PSA for vegan donors: GiveWell not ruling out animal-based aid
I’m a long-time GiveWell donor and an ethical vegan. In a recent GiveWell podcast on livelihoods programs, providing animals as “productive assets” was mentioned as a possible program type. After reaching out to GiveWell directly to voice my objection, I was informed that because GiveWell’s moral weights currently don’t include nonhuman animals, animal-based aid is not categorically off the table if it surpasses their cost-effectiveness bar.
Older posts on the GiveWell website similarly do not rule out animal donations from an ethical lens.
In response to some of the rationale GiveWell shared with me, I also want to proactively address a core ethical distinction:
Animal-aid programs involve certain, programmatic harm to animals (breeding, confinement, separation of families, slaughter).
Human-health programs like malaria prevention have, at most, indirect and uncertain effects on animal consumption (by saving human lives), which can change over time (e.g., cultural shifts, plant-based/cultivated options).
Constructive ask to GiveWell: Until you have publicly considered how to incorporate animal welfare into your moral weights, please avoid funding programs that use animals as aid.
I share this with respect for GiveWell’s impact and to help animal rights-aligned donors make informed choices. If I’ve misunderstood anything, I’m happy to be corrected.
I don’t like that its not off the table for GiveWell, but thankfully I struggle to even imagine how an animal-based human aid program could reach their cost-effectiveness bar.
Why would you prefer this to be off the table?
For the same reasons as the OP. If animal moral weights aren’t considered we could be unnecessarily increasing animal suffering time trying to help humans.
Ah, sorry for the confusion. I thought you meant animals as beneficiaries when you mentioned ‘an animal-aid program’. This makes total sense.
Makes sense sorry I’ve gone back and fixed language a bit for clarity.
I hope so! But I think that as a potential livelihood program, this would come out of the All Grants Fund, not the Top Charities Fund, so the bar may be lower. And I worry that donating to the Top Charities Fund in this scenario would reduce the amount of flexible All Grants money GiveWell needs for top-charity gaps, thereby indirectly funding donations of animals.
The bar for all grants fund is pretty high in terms of rigorous evidence for non hits-based approaches. If you’re thinking something along the lines of—givedirectlt funding a family who then buys a few chickens to state a business, then that could happen, but I don’t know of rigorous evidence supporting animal based support as a cost-effective intervention.
There is actually very rigorous evidence for the effectiveness of “animal-based support” in the form of “graduation programs”, though I’m not sure whether these are likely to hit the new GiveWell livelihoods bar. These programs typically involve a gift of some livestock.
Thanks @katriel yes that’s true nice one. I’ve seen a lot of programs from Village enterprise and others along those lines here in Uganda. In most cases I would have thought cash transfers or agricultural inputs could substitute for animals in this case without much fuss (there’s research supporting all of these I think). You’re right most probably involve livestock, but many don’t.
Also controversially here, in these situations I often think animals kept in village homes in these kind of programs have net positive lives. Many here will disagree.
I think there is a chance they would hit GiveWell’s bar.
Yea, let’s hope so. I’m primarily worried about direct donations of animals.
Yeah I’m 90 percent plus she that would never happen
You’re probably right, but especially when it comes to estate planning (I can’t adjust based on the latest facts once I’m gone), I would really prefer 100% certainty.
Just give to AMF, New Incentives, GiveDirectly, etc., in your estate instead, if you are worried about this? Most likely the money will be funded by GiveWell regardless.
A milder ask would be for a commitment to publicize if they ever grant an animal-aid program and to allow retroactive redesignation during the relevant time period from All Grants or Unrestricted to Top Charities or some other restriction that excludes animal-aid programs.
Given that much of All Grants ends up going to top charities anyway, I don’t think there’s much concern about the donation being in AG or Unrestricted causing a counterfactual increase in the amount that would have been spent on an animal-aid program.
In my view, if GiveWell starts funding a lot of livelihoods work, it should offer additional designations to allow donors to choose between lifesaving or health work versus livelihoods work, rather than having to defer to GiveWell’s moral weights as between the two. So that would also likely solve the problem for donors who object to animal-aid programs anyway.
Thanks, Jason. My concern is fungibility across buckets. I assume livelihoods (incl. any animal-based programs) won’t be funded via the Top Charities Fund, but do TCF inflows still reduce the amount of flexible All Grants money GiveWell needs for top-charity gaps—thereby freeing flexible dollars for non-TC opportunities (potentially animal-based)?
While it’s impossible to prove that absolutely zero funging would occur, there are some features that make me think it is very unlikely to be present at any significant level here:
For GiveWell to give to an animal-aid program, it would need to conclude that this was a better buy than a Top Charity (unless the funding source was limited to livelihoods work, in which case it wouldn’t potentially funge with your donation to the Top Charities Fund). As I read their livelihoods announcement, they are searching for donation options for a donor who weighed livelihoods benefits twice as heavily as GiveWell’s own moral weights. This suggests that animal-aid funding would come out of monies dedicated to livelihood work which couldn’t be used for Top Charities anyway, which makes funging unlikely.
If I understand your concern correctly, a donation to the Top Charity Fund might reduce the marginal cost-effectiveness of the most cost-effective Top Charity after all donations from the Top Charity Fund are allocated. This might make it easier for an animal-aid program to clear the bar for All Grants or Unrestricted funding.
GiveWell raises in the hundreds of millions of dollars for the Top Charities. This doesn’t include their non-GiveWell funding sources. Generally, the Top Charities are able to absorb large amount of funding without the cost-effectiveness dropping very much.
Moreover, my understanding is that the calculated cost-effectiveness bar for Top Charities only moves in fairly large increments. If the best marginal use of the 250 millionth through 253 millionth dollar GiveWell can recommend toward Top Charities is for Charity X’s program in County Z, I doubt GiveWell is recalculating the bar between (say) the 251.4 millionth dollar and the 251.5 millionth dollar.
So unless one is a large donor, I think it’s reasonable to model the cost-effectiveness of Top Charities for funging purposes as fixed. I think that remains approximately true for all but the largest donors.
Although I can’t figure out why I think this, the expected small size of any animal-aid grant (at least in early years) also makes me think the risk is lower. Maybe it is that—even assuming your Top Charities donation counterfactually caused something else to get funded, and further assuming it was a livelihoods program, the odds that the next livelihoods dollar would be for an animal-aid program do not seem high.
To the extent one is concerned about this kind of funging risk, it is also likely present if you gave to the top charity organization directly. Supposing that AMF is the most effective Top Charity at the margin today, giving it $1MM should have about the same effect on the Top Charities cost-effectiveness bar as giving GiveWell Top Charities $1MM to give to AMF. Indeed, unless one of the Top Charities wasn’t going to get funded by GiveWell this round anyway, this result may hold for independent gifts to any Top Charity. So although intuitively the funging risk feels higher because you’re giving to a different fund at GiveWell, I’m not sure how much that is the case.
I would just make the observation that one doesn’t have to buy into GiveWell’s moral weights to make user of their research and recommendations. A donor can build their own moral weights, plug that into GiveWell’s research, and come up with a top choice for the donation. GiveWell is in my experience pretty happy to walk larger donors through this process.
True! My worry is that giving to the Top Charities Fund (as I have been) might indirectly enable animal-based programs in the All Grants Fund because of fungibility.
You could give to AMF directly. But it would still most likely be funged by GiveWell. I don’t think there is any good way out of this, short of funding something you are confident GiveWell wouldn’t (like GiveDirectly); but by doing that, you are also implicitly choosing a worse charity.
I think that donating directly to the top charities might reducing funging (at least slightly) by affecting GiveWell’s information flows and ability to forecast—thereby reducing the chance that All Grants money gets freed up for this sort of potential animal donation program. Worst case, it’s a symbolic act against speciesism. What do you think?
My hunch is that the animals involved in anything GiveWell would support would live vastly better lives than factory farmed animals in high-income countries. There are of course factory farms in low-income countries, but animals raised by smallholder farmers do not live in those conditions, from what I remember of a couple years in rural Kenya.
Thanks, Katriel. My concern isn’t that a GiveWell program would create the worst possible conditions; it’s that using animals as “productive assets” builds in certain, programmatic harm (tethering/work, painful procedures without analgesia, disease risk, separation of family members, and an endpoint of slaughter) while GiveWell’s current moral weights assign animals zero weight. Even if smallholder conditions are “better,” the harm is still intentional and guaranteed by the program design.
There’s also a scale effect: if a livelihoods program is successful, the economic logic pushes toward higher densities, so welfare can deteriorate over time. And the relevant counterfactual for GiveWell isn’t “factory farm in the U.S.”; it’s an animal-neutral livelihood or health intervention that achieves similar human benefits without guaranteed animal suffering.
All I’m asking for is a procedural guardrail: until GiveWell has publicly considered animal moral weights, please don’t fund animal-based aid.
Values-wise, I also firmly hold that sentient beings like non-human animals aren’t resources for us to deploy.
Thanks for the post, Adam. I have eaten fully plant-based for 6 years, and have argued for GiveWell considering effects on farmed animals. However, I now think it would be better for GiveWell to keep focussing just on humans. I believe considering effects on farmed animals would tend to decrease agricultural-land-years via decreasing animal farming, and therefore decrease animal welfare due to increasing the suffering of soil animals much more than it could decrease the suffering of farmed animals (for my best guess that soil animals have negative lives). Moreover, saving human lives cheaply is the most cost-effective way of increasing animal welfare I am aware of, and GiveWell considering effects on animals would tend to decrease the funds going towards that due to alienating some of its funders.
While I appreciate your concern for animal welfare, I think it is dubious with a large backfire risk to suggest this. Getting accidental benefits might be expedient in the short term (by accident) but at the risk of not making the requisite advances to get these benefits. I would see it as equivalent to guessing the correct answer to a math question. While it may be correct, you didn’t develop the tools to get there and thus are not likely to get good answers in the future.
As an example, I could imagine Givewell finding that charities that limit human births to be the most cost effective and this would backfire against you.
Thanks, Marcus. In any case, I think the effects on soil animals (positive or negative) are much larger than those on farmed animals. So I would say it would make much more sense for GiveWell to account for soil animals than farmed animals. As a starting point, they could estimate the cropland- and pasture-years per $ for the interventions they fund.
I think this is more sensible.
Hi Vasco, I have not read everything you have written on this topic in detail so forgive me if I have missed you addressing this somewhere.
It seems reasonable to me to claim that the welfare of soil animals can dominate these calculations. But, as you have noted, the action-relevance of this depends entirely on if soil animals live positive or negative lives. From what I’ve seen, you outsource this determination to the Gemini LLM. It doesn’t seem appropriate to me to outsource such a difficult question to an LLM. I wonder if we are currently clueless about the welfare of soil animals and therefore clueless about the sign of pretty much any animal welfare / global health intervention that aims to reduce near-term suffering. What do you think?
Hi Jack,
There is more than exactly zero evidence about whether soil animals have negative or positive lives. In this sense, I would not say we are clueless about it. I agree the uncertainty is very large, to the point I guess the probability of any intervention being beneficial/harmful is close to 50 % due to the probability of soil animals having positive/negative lives being close to 50 %. One can avoid this problem with a best guess that soil animals have neutral lives in expectation, but I do not think this is reasonable. It would be a huge coincidence because there are lots of positive and negative values, but a single neutral value (0).
In one of my posts, I used guesses from Gemini for the welfare per animal-year of soil animals as a fraction of the welfare per animal-year of fully healthy soil animals. However, I would now guess soil animals to have negative lives regardless of Gemini’s or other LLMs’ guesses. My sense is that most people working on wild animal welfare would guess soil animals have negative lives. In addition, Karolina Sarek, Joey Savoie, and David Moss estimated in 2018, based on a weighted factor model, that wild bugs have a welfare per animal-year equal to −42 % of that of fully happy wild bugs. In my last post about soil animals, I assumed −25 %, which is less negative than they supposed.
It would be great if Rethink Priorities (RP), the Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI), Wild Animal Initiative (WAI), or others investigated whether soil animals have positive or negative lives. I would be happy to donate myself. I emailed and tagged people from those organisations about this, but only Cynthia Schuck‑Paim from WFI replied, saying Wladimir Alonso from WFI is working on a project related to assessing differences in hedonic capacity, which I guess relates to this post.
What would they do with such an estimate? I don’t think anyone, you included, knows with any more than very slim confidence, if it’s good or bad for soil animals to turn wild land into cropland or vice versa.
Hi Guy,
I would support interventions resulting in more m2-years of cropland and pasture per $. I guess soil animals have negative lives, and cropland and pasture are the 2 biomes besides desert with the least soil arthropods per unit area according to the means in Table S4 of Rosenberg et al. (2023), so I think increasing cropland and pasture implies less soil animals with negative lives in expectation.
I am not confident at all about whether soil animals have negative or positive lives. I have been highlighting that decreasing the uncertainty about this would be great. However, I still recommend interventions based on my best guess. I endorse maximising expected welfare (I see any alternatives as way worse), and I believe the expected effects on soil animals are much larger than those on target beneficiaries for the vast majority of interventions, so it makes sense I account for effects on soil animals despite their uncertainty.
Sorry for being this blunt, but EA is about using evidence and reason to identify the most effective ways to help others. I can’t possibly see how operating on a vague guess is on par with that.
This criticism is independent of the fact that I still claim a “negative life” is not a concept we should incorporate into moral theories, and that we definitely shouldn’t aim to just cull all animals whose lives we somehow think are negative.
My sense is that most people working on wild animal welfare would guess soil animals have negative lives. In addition, Karolina Sarek, Joey Savoie, and David Moss estimated in 2018, based on a weighted factor model, that wild bugs have a welfare per animal-year equal to −42 % of that of fully happy wild bugs. In my last post about soil animals, I assumed −25 %, which is less negative than they supposed.
Strong downvote for the usual reasons brother :). Doing think it’s helpful to always post this argument on on general animal welfare threads.
It’s at least somewhat germane here. As I understand Adam’s post, he is urging GiveWell to weight certain types of animal-welfare harm in its analyses. But that would make GiveWell’s work less valuable to many people whose views materially differ in certain ways from whatever specific views and weights regarding animal welfare GiveWell incorporated into its analyses. I think Vasco’s views represent a valid (albeit unusual) example of those circumstances for a specific potential(?) donor.
I downvoted. Saying that you’re downvoting with a smiley face seems overly passive aggressive to me. Your comment also doesn’t attempt to argue any point, and I believe when you have done so in the past you have failed to convince Vasco, so I’m not sure what use these comments serve.
I also personally think that Vasco raises a very important consideration that is relevant to any discussion about the cost effectiveness of both animal welfare and global health interventions. I’m not sure what the conclusion of considering the welfare of soil animals is, but it’s certainly given me food for thought.
Thanks, Nick. I do not think this is a general animal welfare thread. The post is arguing for GiveWell considering effects on animals, and my comment relates to this.
Thanks, Vasco. I have no problem at all with GiveWell focusing on human welfare. I am opposed to donations of animals as a means of doing so, though, and I think that GiveWell should only consider this if they update their moral weights to account for the welfare of animals.
This raises an interesting, and possibly unsolvable, point for organizations in GiveWell’s shoes.
GiveWell was created as a donor-advisory service, and to a significant degree still is (albeit most donors now entrust their money to GiveWell to disburse, so its recommendations can be executed in a timely and efficient manner). Almost by definition, GiveWell and its donors are aligned as to the primary purpose of the organization. But it’s unsurprising that the donor base may have differing opinions on secondary issues like animal welfare. (By secondary, I mean that animal welfare is not the animating concern behind GiveWell’s existence.)
If my memory serves, GiveWell’s moral weights are mostly derived from the views of its donors, although staff views and beneficiary preferences also get some weight. I recall a sentiment that beneficiary preferences should get more weight than they do, but also a recognition that they are difficult to measure. In my estimation, there’s no sound reason to defer to staff views on this issue, and I suspect beneficiary views would end up close to GiveWell’s current position. As far as donor views, I speculate that they are somewhat bimodal ~ a number of donors would not really care, and a number would care a lot. So using some sort of amalgamation of donor views is likely to make very few donors happy
In a usual charity, the practical solution might be to have separate buckets for “all livelihoods work, including animal-aid” and “livelihoods excluding animal-aid” programs. But people in this community know about fungibility, and the fungibility problems on that setup would probably be significant.
Conditional on a universe in which GiveWell would recommend an animal-aid programs to livelihoods donors absent an animal-welfare adjustment, I think it may be impossible to avoid a significant problem for one subgroup of livelihoods donors.[1] If it discloses the situation, then the donors who don’t favor considering animal welfare (or apply only a minor downward adjustment) are going to preferentially fund the animal-aid program. This doesn’t look much different than the two-livelihoods-bucket approach as far as funging effect.
But suppressing the information deprives other donors of the ability to make the highest-impact choice by their own values. And the lack of transparency would be problematic for an organization whose value proposition is helping donors make effective choices with their own monies.
For various reasons, I don’t think fungibility between livelihood-focused buckets and lifesaving/health-promoting buckets at GiveWell is a major concern here.
Thank you for the post. I have a follow-up question which I hope you or Givewell can answer: Do Givewell also give cage systems to people in need, or teach them how to use cages, or both? I am asking because I have seen livelihood projects that do one of these. If my memory is not wrong, they include FAO, World Bank, the Dutch Government, and Heifer (yes, they don’t just give cows, they give chickens too and teach them how to use cage systems).
As far as I’m aware, GiveWell isn’t funding any of these programs and generally they have not been shown to be particularly cost effective.
I think that’s accurate. Not currently funding any of these, but they could as part of livelihood programs.