Constance Li
Bio
Participation3
I started out as a animal advocate in 2001 at the age of 12. Nearly a decade later, I discovered effective altruism and decided to start down an earning to give career path as a physician. Currently, I own a health services business and donate my time and money to direct work in animal advocacy. You usually can find me at the Hive (formerly known as Impactful Animal Advocacy) slack community.
Posts 11
Comments95
It is a pretty uncomfortable problem and not one that I have been able to reconcile very well. One way around it is steering people to support global health/dev orgs that help people while not increasing meat consumption. An example is Female Family Empowerment Media, which improves openness and access to contraceptives in Nigeria. Another examples is the Beans is How Coalition, which aims to double worldwide bean consumption for the purpose of reducing hunger and increasing sustainability.
As economic growth in developing countries is generally correlated to increased meat consumption and the current trend in Africa (where Give Directly does cash transfers) is the rapid expansion of factory farming, how you factoring the welfare of these farmed animals into your decision-making?
Is there some sort of offset donation to animal/plant-based food charities you would consider making? Do you have a theory of change where economic growth in these regions will turn out to somehow benefit animals downstream?
Given that there are vastly more animals than humans in this world, and that effective farmed animal welfare interventions can have an enormous positive impact, have you considered directing more of your philanthropic efforts towards effective animal charities? You can see the support for the cost-effectiveness of these interventions in the recent post "Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare"?
Hey if you want to learn more about the intersection of AI and animal welfare, I recommend you checking out the website https://www.aiforanimals.org/ and subscribing to the newsletter.
Hey Austin, thanks for reading this so thoroughly, making the suggestion to put it up on Manifund, and generously offering to contribute to retroactive funding. This seems like a great idea and I just made a grant request page. :)
Hi Toby, thank you so much for writing a comprehensive review for this time sensitive opportunity.
For anyone interested in a different version of the suggested answers that Ben and Haven made that is more aimed at encouraging the adoption of on-farm monitoring systems in order to lay the groundwork for AI analysis for welfare metrics, please see this guide that I just wrote.
There is the meat eater problem where more animal lives would likely be lost by increasing the human population. It also seems much more cost effective per dollar to suffering spared to help animals and factory farming is spreading rapidly through Asia and Africa, making this a hingey time.