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I’m curating this post — and I’d love to see more reflections on 2023 from other perspectives and fields. (Thanks for cross-posting it!)
This is wild. I wanted to find some estimates; it looks like this report estimates that around $200M was spent on farmed animal welfare in 2020 (with around 10% growth per year, and not counting industry investments into alt proteins), which makes things look pretty close to the Met’s budget.
Some semi-related posts you might appreciate if you appreciated this one:
Broad reflections:
EA’s success no one cares about (by Jakub Stencel, from June)
Let’s celebrate some wins (October), last year’s version of this newsletter, and another recent win: The Belgian senate votes to add animal welfare to the constitution
Reflections on failed policy reforms / initiatives:
EU considers dropping stricter animal welfare measures, see also more discussion here (in the comments) — I would love to see more about this and how we should update on the Forum
Abolishing factory farming in Switzerland: Postmortem
Other interesting animal welfare content:
Animal Advocacy Strategy Forum 2023 Summary (November)
A Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Historical Farmed Animal Welfare Ballot Initiatives (June)
Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare (November), and a response with some discussion
Ideas on potential approaches, like eliminating the New World screwworm, policy wins via minor political parties,
Related opportunities:
The EA Animal Welfare Fund (Once Again) Has Significant Room For More Funding (recommended by GWWC)
You can explore retrospectives and/or funding gap information from The Humane League, Fish Welfare Initiative, Shrimp Welfare Project, and others
Call for abstracts on the economics of animal welfare (deadline: 15 January)
As a side note, I feel conflicted about the post’s title (or newsletter’s subject line); the first sentence seems to disagree with the title and I don’t know if I’d characterize the year as “a year of wins for farmed animals.” (E.g. my sense is that the number of chickens kept in extreme confinement has increased globally, and the trend isn’t changing.) I think it can be very useful to focus on wins sometimes, but I’d change the title to something like “some big wins for farmed animals.”
Finally,
+1 from me. (Bold mine.)
Is this the first time the EA Forum has had an impact story that affected over 1 billion individuals?[1]
I know that there are many instances of things which [arguably] on expectation will affect >1 billion individuals, but I’m wondering if this is the first time that we can concretely point to 1 billion individuals who have been helped past-tense.
Thank you so much for crossposting this!
!!
So if:
Saulius’ 2019 estimates were otherwise correct i.e. cage-free campaigns do in fact affect 75 chicken-years per dollar (updating 64%-->89% follow-through gives 54-->75 chicken-years)
A free-range egg costs 11 cents more than a caged egg
Modern commercial hens produce 300 eggs a year
Then: It’s ~2,500 times more cost-effective to donate to a cage-free campaign than to buy cage-free eggs instead of caged eggs.[1]
While I agree that we shouldn’t take expected value estimates too literally, that’s one hell of a multiplier. And even if ethical offsetting is generally antithetical to EA values, if your goal is to get chickens out of cages, an estimated 2500x multiplier on the margin[2] is a powerful challenge to buying cage-free eggs yourself.
“You shouldn’t be buying eggs at all!” I hear you cry. Why not? Because personally boycotting commercial egg production robustly makes you >2,500 times more persuasive as an animal welfare advocate? Because being free to consume egg-based products would make such a negligible difference to your productivity over the rest of your life, that it would never lead to you earning an additional $1.50?[3] Indeed you never spend more than $1.50 to give yourself the kind of benefits (yes, benefits) you’d get from being free to consume eggs for the rest of your life?
Epistemic status: Sitting in a cafe in a country with ~no cage-free eggs staring hungrily at a breakfast menu consisting entirely of egg-based options considering breaking my no-meat-or-caged-eggs diet while KC and the Sunshine Band sing Give It Up over the cafe speakers and wondering if the universe is telling me to give up rationalising eating tasty food or to give up rationalising looking more altruistic.
75*300/(1/0.11)
Obviously if no one bought cage-free eggs, no one would produce them.
Here, I’m assuming that cage-free campaigns affect 75 chicken-years per dollar (as above), that you’d otherwise eat 200 caged eggs a year, that commercial hens produce 300 eggs a year (as above), that you live another 75 years, that—very speculatively—going cage-free removes 50% of the suffering, and welfarism.
Note that rather than exhibiting regression to the mean over time, this is remarkably ~15x larger than ACE’s 2015 estimate for online ads.
Nice points, Holly!
I had estimated donating “0.147 $/year” to corporate campaigns for broiler welfare is enough to cancel all suffering caused to farmed animals per person per year (not just that linked to eggs). However, I still think eating predominantly whole-food plan-based makes sense from an altruistic perspective:
It is cheaper in upper-middle-income and high-income countries, so one can make more donations. From Springmann 2021 (see Fig. 1 below), “compared with the cost of current diets, the healthy and sustainable dietary patterns were, depending on the pattern, up to 22–34% lower in cost in upper-middle-income to high-income countries on average (when considering statistical means), but at least 18–29% more expensive in lower-middle-income to low-income countries”.
It is healthier, so one can work more time.
According to the EAT-Lancet Commision, the global adoption of a predominantly plant-based healthy diet, with just 13.6 %[1] (= (153 + 15 + 15 + 62 + 19 + 40 + 36)/2500) of calories coming from animals, would decrease premature deaths of adults by 21.7 %[2] (= (0.19 + 0.224 + 0.236)/3).
BMK=benchmark diets. FLX=flexitarian diets. PSC=pescatarian diets. VEG=vegetarian diets. VGN=vegan diets. Veg=diet variant high in fruits and vegetables. Grn=high-grain diet variant.
Thanks for sharing! I found it funny.
Calculated based on values in Table 1.
Mean of the 3 estimates in Table 3.
This is indeed encouraging to hear! I’ve recently been made aware of so much tragic news for the animals (the Italian cellular agriculture ban the most egregious, just as I see it), so to hear that anything good is happening is uplifting. It’s especially important that crustaceans’ welfare is finally being addressed and attended to, when they were ignored for so long.