Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I feel like your comment would be more valuable/credible if you elaborated further on your claims. You say the ideas for the animal charities were bad, but you provide no justification, and most of them not succeeding should not update one much given charities being successful is unlikely on priors.
I’m mainly trying to convey what seemed to be a sentiment among many who worked in research in animal advocacy in response to seeing these ideas, though I agree with your second point.
As an example of this, I think that people thought Animal Ask or Healthier Hens both failed account for why the animal space had consolidated work on a few specific asks over the last few years (because corporations weren’t sure how to prioritize across many asks, and focusing on just one at a time helped get their attention to be more focused), and this was feedback conveyed to CE ahead of time but mostly ignored, and then became a route to failure for their early work.
At Animal Ask we did later hear some of that feedback ourselves and one of our early projects failed for similar reasons. Our programs are very group-led, as in we select our research priorities based on groups looking to pursue new campaigns. This means the majority of our projects tend to focus on policy rather than corporate work, given more groups consider new country-specific campaigns and want research to inform this decision.
In the original report from CE, they do account for the consolidation of corporate work behind a few asks. They expected the research on corporate work to be ‘ongoing’ deeper’ and ‘more focused research’. So strategically would look more like research throughout the previous corporate campaign to inform the next with a low probability of updating any specific ask. The expectation is that it could be many years between the formation of corporate asks.
So in fact this consolidation was highlighted in the incubation program as a reason success could have so much impact. As with the large amount of resources the movement devotes to these consolidated corporate asks ensuring these are optimised is essential.
As Ren outlined we have a couple of recent, more detailed evaluations and we have found that the main limitations on our impact are factors only a minority of advisors in the animal space highlighted. These are constraints from other organisation stakeholders either upper management (when the campaigns team had updated on our findings but there was momentum behind another campaign) or funders (particular individual or smaller donors who are typicaly less research motivated than OPP, EAAWF, ACE etc.)
You can see this was the main concern for CE researchers in the original report. “Organizations in the animal space are increasingly aware of the importance of research, but often there are many factors to consider, including logistical ease, momentum, and donor interest. It is possible that this research would not be the determining factor in many cases”.
My impression is that Healthier Hens wouldn’t have caused confusion for corporations dealing with other major asks like cage-free or broiler asks, because HH was planning to work directly with different targets, specifically farms and feed mills, and in Kenya to start. Do you mean it would have just been better to further support corporate cage-free and broiler campaigns (about which you’ve stated skepticism here), or another ask the movement would consolidate to focus on?
They discuss things that didn’t go well for them here: fundraising, feed testing, delays, survey response collection and (negative results in their) split-feeding trial.
(I don’t have much sense about the impact of Animal Ask, both how much impact they’re having and why. Some of their research looks useful, but I don’t know how their work is informing decisions or at what scale.)
FWIW in the early stages of Healthier Hens, I heard some of the following pieces of feedback which IMO seem significant enough that it may have been a bad decision for CE to recommend a feed fortification charity for layer hens:
Feed costs are approximately 50% of costs for farmers, so interventions that make feed even more expensive are likely to be hard to achieve
CE’s report focuses on subsidising this feed for farmers to lessen the potential risk of the above point, but I think misses the crucial factor where most animal funders don’t want to subsidise the animal agriculture industry without a clear mechanism for passing these costs over to industry, hence making fundraising quite hard (which did turn out to be true)
Following on, if the subsidisation avenue was not pursued, it’s not clear what leverage Healthier Hens (or any other feed fortification charity) would have over feed mills or farms to get them to significantly increase their costs of production. For example, in the report, CE says “Entrepreneurs may pivot based on their own research: for example, they may instead partner with certifiers to encourage them to include feed standards for calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin D3 in their standards” but again, this is a significant ask of farms (and therefore certifiers) which I think was glossed over in the report.
It’s also worth noting that the experts interviewed in this report were 1 free-range egg farmer, 1 animal nutritionist and 2 Indian animal advocates (as it was originally thought to work best in India). None of them mentioned the concerns above but the person I spoke to (involved in global corporate welfare) thought that if CE had spoken to someone with reasonable global campaigning / corporate welfare experience, these problems would have been unearthed. I’m not sure how true this is but thought it was relevant info to the above discussion.
(My overall view on the meta-comment by mildlyanonymous is that it’s too vague to be useful and hard to verify many things but the intention of reducing poor allocation of talented co-founders and scarce funding is important, hence suggesting improvements to CE’s research process does seem valuable)
Edited afterwards: I added “without a clear mechanism for passing these costs over to industry” to the second bullet point after Michael’s good point below.
CE’s report focuses on subsidising this feed for farmers to lessen the potential risk of the above point, but I think misses the crucial factor where most animal funders don’t want to literally subsidise the animal agriculture industry, hence making fundraising quite hard (which did turn out to be true)
I’m not sure if this really explains much or if the funders were acting rationally if it did. As one of its main interventions, SWP is currently buying and giving out electric stunners for free, which is essentially a subsidy in kind. SWP is supported by Open Phil, ACE and seems popular in the broad EA community among animal charities (I’d guess even just for the direct provision of stunners, not any legislative/corporate policy work to leverage it later), but maybe not (?) in the animal community outside of EA.
But maybe shrimp stunning looked better ex ante, given the number of shrimp it could affect per $ and better evidence supporting stunning than feed fortification for keel bone fractures. In fact, HH’s feed fortification trial actually made things worse for hens. SWP is already past a billion shrimp helped in expectation (maybe not just with stunners?). SWP had to get some evidence for the success of the intervention before scaling, but someone had to pay for that and the stunning trial.
If people are hesitant to subsidize the industry, maybe the benefits to animals vs money to industry ratio just looked much better for SWP than HH, and good enough to be worth supporting SWP stunner work but not HH.
FWIW, I think it’s worth doing more hen feed fortification trials, with different supplements or given on different schedules or doses, given the scale and severity of keel bone fractures (WFP), as well as the possibility that cage-free could be worse if and because it increases keel bone fractures.
Yeah good point re Shrimp Welfare Project! I should have said “most animal funders don’t want to subsidise the animal ag industry without a clear mechanism for passing these costs over to the industry”.
For example, in the case of SWP, my understanding is that SWP wants to get these relatively cheap stunners ($50k and only a one-off cost) for a few major producers to show both producers and retailers that it is a relatively cheap way to improve animal welfare with minimal/no impacts on productivity. Then, I believe the idea is to get retailers (e.g. like this) to commit only to sourcing from producers who stun their shrimps, thereby influencing more producers to buy these stunners out of their own pocket (and repeat until all shrimp are being stunned before slaughter).
I think the case with feed fortification with layer hens is much less obvious and less simple due to the impact of feed costs (which are significant and ongoing), so IMO it wasn’t clear to animal funders how these costs would be passed onto the industry at a later date, rather than subsidising feed fortification in perpetuity.
A smaller note is that there is also a very small number of animal funders who follow this suffering-reduction-focused theory of change so if one major funder (e.g. OP) doesn’t fund you, this can be very problematic (as in the case of Healthier Hens). Also many funders don’t act rationally, so it’s also important the research takes that into account (not convinced that funders weren’t acting rationally in this case though).
But do EAs (and major funders especially) support SWP because they expect SWP to accelerate industry adoption of stunners paid for by the industry (or by others besides SWP/animal advocates)?
The ACE review barely discusses stunners, and only really in their section on room for more funding, where stunners account for essentially all the RFMF in 2024 and 2025, and there’s no mention of accelerated industry adoption of stunners not paid for by us.[1]
The EA Animal Welfare Fund grant just says “Purchase 4 stunners for producers committing to stun a minimum. of 1.4k MT (~100 million) of shrimps/annum per stunner”.
Stunning equipment will break down over time and eventually need to be replaced. Maybe they’re assuming the companies will repair/replace the stunners at their own cost as they break down, but I imagine they expect this to look good with only a few years of impact per stunner (or didn’t take into account the fact that stunners will break down).
The written rationale of Open Phil’s most recent grant to SWP doesn’t mention the possibility, either: “Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $2,000,000 over two years to the Shrimp Welfare Project. Focuses include installing stunners at major shrimp producers, reducing stocking density on shrimp farms in South Asia, and increasing industry awareness of shrimp welfare.”
Other than by SWP themselves, I haven’t seen ~any online discussion of this acceleration.
It’s possible the grantmakers are sensitive to the possibility of acceleration of industry adoption of stunners paid for by the industry and are granting in part based on this, but it doesn’t show up in their written rationales. They say very little about the stunner plans in general, though.
And should we have had similar expectations for feed fortification costs to eventually be passed on and HH to accelerate feed fortification paid for by the industry (or not us)? Eventually we can move on from cage-free asks when+where cage-free becomes the norm (or the law), say. Maybe this is complicated by the fact that many companies are international, though.
relatively cheap stunners ($50k and only a one-off cost)
(...)
impact of feed costs (which are significant and ongoing)
Stunners aren’t a one-off cost in general: they’ll need to be repaired and replaced eventually if we keep killing shrimp and want them stunned. Someone will have to pay for that, just like ongoing feed fortification. So the only question is whether and how much SWP and HH accelerate the industry (or others besides animal advocates) paying for the respective costs. And again, written grant rationales for SWP don’t mention this acceleration, so it’s not clear the grants depended on expected acceleration.
And HH wouldn’t be paying for all of the feed, just some supplements. I do think SWP’s stunners work looks more cost-effective ex ante than HH did, though.[2]
I think this highlights a methodological issue with ACE’s review process: it isn’t sufficiently sensitive to the details and ex ante cost-effectiveness of additional future funding. Its cost-effectiveness criterion is retrospective wrt outputs, but SWP’s future plans with additional future funding are very different from what its cost-effectiveness was assessed on, and the ACE review of its future plans with additional funding is very shallow.
CE’s CEA of subsidized feed fortification was 34 welfare points per dollar assuming only an overall probability of success of 26%. The CEA for SWP assumes 100% probability of success. If we also assumed 100% for HH, HH would be at least 130=34/0.26 welfare points per dollar conditional on success (possibly higher, because there are still costs if it fails). The difference between conventional cage and cage-free is probably around 50 or fewer welfare points per year of life by CE’s estimates (comparing USA FF laying hens (battery cages) to wild bird or FF beef cow, say). Corporate cage-free campaigns were 54 years of life affected/$, so this would be <2700 welfare points/$ historically and say <540 welfare points/$=2700 welfare points/$/5 now, so I’d guess still a few times better than HH at >130 welfare points/$ conditional on success.
SWP has some track record with stunners already, so it is reasonable to assign them a higher probability of success than HH ex ante, and this can increase the gap.
Obviously, I don’t speak for OP or EA AWF fund but they literally only publish 1-3 sentences per grant so I’m not surprised at all if they don’t mention it, even if it is a consideration for them. That said, I might just be projecting because this was partially the reason why I supported giving them a grant!
Agree though that stunners aren’t literally a one-off and never touch again, but as you mention I think the overall cost of the intervention to animals helped is significantly better for shrimp stunning in my opinion, as well the avenue for industry adoption being much more clear and more likely.
Just a couple of points on the original comment about AIM:
@mildlyanonymous, I’m glad you brought up the perception of the animal movement regarding AIM. I must say, I don’t have the same negative perception as you do but this may be biased:
i) motivated reasoning on my part as a AIM incubate, and
ii) feedback I get from the overall movement may be filtered by my interlocutors because of said affiliation
In any case, I would really invite whoever feels that AIM is ‘not collaborative with the movement’ to look again. AIM has launched or is planning to launch several organisations which are actively designed to support the movement:
To grow in Africa (AAA)
To bring in more talent into the movement (AAC)
Help orgs in the movement make better decisions (Animal Ask)
Bring in more money to a resource-strained cause area (work in progress)
If this is not the very definition of collaboration, I don’t know what is
Regarding SWP not doing what CE originally proposed we do: I’ve mentioned this openly at least in a couple of interviews (80K, HILTLS). My goal was not to demerit AIM’s research but rather to say that there is so much one can learn from desktop research in a low-evidence space such as animal welfare and it is the role of the founding team to explore the different permutations and see what sticks
IMO, AIM’s reports need to lay out at least a promising intervention, do a cost-effectiveness analysis on it (among other things), and see how it compares to say, cage-free campaigns to decide whether to kill it or explore deeper
I apologise in advance for not engaging further with the comments about AIM / animal movement but we are very (human) resources constrained at SWP and the case in favour of AIM has been sufficiently established IMO
Out ToC indeed aims to move the Overton window in such a way that eventually high-leverage stakeholders (e.g. retailers, certifiers) feel confident to demand the use of electrical stunning beyond the capacity of SWP to fund
On the other hand, none of our funders has included this as strict condition because:
i) it is much harder to measure, and much more importantly
ii) the intervention looks sufficiently impactful and cost-effective without having to incorporate such second-degree effects
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I feel like your comment would be more valuable/credible if you elaborated further on your claims. You say the ideas for the animal charities were bad, but you provide no justification, and most of them not succeeding should not update one much given charities being successful is unlikely on priors.
I’m mainly trying to convey what seemed to be a sentiment among many who worked in research in animal advocacy in response to seeing these ideas, though I agree with your second point.
As an example of this, I think that people thought Animal Ask or Healthier Hens both failed account for why the animal space had consolidated work on a few specific asks over the last few years (because corporations weren’t sure how to prioritize across many asks, and focusing on just one at a time helped get their attention to be more focused), and this was feedback conveyed to CE ahead of time but mostly ignored, and then became a route to failure for their early work.
At Animal Ask we did later hear some of that feedback ourselves and one of our early projects failed for similar reasons. Our programs are very group-led, as in we select our research priorities based on groups looking to pursue new campaigns. This means the majority of our projects tend to focus on policy rather than corporate work, given more groups consider new country-specific campaigns and want research to inform this decision.
In the original report from CE, they do account for the consolidation of corporate work behind a few asks. They expected the research on corporate work to be ‘ongoing’ deeper’ and ‘more focused research’. So strategically would look more like research throughout the previous corporate campaign to inform the next with a low probability of updating any specific ask. The expectation is that it could be many years between the formation of corporate asks.
So in fact this consolidation was highlighted in the incubation program as a reason success could have so much impact. As with the large amount of resources the movement devotes to these consolidated corporate asks ensuring these are optimised is essential.
As Ren outlined we have a couple of recent, more detailed evaluations and we have found that the main limitations on our impact are factors only a minority of advisors in the animal space highlighted. These are constraints from other organisation stakeholders either upper management (when the campaigns team had updated on our findings but there was momentum behind another campaign) or funders (particular individual or smaller donors who are typicaly less research motivated than OPP, EAAWF, ACE etc.)
You can see this was the main concern for CE researchers in the original report. “Organizations in the animal space are increasingly aware of the importance of research, but often there are many factors to consider, including logistical ease, momentum, and donor interest. It is possible that this research would not be the determining factor in many cases”.
My impression is that Healthier Hens wouldn’t have caused confusion for corporations dealing with other major asks like cage-free or broiler asks, because HH was planning to work directly with different targets, specifically farms and feed mills, and in Kenya to start. Do you mean it would have just been better to further support corporate cage-free and broiler campaigns (about which you’ve stated skepticism here), or another ask the movement would consolidate to focus on?
They discuss things that didn’t go well for them here: fundraising, feed testing, delays, survey response collection and (negative results in their) split-feeding trial.
(I don’t have much sense about the impact of Animal Ask, both how much impact they’re having and why. Some of their research looks useful, but I don’t know how their work is informing decisions or at what scale.)
FWIW in the early stages of Healthier Hens, I heard some of the following pieces of feedback which IMO seem significant enough that it may have been a bad decision for CE to recommend a feed fortification charity for layer hens:
Feed costs are approximately 50% of costs for farmers, so interventions that make feed even more expensive are likely to be hard to achieve
CE’s report focuses on subsidising this feed for farmers to lessen the potential risk of the above point, but I think misses the crucial factor where most animal funders don’t want to subsidise the animal agriculture industry without a clear mechanism for passing these costs over to industry, hence making fundraising quite hard (which did turn out to be true)
Following on, if the subsidisation avenue was not pursued, it’s not clear what leverage Healthier Hens (or any other feed fortification charity) would have over feed mills or farms to get them to significantly increase their costs of production. For example, in the report, CE says “Entrepreneurs may pivot based on their own research: for example, they may instead partner with certifiers to encourage them to include feed standards for calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin D3 in their standards” but again, this is a significant ask of farms (and therefore certifiers) which I think was glossed over in the report.
It’s also worth noting that the experts interviewed in this report were 1 free-range egg farmer, 1 animal nutritionist and 2 Indian animal advocates (as it was originally thought to work best in India). None of them mentioned the concerns above but the person I spoke to (involved in global corporate welfare) thought that if CE had spoken to someone with reasonable global campaigning / corporate welfare experience, these problems would have been unearthed. I’m not sure how true this is but thought it was relevant info to the above discussion.
(My overall view on the meta-comment by mildlyanonymous is that it’s too vague to be useful and hard to verify many things but the intention of reducing poor allocation of talented co-founders and scarce funding is important, hence suggesting improvements to CE’s research process does seem valuable)
Edited afterwards: I added “without a clear mechanism for passing these costs over to industry” to the second bullet point after Michael’s good point below.
I’m not sure if this really explains much or if the funders were acting rationally if it did. As one of its main interventions, SWP is currently buying and giving out electric stunners for free, which is essentially a subsidy in kind. SWP is supported by Open Phil, ACE and seems popular in the broad EA community among animal charities (I’d guess even just for the direct provision of stunners, not any legislative/corporate policy work to leverage it later), but maybe not (?) in the animal community outside of EA.
But maybe shrimp stunning looked better ex ante, given the number of shrimp it could affect per $ and better evidence supporting stunning than feed fortification for keel bone fractures. In fact, HH’s feed fortification trial actually made things worse for hens. SWP is already past a billion shrimp helped in expectation (maybe not just with stunners?). SWP had to get some evidence for the success of the intervention before scaling, but someone had to pay for that and the stunning trial.
If people are hesitant to subsidize the industry, maybe the benefits to animals vs money to industry ratio just looked much better for SWP than HH, and good enough to be worth supporting SWP stunner work but not HH.
FWIW, I think it’s worth doing more hen feed fortification trials, with different supplements or given on different schedules or doses, given the scale and severity of keel bone fractures (WFP), as well as the possibility that cage-free could be worse if and because it increases keel bone fractures.
Yeah good point re Shrimp Welfare Project! I should have said “most animal funders don’t want to subsidise the animal ag industry without a clear mechanism for passing these costs over to the industry”.
For example, in the case of SWP, my understanding is that SWP wants to get these relatively cheap stunners ($50k and only a one-off cost) for a few major producers to show both producers and retailers that it is a relatively cheap way to improve animal welfare with minimal/no impacts on productivity. Then, I believe the idea is to get retailers (e.g. like this) to commit only to sourcing from producers who stun their shrimps, thereby influencing more producers to buy these stunners out of their own pocket (and repeat until all shrimp are being stunned before slaughter).
I think the case with feed fortification with layer hens is much less obvious and less simple due to the impact of feed costs (which are significant and ongoing), so IMO it wasn’t clear to animal funders how these costs would be passed onto the industry at a later date, rather than subsidising feed fortification in perpetuity.
A smaller note is that there is also a very small number of animal funders who follow this suffering-reduction-focused theory of change so if one major funder (e.g. OP) doesn’t fund you, this can be very problematic (as in the case of Healthier Hens). Also many funders don’t act rationally, so it’s also important the research takes that into account (not convinced that funders weren’t acting rationally in this case though).
But do EAs (and major funders especially) support SWP because they expect SWP to accelerate industry adoption of stunners paid for by the industry (or by others besides SWP/animal advocates)?
Its stunner cost-effectiveness analysis and numbers of shrimp helped so far don’t reflect this possibility.
The ACE review barely discusses stunners, and only really in their section on room for more funding, where stunners account for essentially all the RFMF in 2024 and 2025, and there’s no mention of accelerated industry adoption of stunners not paid for by us.[1]
The EA Animal Welfare Fund grant just says “Purchase 4 stunners for producers committing to stun a minimum. of 1.4k MT (~100 million) of shrimps/annum per stunner”.
Stunning equipment will break down over time and eventually need to be replaced. Maybe they’re assuming the companies will repair/replace the stunners at their own cost as they break down, but I imagine they expect this to look good with only a few years of impact per stunner (or didn’t take into account the fact that stunners will break down).
The written rationale of Open Phil’s most recent grant to SWP doesn’t mention the possibility, either: “Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $2,000,000 over two years to the Shrimp Welfare Project. Focuses include installing stunners at major shrimp producers, reducing stocking density on shrimp farms in South Asia, and increasing industry awareness of shrimp welfare.”
Other than by SWP themselves, I haven’t seen ~any online discussion of this acceleration.
It’s possible the grantmakers are sensitive to the possibility of acceleration of industry adoption of stunners paid for by the industry and are granting in part based on this, but it doesn’t show up in their written rationales. They say very little about the stunner plans in general, though.
And should we have had similar expectations for feed fortification costs to eventually be passed on and HH to accelerate feed fortification paid for by the industry (or not us)? Eventually we can move on from cage-free asks when+where cage-free becomes the norm (or the law), say. Maybe this is complicated by the fact that many companies are international, though.
Stunners aren’t a one-off cost in general: they’ll need to be repaired and replaced eventually if we keep killing shrimp and want them stunned. Someone will have to pay for that, just like ongoing feed fortification. So the only question is whether and how much SWP and HH accelerate the industry (or others besides animal advocates) paying for the respective costs. And again, written grant rationales for SWP don’t mention this acceleration, so it’s not clear the grants depended on expected acceleration.
And HH wouldn’t be paying for all of the feed, just some supplements. I do think SWP’s stunners work looks more cost-effective ex ante than HH did, though.[2]
I think this highlights a methodological issue with ACE’s review process: it isn’t sufficiently sensitive to the details and ex ante cost-effectiveness of additional future funding. Its cost-effectiveness criterion is retrospective wrt outputs, but SWP’s future plans with additional future funding are very different from what its cost-effectiveness was assessed on, and the ACE review of its future plans with additional funding is very shallow.
EDIT: MHR’s CEA of stunners based on SWP’s CEA turned out a few times less cost-effective than historical corporate cage-free campaigns after accounting for moral weight and pain intensities and durations, so probably roughly competitive or better now, as Open Phil’s “marginal FAW funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis”.
CE’s CEA of subsidized feed fortification was 34 welfare points per dollar assuming only an overall probability of success of 26%. The CEA for SWP assumes 100% probability of success. If we also assumed 100% for HH, HH would be at least 130=34/0.26 welfare points per dollar conditional on success (possibly higher, because there are still costs if it fails). The difference between conventional cage and cage-free is probably around 50 or fewer welfare points per year of life by CE’s estimates (comparing USA FF laying hens (battery cages) to wild bird or FF beef cow, say). Corporate cage-free campaigns were 54 years of life affected/$, so this would be <2700 welfare points/$ historically and say <540 welfare points/$=2700 welfare points/$/5 now, so I’d guess still a few times better than HH at >130 welfare points/$ conditional on success.
SWP has some track record with stunners already, so it is reasonable to assign them a higher probability of success than HH ex ante, and this can increase the gap.
Obviously, I don’t speak for OP or EA AWF fund but they literally only publish 1-3 sentences per grant so I’m not surprised at all if they don’t mention it, even if it is a consideration for them. That said, I might just be projecting because this was partially the reason why I supported giving them a grant!
Agree though that stunners aren’t literally a one-off and never touch again, but as you mention I think the overall cost of the intervention to animals helped is significantly better for shrimp stunning in my opinion, as well the avenue for industry adoption being much more clear and more likely.
FYI you described the “Electric Shrimp Stunning: a Potential High-Impact Donation Opportunity” post as “SWP’s CEA of stunners,” but I have no affiliation with SWP.
Just a couple of points on the original comment about AIM:
@mildlyanonymous, I’m glad you brought up the perception of the animal movement regarding AIM. I must say, I don’t have the same negative perception as you do but this may be biased:
i) motivated reasoning on my part as a AIM incubate, and
ii) feedback I get from the overall movement may be filtered by my interlocutors because of said affiliation
In any case, I would really invite whoever feels that AIM is ‘not collaborative with the movement’ to look again. AIM has launched or is planning to launch several organisations which are actively designed to support the movement:
To grow in Africa (AAA)
To bring in more talent into the movement (AAC)
Help orgs in the movement make better decisions (Animal Ask)
Bring in more money to a resource-strained cause area (work in progress)
If this is not the very definition of collaboration, I don’t know what is
Regarding SWP not doing what CE originally proposed we do: I’ve mentioned this openly at least in a couple of interviews (80K, HILTLS). My goal was not to demerit AIM’s research but rather to say that there is so much one can learn from desktop research in a low-evidence space such as animal welfare and it is the role of the founding team to explore the different permutations and see what sticks
IMO, AIM’s reports need to lay out at least a promising intervention, do a cost-effectiveness analysis on it (among other things), and see how it compares to say, cage-free campaigns to decide whether to kill it or explore deeper
I apologise in advance for not engaging further with the comments about AIM / animal movement but we are very (human) resources constrained at SWP and the case in favour of AIM has been sufficiently established IMO
Regarding the discussion between @James Özden and @MichaelStJules, you are both right to some extent:
Out ToC indeed aims to move the Overton window in such a way that eventually high-leverage stakeholders (e.g. retailers, certifiers) feel confident to demand the use of electrical stunning beyond the capacity of SWP to fund
On the other hand, none of our funders has included this as strict condition because:
i) it is much harder to measure, and much more importantly
ii) the intervention looks sufficiently impactful and cost-effective without having to incorporate such second-degree effects