Potential Animal Welfare intervention: encourage the ASPCA and others to scale up their FAW budget

I’ve only recently come to appreciate how large the budgets are for the ASPCA, Humane World (formerly HSUS), and similar large, broad-based animal charities. At a quick (LLM) scan of their public filings, they appear to have a combined annual budget of ~$1Bn, most of which is focused on companion animals.

Interestingly, both the ASPCA and Humane World explicitly mention factory farming as one of their areas of concern. Yet, based on available data, it looks like <5% of spending in this category is directed toward factory-farmed animal welfare — despite factory farming accounting for the overwhelming majority of total animal suffering.

Given that factory farming is already in scope for these orgs, and that is responsible for the vast majority of animal suffering, it would seem quite reasonable for these orgs to increase their spending on FAW several-fold. I doubt their donors would object!

Should GiveWell offer Animal Welfare regrants on an opt-in basis?

The GiveWell FAQ (quoted below) suggests that GiveWell focuses exclusively on human-directed interventions primarily for reasons of specialization—i.e., avoiding duplication of work already done by Coefficient Giving and others—rather than due to a principled objection to recommending animal-focused charities. If GiveWell is willing to recommend these organizations when asked, why not reduce the friction a bit?

A major part of GiveWell’s appeal has been its role as an “index fund for charities.” While ACE and similar groups offer something comparable for animal causes, GiveWell has a much larger donor base, and donors often prefer to consolidate their giving into a single recurring contribution. An optional Animal Welfare allocation could serve those donors better while remaining consistent with GiveWell’s stated reasoning.

Why doesn't GiveWell recommend organizations focused on animal suffering?
GiveWell has not prioritized research into organizations focused on animal suffering in part because there are two organizations we know well that are investigating this question: Open Philanthropy and Animal Charity Evaluators. We have limited research capacity, and would guess that we may come to similar conclusions as those groups about which groups to recommend, although we would likely have a different research process[...]We generally point interested individuals to these two organizations when they reach out to us for recommendations in this cause area.

Accepting that this campaign was debatable ex-ante and disappointing ex-post, I think it's helpful to view it in the context of the broader reality: 

Given the dire^[1] status quo, I am generally grateful when thoughtful, conscientious actors like FarmKind take the initiative to try new approaches in the hope of unlocking positive change for animals. Although this campaign didn't achieve its aims, it’s good to see that it generated some useful lessons—and, most importantly, I hope the harsh reaction won’t unduly discourage future attempts to test new ideas.

1. ^{^}

   Factory farming is arguably the moral atrocity of our time, and still getting worse despite current best efforts

Thanks for posting this! My thoughts on "what's going on here?":

1. The simplest high-level explanation is that the surveys capture 'thought leaders', which is distinct from the set of people who control the money, and these groups disagree on allocation. I guess my prior expectation would not have been that these numbers match, but perhaps I'm in the minority there?
2. More specifically, as you mentioned, Coefficient Giving is responsible for ~2/3 of the grant dollars in this data set, so to a significant extent this reduces to comparing Dustin and Cari's preferred allocation to that of the surveyed EA population.
3. It's notable that Global Health is the only category to receive more funding than the survey mean (and more than double at that). Here it's both true that CG consistently gives a larger fraction, and that GiveWell top charities are the only 'EA orgs' to achieve any significant 'mainstream appeal' to date; e.g. the amount that GiveWell directs from non-CG sources per year is 3-4x the entire Animal Advocacy budget in this data set (and likely very little of that is coming from EA survey respondents).

Perhaps there is room for more EAs to shift their giving to Animal Advocacy in response to the above, and/or more optimistically to find animal-centric messaging with as much mainstream appeal as GiveWell.

Thanks for bringing this up Aidan. I raised this topic in both of my versions of the Historical Funding post, and I remain interested in doing this properly if and when I get sufficient time and data. What I have found so far is (a) accessing the bottom-up data for ~all relevant charities seems to be much more difficult than I would have imagined, and (b) I've floated this project to a few people and the interest seemed lukewarm (probably mostly due to their sense of intractibility).

FarmKind, Anima International, THL UK, SWP, FWI, ACE, RP, The Centre for Feed Innovation, Scale Welfare, Arthropoda, Indonesian Cage-Free Association, Across Species Project Indonesia

I continue to think that animal welfare—in particular the fight against factory farming—is severely under-funded, even compared to other worthy options such as GiveWell top charities.

Thanks! Small correction: Animal Welfare YTD is labeled as $53M, when it looks like the underlying data point is $17M (source and 2023 full-year projections here)

Both posts contain a more detailed breakdown of inputs, but in short:

1. 80k seems to include every entry in the Open Phil grants database, whereas my sheet filters out items such as criminal justice reform that don't map to the type of funding I'm attempting to track.
2. They also add a couple of 'best guess' terms to estimate unknown/undocumented funding sources; I do not.

If you expect to take in $3-6M by the end of this year, borrowing say $300k against that already seems totally reasonable.

Not sure if this is possible, but I for one would be happy to donate to LTFF today in exchange for a 120% regrant to the Animal Welfare Fund in December^[1]

1. ^{^}

   This would seem to be an abuse of the Open Phil matching, but perhaps that chunk can be exempt