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 andguaranteed 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.
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.