Quick takes

There are two UK government consultations closing March 9th, for: (1) banning cages for 7 million hens, and (2) reducing the pain that castration and tail docking practices for lambs cause, such as requiring pain relief. In the UK are 7 million hens (21%) still in cages, and roughly 17 million lambs that go through these painful procedures every year.  You can use these guides to make your response, to make these changes more likely to happen:  Hens: https://tinyurl.com/cage-consultation  Lambs: https://tinyurl.com/lamb-consultation  If you prefer, you can sign up for this online event on Sunday 5pm-6pm UTC, where we'll be writing and submitting our responses together. 

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

Farmed animal welfare is one of the most important cause areas out there. Though we’ve written about animal welfare broadly before, we recently published a dedicated piece on farmed animals specifically. Given how often this cause area shows up on our job board and throughout our content, we thought it deserved its own standalone overview, which covers: * How different farmed animals are treated, including fish, crustaceans, and insects. * Promising approaches already reducing suffering at scale. * Why farmed animal welfare remains highly neglected despite its enormous scale. * Concrete ways you can get involved, whether through your career or otherwise. It’s intended as an approachable introduction to the cause area; if you're already familiar with farmed animal welfare, especially through other EA content, you probably won't be surprised by much here. But if you're new to the topic or looking for a solid overview to share with others, you might find it useful. You can read the full article here.

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!"

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.

Researchers simulate an entire fly brain on a laptop. Is a human brain next? What is the implication of this for EA thinking? Does the fly that purely exists in the computer warrant moral consideration, and could we increase the overall welfare of the world by making millions of these simulations with ideal fruit-fly conditions?    They fully copied the brain of the fly, so from my understanding it should also feel pleasure and pain in theory, I think this poses a real conundrum for EA morality.