Animal welfareAnimal welfare
Reducing suffering experienced by farmed animals and wild animals
Posts tagged Animal welfare
Quick takes
Animal welfare is a core focus area within effective altruism. It focuses on ways to improve the wellbeing of nonhuman animals, primarily in factory farms and in the wild.
Animals currently make up the vast majority of sentient beings. As many as 2.8 trillion animals might be killed for food each year, and there are many more wild animals.[1] Although many experts agree that animals display some signs of sentience, it remains an open question which animals are sentient, and how we should compare welfare between different sentient species.
Despite its importance, animal welfare is highly neglected: animal charities receive only 3% of charitable donations, and 99% of that money is focused on pets, who make up less than 0.1% of all domesticated animals.[1]
The area also appears to be somewhat tractable. Open Philanthropy estimates that past corporate cage-free campaigns have spared about 120 years of suffering in battery cages per dollar donated.[2]
Some people focus more narrowly on farmed animal welfare or on wild animal welfare.
Some have argued that, if one takes the view that future beings matter morally, interventions that seek to improve short-term animal welfare may not be as cost-effective as interventions that seek to influence the far future, given the astronomical number of animals that could potentially exist. In response, others have argued that attempts to improve short-term animal welfare will also have strongly positive indirect long-term effects.[1] An objection to that argument is that it would be remarkable if an intervention selected for its short-term effects just happened to have better long-run consequences than all other interventions.[3] In addition, critics have noted that there are theoretical reasons for expecting interventions focused on humans to have better long-run effects than interventions focused on animals.[4] The considerations bearing on this issue are numerous, complex, and hard to assess, and the debate is currently unresolved.[5]
Humans have actively worked against promoting the welfare of wild city rats throughout history. Aside from primates, they are some of the most closely related non-human animals to H. sapiens, yet we know very little about how they live outside of laboratory settings (i.e., often dystopian, prison-like conditions). In order to enhance their welfare in the wild and in laboratories, there is a huge need to develop and deploy technologies to study their behavior. Such studies would also benefit global human health and biosecurity efforts because rats can serve as vectors of disease, sources of infrastructural damage, and pose a threat to stored foods.
There are very few researchers working in this space across the globe, and I am one of the few (pre-PhD, looking for programs where I can complete my doctorate) who has the experience with + concern for rats and software/hardware/IoT development & design skills necessary to push this area of research further in a manner that embraces total harm-reduction (as opposed to eliminationist) thinking/strategies. Am I in the right place for starting conversation(s) on this topic? Should I repost this some other way?
Hopefully I'm posting this in the correct context + idea development status, it's my first post on the site. I found out about the potential for research funding opportunities last weekend while attending a conference at GWU Law School and figured it is worth a shot, given the sad state of affairs with research funding lately.
With Who Let the Docs Out now taking applications, here are a couple of quick thoughts from an evaluation of Blackfish.
Blackfish is the film everyone points to. A few years ago I looked at whether it actually caused SeaWorld’s troubles, using stock market data and interviews with 26 people from marine parks, zoo associations, animal welfare NGOs, the film crew, marine science and narrative research. (Blackfish paper; plain-English write-up in The Conversation). We used General Elimination Methodology to test the competing explanations. Some didn’t hold up. In 2013 SeaWorld’s Orlando and California parks lost visitors while Universal and Disney gained them, so tighter household budgets can’t explain the drop.
Blackfish did contribute to the fall in attendance and share price, the redesigned orca show and the end of the breeding programme. Interviewees put its impact down to four things:
Some advice for farmed animal documentary filmmakers:
Happy to talk to any filmmakers or funders thinking about evaluation.
Quick take only for now because this is basically a social media post:
Updates on the Animal Futures tournament in progress: https://uj-animal-futures-update.netlify.app/
Some highlights: Solid participation, one cultivated-meat approval question already resolved, and a mixed bag of forecasts for animals.
Some good "news" for advocates: Forecasters give the Save Our Bacon Act 3% and the Canary Islands octopus farm 1%, expect about half of Europe's top 20 grocers to have shrimp welfare commitments, and see in-ovo sexing spreading in the EU (~44% of layers) (but barely in the US ~3%).
Less good, especially for the US: ~80% for at least one more state cultivated-meat ban, 2% for plant-based reaching 10% of US retail by 2031, and low expected fulfillment of 2026 corporate chicken pledges.
But I think predicting the future doesn't help much unless it informs decisions.
Help us: Who should we be sharing this with? What forecast would change a grant, campaign, or policy decision? Decisionmakers: what threshold matters, and what evidence would you need? Add your comments here, on that page, or DM.
And you can still play: https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/33016/
Metaculus Sentient Futures
Start with journals: a cheap governance test for AI animal-communication tools
A recent Guardian feature on AI and animal communication brought renewed attention to the PEPP Framework (Prepare, Engage, Prevent, Protect), developed by NYU’s More Than Human Life Program for the responsible development and use of nonhuman animal communication technologies.
PEPP is quite ambitious. Its 12 principles cover risk assessment, precaution, animal autonomy and best interests, transparency, responsibility, remediation, and other issues that could become increasingly important if AI systems get better at interpreting or reproducing animal signals. The framework is currently voluntary and its authors envisage it evolving as the field develops.
My tentative view is that scientific journals may be the most promising place to start turning some of these principles into actual requirements, at least while this remains predominantly a research field.
Funders have leverage, but only over the work they fund. Research ethics bodies matter earlier in the process, although their mandates and practices differ considerably across institutions and jurisdictions. Regulation will eventually matter most for some applications, especially commercial deployment or interactions with protected wildlife, but the field may still be too immature for a detailed regulatory regime.
Journals occupy an unusual leverage. Publication is a recurring bottleneck across the research ecosystem, and journals already routinely require researchers to disclose ethical approval, methods, conflicts of interest and compliance with reporting standards. For research involving AI mediated communication, they could require authors to report things such as whether playback or generated signals altered animal behaviour, how risks to the animals were assessed, what validation methods were used, and whether adverse effects occurred.
There is also a useful precedent from animal research itself.
The ARRIVE guidelines, first published in 2010, were designed to improve reporting of animal experiments. They eventually received endorsement from more than 1,000 journals as well as funders and universities. Yet evidence of improved reporting remained limited. The lesson seems important: endorsement alone did very little. ARRIVE 2.0 explicitly identifies active involvement by journal and editorial staff as one of the key factors affecting whether reporting standards actually change practice.
A randomised trial at PLOS ONE makes the point even more clearly. Simply asking authors to submit an ARRIVE checklist, without editors checking compliance, did not improve reporting. Other interventions involving shorter requirements and greater editorial follow up performed considerably better.
That makes me think the first useful experiment for PEPP could be quite modest: take a small subset of its principles that can already be operationalised as disclosure requirements and persuade one or more journals publishing animal communication research to require them.
The effects could then actually be observed: Do researchers comply? Do the requirements reveal risks or methodological weaknesses that would otherwise remain invisible? Are some PEPP principles too vague to use this way? Which requirements create useful information, and which simply create paperwork?
Animal communication technology is probably a relatively small AI × animals issue in terms of current welfare scale. I still think it could be an unusually useful test case for a much bigger governance question: how do we move from voluntary animal inclusive principles to institutional constraints without locking in rules before we know whether they work?
Developing Thoughts on the Animal Advocacy Community in Africa
African animal advocacy movement may be under-exploring its potential and is NOT talent-constrained. Instead, the movement is currently held back by the following:
Lack of strategy R&D: This stems from two sources: limited exploratory, outside-the-box thinking, and funding habits that do not reward thorough research and the development of relevant interventions.
Lack of space for innovation: Few, if any, African animal advocacy organizations have a dedicated special or new projects team, because most are scrambling to keep running into the next year. Most do not dedicate enough staff and resources to developing stealth projects that could one day spin off or open a new area of work for the organization.
High risk aversion? This may be an underlying reason for the constraints above and their knock-on effects. What level of risk-taking is reasonable? Who leads or guides the norm- and behavior-setting conversations that reduce in-fighting?
Cost of recruiting and training people from outside the movement: Africa has an abundant talent pool, so African groups are not talent-constrained. Rather, groups are unable to absorb this talent for several reasons, which used to be reduced to "funding". Some may say funding is being unlocked, with the dollar amounts going to African groups growing year on year, and that the barrier now surfacing is the cost of bringing in people from this large talent pool and training them. However, this growth starts from a very low base, and much of it is short-term and restricted to specific projects rather than covering core costs such as recruiting and training staff.
Program support and MEL (monitoring, evaluation and learning): Several groups lack dedicated, experienced operational, administrative and program staff. A single person may be responsible for all three of these functions and more. As a result, proper monitoring, designated learning opportunities and communication of impact are heavily deprioritized, and in most cases non-existent.
Low wages: This is a controversial area. Most animal advocacy groups pay significantly lower salaries than other local NGOs in the same country, such as health, development and conservation NGOs. They also offer few or no benefits such as health insurance, pension or professional development. As a result, the movement loses talent to these neighboring sectors. This is in sharp contrast to international GH&D (global health and development) organizations, which have been criticized for paying high wages.
Outsider "Africa is cheap" expectation: Some people I speak with who have no experience of working in Africa assume that running projects there is so cheap that even current funding levels should have an outsized impact. Is the EA marketing of "$5,000 to save a life", based on GH&D programs in Africa, reinforcing this idea of cheapness?
Upsides
Large talent pool: The few jobs, fellowships and trainings that are announced now receive far more applications than there are places. Animal Welfare League received over 2,000 applications for a single role.
Efficiency and effectiveness: A small number of stronger groups are developing structures, projects and budgets that capture real costs and impact size, and that achieve key outcomes at lower cost. They may soon benchmark their cost-effectiveness against each other and against global groups. These groups remain the exception: most still lack the MEL capacity this requires.
New organizations: Much more can happen with new organizations, and it is exciting to see them springing up in new areas. To see what new organizations can add, compare Ghana's fish welfare space before and after SHARED (run by @Emmanuel Awuni) and AWASH (run by @Naveeth Basheer)
With the large expected inflow of philanthropic capital, there has been a surge in interest in entrepreneurship among those who otherwise might not have pursued it. As we pursue promising new ideas, many ventures will fail. Some of these failures will be because the idea was not as good as it seemed, but many will fail because the entrepreneurs executed it poorly.
I'm concerned we will abandon good ideas due to poor execution.
Founders new and old should strive to make their successes and failures publicly visible (though these stories should be read critically given founder biases). More importantly, we should be skeptical of claims that an idea is bad based solely on the failure of one attempt, and we should be willing to pursue ideas more than once if we have a strong account for why the previous attempt(s) failed.
Evidence of bumblebees liking and disliking foods depending on context.
We know that unhatched chick embryos can suffer late in development, but current evidence is mixed on mid-term development around day-13. The in-ovo sexing technology used by the NestFresh brand in the US works on day-13 (which is banned in Germany). Claude's overview is here.
Given that public policy and industry tech adoption is still in early stages outside Europe, it seems to me that it is great time to fund further research on chick embryo sentience. Before day-13 becomes standard.