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Thank you for writing this! I have been thinking about some ideas that could become mega projects, just throwing some of them out here (you have already listed some of them)
Pay to install electric stunners in “small fish slaughter machines” which is popular in China. The idea is to pay way higher than the cost of installing such stunners so that the whole industry that produces this machine is disrupted. I am doing research on this potential project. My tentative judgement is that installing such stunners might be cheap—it could be as simple as connecting electricity between the gear wheels that push the fish into the machine. According to the producers’ claims, these machines can kill 100-15000 fish per hour, depending on the species. I estimate that a $100 payment per machine is huge enough to incentivise the majority of these machines’ producers to agree to a deal.
Invent a new “cleansing machine” for crayfish (I estimate that Chinese people eat 4,000B of them each year). The special thing about crayfish is that they are so dirty for human consumption they require heavy “cleansing” before being cooked. Shallow research shows that the currently most common method for “cleansing” them is ultrasonic bath while they are still fully alive (for about 20 minutes), which seems extremely painful if they are sentient (in this video you can see the crayfish crawling out to escape the ultrasonicing water.) The idea is to invent a new method that is much less painful and sell the machine at a price that would crowd out all other methods. Without virtually any serious research, it seems like electrical bath before the cleaning starts is the way to go.
AI For Animals (This could be the name of a new charity)
AI to monitor the welfare situation (not according to factory farms’ definitions) in factory farms, transportation, and retail spots. This is especially important for fish, because there are many species farmed
AI to speed up PB/CM research. A lot of PB/CM startups now have 1-2 computer scientist/data scientist. Instead of each of them hiring expensive CS/DS/ML researchers and doing uncollaborated work, start a research hub to distribute the new science and technology
AI to decipher animal “language”. This is something that a few academic teams are already working on, but with small project scales, and on animtals that are not farmed. This is a moonshot—for maybe the truth is that high level nonhuman animal-human communication is impossible. But if we can directly communicate with them, or at least know what they want to express, it will help us understand a lot more about nonhuman animals, and probably help advocacy (imagine a knowing a fish’s complaint or pleading!)
AI for tackling wild animal suffering. This is a big idea with potentially many sub-applications:
AI (drones) to identify dying wild animals and euthanize them. This approach even avoids the problem/accusation that we might cause unpredictable changes and therefore possibly harms while we change what happens in ecosystems, for example, if a deer felt off a cliff and painfully waits for the death, whether the death is cause by time, hunger, a predator, or a drone (as far as the killing doesn’t leave stuff like bullets or toxic chemicals) likely won’t affect what will happen inside that ecosystem. The same might even be said in some cases where the animals are not yet dead—for example, if a forest fire is definitely going kill certain animals and the AI deemed it impossible to move those animals out of the fire’s affecting zone, the AI drones can kill them before the fire reach them. Again in this case whether the animals are dead before the fire reaches them won’t affect the ecosystem, the only difference is only the amount of suffering that happens (burning alive is often thought to be one of the most painful deaths).
AI to track/count wild animals. Quite a number of teams are already doing this, but none of them are interested in the suffering/welfare of individual animals. If a team is interested in tackling WAS the animals to train the AI to track/count would be very different. Being able to count wild animals, monitor their movements, and changes in population, are all hugely important for research that guide wild animal welfare interventions.
AI to identify wild animal welfare levels. This is the wild animal version of the farmed animal welfare identification AI, but probably much harder as wild animals are not in controlled environments and data gathering and data curation will be much harder.
Computer models to predict the effects of interventions. There are many people working on this, but as far as my knowledge goes those people are mostly, if not entirely, interested in “classical conservation” which is not interested in the welfare of individual animals. We need models that can predict the change of net welfare in a system when certain interventions are introduced to a system.
These are interesting ideas! I think that AI systems designed with animal welfare in mind would be more reliant on computer vision and sensory data than NLP, since animals don’t speak in human tongues. This blog post about using biologgers to measure animal welfare comes to mind.
I’m nervous about implementing AI solutions in the near-term, because, as you allude, what they are used to achieve is matter of who’s programming them :/
These are very interesting. The electric stunning can be both beneficial in the way that animals, if they are at least intuitively aware what they live for—to maybe be eaten or produce animal products and be eaten, then if this is they all their life just chill and then it is just a stun, then it’s quite ok. If they could they would probably contribute further, by some advancement, but since we currently only can use their contributions in this way, they may be quite ok just chilling taking care of their life. I read there at least were issues with the stunning machines in US slaughterhouses—simple technical issues—poor placement or inadequate current. Also, ritual killing is an issue. Stunning is more elegant and should be the new ritual.
Electrical bath for crayfish makes sense too. It can be just a simple electrode which prevents the issues of crawling (and thus loss of crayfish and capital). Of course, the alternative of eating rare tofus can be even better but for the time being—there should be manufacturers that would gladly produce this device.
AI monitoring welfare—I would not implement it, maybe in a few years when institutions become more interested in monitoring—it’s a moonshot plus there may be other tech solutions with higher marginal cost-effectiveness. For example, actually, if you focus on cricket farms—I think that if they miss simple nutrients, such as salt, they eat each others. This can extensively slump the atmosphere there for large numbers of individuals. So, some maybe salinity/humidity/etc monitoring device that even a worker can go around with and just poke around and depending on the values nutrients are automatically dispersed. Of course, insect welfare research should perhaps be prioritized because what if crickets just love the thrill of eating others and being eaten since they live to the fullest or suffer in any case so optimal salinity makes very little difference.
I think plant-based is more promising with the cost right now than cultured meat. Still, the equipment is suboptimal since it is made for meat. Probably, these are relatively simple engineering solutions.
Animal language can be deciphered based on evolutionary empathy. For example, when one really eats some vegetable, they can feel like a bug in the same situation. When they are unsure about an unfamiliar object and looking at it, like a bird in that situation. You probably do not need to ‘require’ animals to communicate, since it is quite clear what they want—or, it is similar to what one can perceive in some globally poor/disempowered contexts: individuals do not have their own objectives since no one has asked them. I wonder if this should be different with animals: if developing their own interests would be a challenge/detrimental to their subjective wellbeing since they are used to/capable of only very simple lives.
You need research on wild animal welfare before you can be reasonably certain that interventions will be welcome. For example, animals can negotiate/make agreements/cooperate by the exhibit of power. Since they cannot imagine treatment and specialize in order to increase efficiencies by trade little (are independent of others outside of their family/tribe, more competing for scarce resources or benefiting from others’ death), they can just have very different attitudes to concepts such as longevity, disability-adjusted life year. For them, it can be ‘are what they should and protect those who they should’ or not. It is a good life—righteousness transcends pain, which is accepted by its inevitability. Maybe. Engagement of similar humans can help elucidate non-humans’ way of thinking.
Yes, you would need to know the quality of the lives of the number of animals to have valuable data. Even the number, and other metrics, can be beneficial, if maybe in the future the quality is associated with these metrics and historical developments inform optimal solutions as well as present welfare states.
Hm, yes, computer models that track the developments of populations, e. g. based on predation rates are ok but the welfare is missing.
On buying policy change:
The swiss non-factory farming ballot is actually coming this september and additional funding could greatly help to change the outcome. I copy+paste the reddit post I made yesterday with the details here:
A rather revolutionary referendum will take place in Switzerland this fall: The voters will decide whether in the future all livestock farming in Switzerland must at least meet the standards of “Bio Suisse”, an organic label with rather strict standards.
I am writing this post because I am convinced that the initiative has a not bad chance to be accepted and a very high expected value. In a representative opinion poll on the launch of the initiative, 59% of the respondents said they were in favor of the initiative.
In Switzerland, 80 million animals are killed every year, which could now at least live and die under completely different conditions. In addition, the appeal abroad should not be underestimated if an entire country adopts such strict husbandry regulations and can show that it is a sustainable model.
Of course, the livestock industry, for its part, is throwing millions into the election campaign, which is why additional financial resources could make a huge difference to the outcome of the vote. The initiative is broadly supported by environmental organizations and led by a professional team.
More information and details for donations:
Campaign website (in German, Italian, French): https://massentierhaltung.ch/
Website of the organization leading the campaign (also in English): https://sentience.ch/en/
I really like this idea. In addition to financial supports, maybe EA should formally take a stance on this?
That woud be amazing! I’m not well connected within the EA community so if somebody can help out with this that would be awesome!
Some of my favorite ideas (some listed above):
Venture philanthropy fund—evergreen fund (profits get recycled to make more investments) to invest in technologies/companies that improve animal lives (alt proteins, more humane slaughter, conservation, etc)
Hedge fund/venture scout model—turn high performing individuals in non-grantmaking roles into part-time grantmakers by giving them philanthropic budgets to deploy autonomously (and only continue giving them funds if they show “impact returns”)
Longtermist Animal Welfare NGO—this seems almost completely neglected by both EA LT’s and non-EA AW people but there are many long-term nightmare scenarios we are not defending against (e.g. CAFOs in space, insect farming, digital animals, animal pandemics).
Endow a university institute—I am not aware of any institutes dedicated to the study and promotion of animal welfare. “Animal health” is very common at the American land grant universities but in practice “animal health” means the opposite of animal welfare
Mass media—funding of documentaries and other media that can convince mainstream consumers to stop eating animal products or otherwise expand their moral circle
Asset management—Create a philanthropic private equity fund to engage in shareholder activism (such as Carl Ichan’s failed bid with McDonalds)
Infrastructure fund for alternative proteins—there is a desperate need for plant protein extraction infrastructure and precision fermentation/cultivated meat bioprocessing infrastructure (about $60Bn needed total). Venture capital largely won’t invest because they are too capital intensive and governments mostly refuse to support the sector due to agribusiness lobbying power. Loan guarantees would help too.
Supercharging existing EA AW orgs and Charity Entrepreneurship
Impact litigation to make factory farming a liability like Legal Impact for Chickens
Happy to share additional details on anything! These are mostly finance based as that is my background.
Just replying, very belatedly, to say: You’re amazing.
I enjoyed this post. And I appreciated some of the explanation in the intro. E.g. I can imagine this list being inspiring for donors (and hadn’t thought about it like that before).
But is it much different from a list of (non-mega) project ideas?
E.g. see this comment:
“Rethink Priorities’ first incubated charity, Insect Welfare Project (provisional name) might be an example of launching something that eventually could absorb $100M when it finds an effective intervention and scales it. The Shrimp Welfare Project might be another example.”
You could apply this logic to almost any animal charity that’s trying to find interventions that are both cost-effective and scalable.
Once you adopt this perspective, the question could be switched from “which megaproject ideas can we think of?” to “how rapidly will we get diminishing returns on further investment in various plausibly cost-effective project ideas?”
Thanks Jamie! We struggled a lot with this issue when writing the post.
I’m not really sure I see a problem or a difference with the “which megaproject ideas can we think of?”/ “how rapidly will we get diminishing returns on further investment in various plausibly cost-effective project ideas?” distinction. I think if the answer to the second question is “quickly and with only a few million $” then you cut the idea from the list. It’s part of the way to arrive at answers to “which megaproject ideas can we think of?”. Other ideas floated seemed like they would be cost-effective at a small scale but could never absorb $10M because the problem was so small (foie gras bans perhaps) or the low-hanging fruit was uniquely cheap (the first type of a new campaign in a new region/species but hit some blockers or severe diminishing returns as they try to scale), and other ideas didn’t look cost-effective at a small scale only but maybe at large scale if they reach some sort of economies of scale (some sort of policy or subsidization schemes that only gain leverage at large scales).
On the specific example you highlighted, I think “almost any animal charity” would have more weight as a critique if there were many such opportunities. I think the N of animal charities pursuing interventions that could actually both scale & remain cost-effective is relatively small (I don’t see orgs like FWI and Healthier Hens popping up without the deliberate effort of Charity Entrepreneurship and it’s still to be proven if they can scale and remain cost-effective. Even larger orgs like CIWF & THL aren’t obviously only doing cost-effective things). The two we cited (focusing on shrimp and farmed insects) were deliberate because the sheer number of animals affected provide the opportunity that cost-effectiveness could be maintained even if spending a lot of money, unlike other animal charities.
I agree not all the items on the list will turn out to meet strict definitions, or even vague definitions, of megaprojects. The main point of the exercise here was to note the virtual lack of any ideas on animals and prompt discussion and interest, and secondly to actually propose ideas from among which further investigation might find some really compelling megaprojects.
Appreciate this post.
Sections that stood out for me as being particularly tractable & scalable are:
Build a better evidence base: I think Rethink Priorities is doing a great job here and would be great to see their team grow. Work from Welfare Footprint has also been really useful to support advocacy work. Something I have heard from many campaign groups is that having research conducted in their country in their own language would be really useful for working with local goverments, companies and producers.
Build infrastructure: I think this Global Food Partners model farm project in Indonesia is really useful in facilitating change. I think having something like this in many more countries would be impactful.
Build and launch organisations: I think the idea of working with existing orgs to focus on specific animal issues is valuable. Considerable effort is spent getting a new organisation started and connected. Friends of the Earth incorporated the Better Chicken Commitment into their Kale Yeah! initiative to shift caterers to use more plant based food and this led to a number of universities making change for chickens. Many Open Wing Alliance groups have made rapid progress on cage-free as they already had the foundation of their organisation in place. I agree that larger organisations could quite easily absorb more funding. Something I have noticed in hiring is we are having a lot, 100′s of applications, for entry level roles and limited applications for roles with more experience and technical skills. I am happy to see larger organizations putting more effort into growing staff in technical skills, management skills etc and see this as being very important. I would like to see more of this along with more entry level roles and perhaps something like ‘graduate programs’(I don’t think it should be restricted to graduates though) that larger businesses offer to grow the talent pool. I also see big value in replicating projects that are working.
Spread Information: From what I understand, the WakkerDier campaign on broilers in the Netherlands was very successful in part due to their ad blitz. The cost of doing an ad blitz with the same exposure in other countries is pretty high.
Buy policy change: Ballot initiatives/referenda really do seem to be working well and complement corporate campaign work. Obraz in Czechia achieved a laying hen cage ban that comes into effect in 2027 on the back of their cage-free egg campaign. They launched corporate their cage-free campaign in 2018 and won many major commitments with 83.3% of hens in cages, in 2019 they introduced into parliament legislation for a ban with 74% of hens in cages and in 2020 a ban was made with 67.6% of hens in cages. I think the execution of this campaign was exceptional and having a laser focus on an issue and closing it out from a number of angles should be done more.
Are there any particular existing texts that would be useful to translate to other languages? Perhaps the Welfare Footprint books on hens and broilers? This wouldn’t be as good as research conducted in their own country but perhaps still useful and probably very easy to organize and fund.
Yes, I think it is exactly that sort of thing Saulius. From what I have heard it is often the research about how animals are kept that people want from their region/country.
There is a lot of potential in fish welfare/stunning. In addition to what others have mentioned, IIRC from some reading a few years ago:
The greatest bottleneck in humane slaughter is research, e.g. determining parameters/designing machines for stunning each major species, as they differ so much. There just aren’t many experts in this field, and the leading researchers are mostly very busy (and pretty old), but perhaps financial incentives would persuade some people with the right sort of background to go into this area.
As well as electrical and percussive stunning, anaesthetising with clove oil/eugenol seems a promising and under-researched method of reducing the pain of slaughter. Because it may just involve adding a liquid/powder to a tank containing the fish, it may also require less tailoring to each species than than other methods (though it can affect the flavour if “too much” is used). I have some notes on this if anyone is interested.
Crustastun could be mass-produced and supplied cheaply/freely to places that would otherwise boil crustaceans alive. I seem to recall a French lawyer had invented another machine that was even better (or cheaper) but was too busy to promote it; maybe EAs could buy the patent or something?
This is a very valuable post. Thanks a lot to both for writing this up! Looking forward to seeing some of these megaprojects happening in the future!
Very cool! I hope to see at least some of those analyzed and maybe taken off the ground in the near future :)
I love this post! Based on my experience as co-founder of Talist (and a lot of research before launching this new organisation) I want to highlight the need & opportunity for mega-projects for headhunting, building up a talent pipeline and training - basically solving the talent bottleneck for both the EAA movement and the Alt. Protein Industry. Globally finding, attracting and assessing the best people could easily absorb multi million fundings and there are opportunities for very scalable projects with great potential for high impact. (I am currently investigating the idea of a digital talent community / job market place for STEM professionals to help solve the talent gap in the Alt Protein Industry. I wish there were already more opportunities for non-profit funding for bigger projects like this. The only funder I am aware of is the Future Fund / FTX community and they do not accept unsolicited funding requests atm. So I am considering for-profit funding, which comes a long with several risks and downsides compared to non-profit funding)
Excellent post! Regarding fellowships and scholarships within academia, I would also suggest offering pre-PhD fellowships similar to NSF, NDSEG, or Hertz, which support a student’s full grad school tuition. The stipulation would be that the student’s dissertation would need to be related to animal welfare-related topics, which is similar to how NIH training grants in the USA are already structured. A similar model could work for postdoctoral fellowships.
This would have the following benefits:
Winning a competitive fellowship pre-PhD looks great on a student’s CV and can help them get into grad school and find an excellent advisor.
In many academic departments in the US, it can be hard for even well-funded faculty members to take on students to work on animal welfare topics, because their existing funding is earmarked for other topics.
Related to the above, most funding for animal welfare research is unfortunately tied to specific projects, making it hard for faculty to find funding for training students on these topics.
Regarding encouraging faculty to work on animal welfare topics, establishing less restricted funding sources (i.e., earmarked for animal welfare research, but not tied to a specific project) for faculty with strong track records of working in this area would improve substantially on the current model and incentives.
Hi @James Özden thank you so much for mentioning Expertise for Animals!
We are working hard to support animal advocacy with our knowledge in veterinary medicine and biology.
You are currently linking to another consulting organization who works with zoos, keepers and trainers on the welfare captive animals as far as I understand.
Our link is https://www.expertiseforanimals.com/en/home
Expertise for Animals is supporting other organizations and activists with our expertise and moves data from animal welfare science into animal advocacy.
If other forum users could help me tag James, I would very much appreciate it, since i can not mention him directly yet.
Fixed! Thanks for flagging this
Thank you so much!
someone recently posted the transcript from an 80k hours podcast interview with an MIT scientist who invented something called the CRISPR drive, which the MIT scientist thinks could be used to make lots of male screwworms infertile so that they stop making larvae that eat the flesh of many millions of animals every year. New World Screwworm would be difficult to eradicate in South America, where it does most of its damage, but it is still endemic in Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Trinidad and Tobago, which are island nations who would be protected by the sea from re-infestation if NWSW were to be eradicated on their territories. I imagine it may also be problem on non-sovereign islands like Colombia’s San Andres and Providencia in the Caribbean, and maybe Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, which definitely has a parasite that is endangering several bird species by invading the organisms of hatchlings. Uruguay is trying to eradicate NWSW on its territory now. maybe a megaproject could pay technicians from the Uruguay mission, if it turns out to be successful, to try to repeat the feat on a Caribbean island to try to bring the issue to the attention of more nation-states and donors.
Fantastic piece. A lot to think about and digest. Thank you for writing this.
Supporting New Harvest could go a long way towards helping ensure well-being of animals. I met with Stephanie from their team earlier this year. Here is a link to a Ted Talk by one of their co-founders (Isha Datar).
It seems like they have a small, but very capable team. The way I understand it, their focus is to continue to foster the collaborations/research in the wider domain of cellular agriculture.