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!)
...all advocacy for farmed animals globally has a combined budget smaller than the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. And yet we’ve already achieved progress for billions of sentient beings.
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:
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,
None of this progress just happened. Almost all of it came thanks to the tireless work of advocates, enabled by the generosity of donors. Many of both read this newsletter. So let me say: I’m deeply grateful for all you do.
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.)