,000(!) additional deaths each year from 2000-05 due to a +4.2%(!) increase in all-cause mortality among the 430 million people living in districts that once had a lot of vultures, which is staggering; this is e.g. more than the death toll in 2001 from HIV/AIDS (92,000), malaria