Yes, this has certainly updated my view on prioritisation between big and small countries. So thanks for sharing your thoughts!

I think it's a good idea to reduce the weight of scale, though probably not as much as you might. Aashish and I might update this as soon as we got around to talking about it and are aligned.

In any case, we encourage people to just take the model, make a copy, and change parameters themselves, if it seems useful for their purposes.

Thanks for your comment! And no worries about not polishing, I will do the same, so it will also be a bit long :)

I agree with your concern and it is something I've also thought about before (in other contexts as well). However, I see two reasons for why working in high-population countries should indeed be favoured:

1. At Animal Advocacy Africa we're currently working on recommendations and implementation guides for advocates that aim to mitigate the rise of industrial animal agriculture in Africa. Based on our research, policy work is the top recommendation and I do think the expected value of this is higher in high-population countries. The reason is that it is hard to know where policy work is more likely to be successful (which you also mentioned). As long as we don't have an indication that it is significantly less likely to be successful in higher-population countries, it seems fair to focus on the factor that we know will be important: the expected impact, if successful.
2. For work besides the area of policy/regulations (e.g. working with farmers or certain public outreach interventions, which are our recommendations #2 and #3), I agree that scale considerations can be overblown. If we cannot cover the whole population anyway, there is no limit that should really matter. However, I think scalability and potential flow-through effects are important to consider here. If we can get a successful model to work for some part of a large country, there is the potential to scale this much further or to have it scale automatically across the country (e.g. word of mouth).

In short, there is a lot of upside to working in such large countries and as long as I don't have evidence that working in smaller countries is much more tractable I would keep focusing on the large ones. However, if there is clear evidence that working in a specific country is likely to be significantly more tractable, we should give this consideration a lot of weight. Unfortunately our rough model is not well-suited for such nuances, so it should definitely be combined with contextual knowledge/factors.

That said, I think it is a good point that the weight might be too high and these weights are mostly based on our intuitions anyway. So it's great that you are challenging this. I think it would probably be fruitful to do some kind of MC simulation on how the scores change if we vary the weights of different parameters. Maybe I'll find time for this somewhere down the road.

Thanks for your perspective, I'll definitely let you know about our further research :)

Thanks for your inputs, this is great. I also didn't expect you to have the perfect answer. It's a very tricky problem.

I'll incorporate these considerations in our research!

Thanks for your research on this Aashish! Very relevant for our work at Animal Advocacy Africa.
I'm getting the sense that policy work / lobbying could be a good idea (since your uncertainty around this has reduced as a result of your evidence review), but it should be targeted at something else than subsidies, since their path to impact is quite long and unclear? For example lobbying for better animal welfare standards might be more promising as it more directly addresses the problem (has a shorter ToC)?
Do you have an opinion on this? Or any other interventions you think might be more promising than addressing subsidies?

Have you seen this post on second-hand battery pages in Africa? Do you think an intervention focusing on this issue would be promising? If so, what kind of intervention? Should this be focused on the exporting or importing countries?

I would be curious to get your opinion on this, as we (Animal Advocacy Africa) are currently considering different strategies to recommend/pursue.

Thank you!

Also linking CE's own previous research here. Note that we did not really look at this previous report when we conducted our own research and came to the topic with fresh eyes.

Thanks both!

I just wanted to add to Zuzana's response that our basis for the statement in question is also based on what we have learned out about cage-free corporate campaigns. From our understanding, the threat of a "bad cop" campaign is often enough for companies to sign commitments. So yes Jojo, your interpretation is correct I would say.

Thanks for adding that helpful perspective!

We did not make the comparison to QALYs since the program looked at global health/development and animal interventions separately. So we only compared animal interventions to other animal interventions. My personal perspective is that animal interventions indeed tend do be much more cost-effective, which is why I focus on that area.

It might also be interesting to note that CE's own previous research (which we did not really look at when we conducted our own research) estimates ~20-30 welfare points per dollar, which is somewhat higher than our best guess of 12 WP/$.

Thank you Zuzana!
If you haven't yet, I can recommend this article that I linked in the post which gave me some food for thought on the interplay between farming for meat and leather.
Please also note that the statement "demand for leather products is on a downward trajectory on a global level" is based on that article and I didn't dive deeper into this, since this was only a shallow review. Would have to do more detailed research to be very confident in this.