Hi Vasco,

Thanks so much for your question and interest in our work!

Is there a way of supporting RP's wild animal welfare research without any unrestricted funds currently supporting it moving to other work (including research on farmed animals)?

Yes, absolutely. Since we do not currently have any unrestricted funds allocated to wild animal welfare, a restricted donation to this area would not cause funding shifts between departments, or animal welfare sub-causes. Instead, it would directly increase our capacity for wild animal welfare work. In fact, wild animal welfare is the least funded area of our animal welfare portfolio, despite its importance and potential for impact.

Our animal welfare work is primarily funded through restricted donations for specific projects or sub-causes, with most directed toward non-invertebrate and non-wild animal priorities. Only ~11% of RP's overall funding is unrestricted, and based on our current plans, donating to the Animal Welfare Department would not result in unrestricted funds being redirected elsewhere.

We take donor preferences very seriously. For larger donations, we’re happy to explicitly increase the budget for a department, sub-cause, or project by the exact amount of your contribution, eliminating any potential fungibility concerns entirely. For small donations (relative to project costs), there may be practical limitations if a project requires significantly more funding to proceed, but we’ll inform you if this is the case and will always work to honor donor preferences.

Please let me know if you have any other questions!

Hi Vasco! Thank you for your question! For next year, we are planning to research some funding-related questions for wild animals. More generally, our approach is to engage directly with funders to highlight impactful opportunities. For example, this year, we hosted several talks with various philanthropic institutions aiming to increase funding for some farmed invertebrate interventions. We also conducted research to inform the strategy of an organization bringing in new funding into the space. It’s something we’re excited to keep building on!

Hi Ula! I agree with you. I myself stopped working directly as an animal advocate after being mobbed, harassed, and listening to regular discriminatory comments for being a woman, an immigrant, and because of my origin. I've seen so many activists going through the same.

In my case, the continued support of other advocates, especially of the Encompass community (www.encompassmovement.org), has been invaluable. I highly recommend it.

Second, I also believe that it's time to stop normalizing activists' mistreatment and discriminatory practices, especially in organizations where there is evidence that these issues are structural. In this regard, it's very disappointing that organizations with ongoing and severe management and leadership problems continue to receive large grants or support from the EA community.

Third, I think organizations should develop active policies to prevent these situations from happening in the very first place. We should not have more advocates burning out or leaving the movement to take this issue seriously.

I'm glad that you're also concerned about this problem, and I'd be happy to talk about this further with you :). I'm also open to discussing it with Lewis– if he considers it appropriate.

Thanks for pointing this out, Ula. I'm aware that several activists in other organizations have also suffered similar situations, along with derogatory comments because of their origin and gender.

Hey Lewis!

1. What kind of work would you like to see done for invertebrates?
2. What kind of work would you like to see done for animals living in the wild?
3. Are there key research questions that you think would contribute to advance these two areas' tractability?

Thanks!

Hi Tobias!

Thanks for commenting. That's a very interesting question. Probably, after the pandemic, people may be more concerned about safer and healthier food, and more open to messages about public costs and other problems associated with animal farming. But for now, this is just a hypothesis that should be empirically tested, as Peter says.

However, I disagree with the idea that coronavirus doesn't have anything to do with animal farming. There is extensive evidence about how factory farms provide an ideal breeding ground for highly pathogenic viruses, worsen by the abusive use of antibiotics. Researchers Cynthia Schuck and Wladimir Alonso have recently published a report about this issue available here.

Interesting, thank you!

Thanks for your comment, adamShimi! Do you have a sense of the profile of people that find eating snails disgusting? I wonder if it's a generational issue, for example. In Spain, eating snails now seems to be much more prevalent among older generations than among the youngest population.

Hey Julia! I partially address that point in the section that Linch indicated. As you say, whether snails have a capacity for valenced experience is still uncertain. When compared to bivalves, snails have more diverse and specialized sensory organs. As snails are motile and active foragers, they display a wider range of behaviors, and that is reflected in greater neural complexity. For instance, snails show nociceptive responses, like avoidance behavior in response to high temperatures (not surprisingly, several sources that provide instructions for cooking snails mention the attempts of snails to escape boiling water). However, relatively little is known about the anatomical organization and actual functions of most neurons in their ganglionic regions.
I must admit that I haven't investigated any bivalves in detail. Still, for what I know, the case for snail sentience is much better than the evidence for bivalve sentience.