Just to flag that I've posted a short update on fundraising for the Center for Wild Animal Welfare here, as a 'quick take'. Do check it out! 

Also, we will be setting up a newsletter for people who'd like to keep up to date on our work - please feel free to sign up here if you're interested. Cheers! 

Hey folks! I wanted to share a quick update on fundraising for the Center for Wild Animal Welfare (CWAW), as the year draws to a close, and as people consider finalising their end-of-year giving. 

Our original forum post, announcing the launch of the Center and setting out the giving opportunity, is here. 

We’ve had a great response, and have successfully raised our core Year 1 budget - whoop! The $60,000 1:1 donor match has been fully used up, so further donations to CWAW won’t be matched. 

We are still gladly accepting donations, which will be used for ‘stretch’ items in CWAW’s budget - things such as public polling and focus groups to inform comms and policy development, contracting experts for advice on specific policy areas, subscriptions for parliamentary and media monitoring, joining professional and policy networks, running events such as policy report launches, improving our website, and expanding our capacity for ‘mainstream’ fundraising. We think that these items offer substantial value for money at the margin.  

If you’d like to support our mission, it’s super easy to donate, and there are a variety of tax-efficient giving options (for various countries). Please see the original forum post for full details. 

If you’re considering making an end-of-year gift, and have any questions - whether to help you weigh up the strength of CWAW as a giving opportunity, or on logistics - please feel free to reach out to Ben and I at team@wildanimalwelfare.org. 

I’m also delighted to share that we will be launching a newsletter to keep people up to date about CWAW’s work. Whether you’re a donor or not, if you’d like to receive this, please do sign up here. 

Cheers, and happy new year! 

Thanks Saulius! That’s actually super encouraging and validating for us to hear, given your contributions to the field. Some of your earlier work on interventions has been very helpful to us as we were thinking through this project. We’re glad to hear you’re excited about it, and are grateful for your support!

That's so kind, and much appreciated, Diego! Thanks for everything that you have done, and are doing, for the wild animal cause, too!

Awesome, thanks Matej! I've reached out to you offline...

Thanks for this stimulating and thoughtful post!

I think there is also a third option: that we choose not to create artificial sentience (or artificial moral patients) in the first place. 

I wrote about this in more detail here: We should prevent the creation of artificial sentience 

To build (loosely) on your analogy with factory farming, this might be roughly equivalent to going back to the 1940s and preventing the creation of factory farming in the first place...