I’d be surprised if there isn’t something in the order of at least a 100x to 1000x difference in cost-effectiveness in favour of animal interventions (as suggested here).
Animals are much more numerous, neglected, and have terrible living conditions, so there’s simply much more to do. According to FarmKind, $100 donated to the Impact Fund can protect 124 chickens 🐥 from suffering, as well as 61 pigs 🐷, a cow 🐮, 22 fish 🐟, and more than 25 000 shrimps, 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦. Plus, it offsets ~6.7 tonnes of CO2 🌎. These kinds of numbers would be unthinkable for human-focused charities.
According to the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, a significant amount of evidence points to these animals being sentient (able to feel pain and pleasure). As indicated through research on the Moral Weight Project, it’s hard to have a high confidence that their moral value and ability to suffer is much lower than that of humans. I would be extremely surprised that individuals with which we share billions of years of evolutionary history are less able to suffer. Why would evolution not implement a tool as useful as suffering in animals?
I feel like the view that animals do not matter too much morally often does not come from a detailed research, but mostly stems from intuition. We have a natural tendency to prefer those that are more similar to us humans. This is normal and natural, and it feels good to help humans—however, it might not be the optimal choice.
For instance, Farmkind estimates that less than 10% of the funds raised by effective giving organizations go to factory farming. Even in the context of strategy diversification, it’s weird to allocate such a small amount to trillions of individuals suffering today.
I think not taking enough animals into account is the strongest issue I see in EA—although it fares much better on this point than most other social movements. For instance, the positive expected value of working on longtermism relies on the assumption that the future will likely be positive for all beings. Few people, however, explicitly look into whether the future will be positive or negative for animals—many scenarios include the continuation of factory farming. Right now, if humans and farmed animals are considered together, total global welfare may be declining at increasing speed, and could already be well below zero.
However, EA is already one of the movements with the best track record in the world for helping animals—with thousands of people supporting impactful organisations, so I am confident it can go even further on that path.
“Right now, if humans and farmed animals are considered together, total global welfare may be declining at increasing speed, and could already be well below zero.” Given that there are way more wild animals than farmed animals, this is probably determined by whether wild animal lives are net negative, and how much humans are reducing their population overall, right?
I’m not sure this metric is relevant : biomass weight is massively dominated by the largest mammals just for the reason that they are big.
Going by this metric, it would mean that having one super obese 400kg individual, or one small cow, counts the same as having 100 human babies (not to talk about elephants).
I think number of individuals is much more relevant here. And there just happens to be a lot of smaller individuals.
Yeah, I didn’t intend to suggest that biomass is actually the metric, but more like, if you believe that the “intensity of experience” ratio is at least as large as the mass ratio (not because of the mass, but because the larger creatures tend to also have more complex brains and behaviour and so on), then actually farmed animals may have at least comparable if not more “total experience” than wild animals.
Great point—it was flagged in the linked post, but I forgot to explicit that.
Regarding wild animals, it is so hard to estimate whether their lives are overall net negative (or positive) and to what extent, that I forgot to precise this huge caveat here. We still don’t have good enough data, and there are large uncertainties (e.g. what is the impact of climate change if it makes siberia more habitable?)
But this could indeed change the overall sign of the impact of humanity (and there are some futures where we take better care of wild animals—which would be great).
But yeah, more solid data is needed on that topic.
I’d be surprised if there isn’t something in the order of at least a 100x to 1000x difference in cost-effectiveness in favour of animal interventions (as suggested here).
Animals are much more numerous, neglected, and have terrible living conditions, so there’s simply much more to do. According to FarmKind, $100 donated to the Impact Fund can protect 124 chickens 🐥 from suffering, as well as 61 pigs 🐷, a cow 🐮, 22 fish 🐟, and more than 25 000 shrimps, 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦. Plus, it offsets ~6.7 tonnes of CO2 🌎. These kinds of numbers would be unthinkable for human-focused charities.
According to the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, a significant amount of evidence points to these animals being sentient (able to feel pain and pleasure). As indicated through research on the Moral Weight Project, it’s hard to have a high confidence that their moral value and ability to suffer is much lower than that of humans. I would be extremely surprised that individuals with which we share billions of years of evolutionary history are less able to suffer. Why would evolution not implement a tool as useful as suffering in animals?
I feel like the view that animals do not matter too much morally often does not come from a detailed research, but mostly stems from intuition. We have a natural tendency to prefer those that are more similar to us humans. This is normal and natural, and it feels good to help humans—however, it might not be the optimal choice.
For instance, Farmkind estimates that less than 10% of the funds raised by effective giving organizations go to factory farming. Even in the context of strategy diversification, it’s weird to allocate such a small amount to trillions of individuals suffering today.
I think not taking enough animals into account is the strongest issue I see in EA—although it fares much better on this point than most other social movements. For instance, the positive expected value of working on longtermism relies on the assumption that the future will likely be positive for all beings. Few people, however, explicitly look into whether the future will be positive or negative for animals—many scenarios include the continuation of factory farming. Right now, if humans and farmed animals are considered together, total global welfare may be declining at increasing speed, and could already be well below zero.
However, EA is already one of the movements with the best track record in the world for helping animals—with thousands of people supporting impactful organisations, so I am confident it can go even further on that path.
“Right now, if humans and farmed animals are considered together, total global welfare may be declining at increasing speed, and could already be well below zero.” Given that there are way more wild animals than farmed animals, this is probably determined by whether wild animal lives are net negative, and how much humans are reducing their population overall, right?
This is surely true by number but I’m not sure it would be true on all reasonable weightings? See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)#/media/File:Terrestrial_biomass.jpg
I’m not sure this metric is relevant : biomass weight is massively dominated by the largest mammals just for the reason that they are big.
Going by this metric, it would mean that having one super obese 400kg individual, or one small cow, counts the same as having 100 human babies (not to talk about elephants).
I think number of individuals is much more relevant here. And there just happens to be a lot of smaller individuals.
Yeah, I didn’t intend to suggest that biomass is actually the metric, but more like, if you believe that the “intensity of experience” ratio is at least as large as the mass ratio (not because of the mass, but because the larger creatures tend to also have more complex brains and behaviour and so on), then actually farmed animals may have at least comparable if not more “total experience” than wild animals.
Oh, as a proxy of that.
I don’t think I agree since I am not convinced that neural count is the relevant metric but I understand better the use of this proxy.
Great point—it was flagged in the linked post, but I forgot to explicit that.
Regarding wild animals, it is so hard to estimate whether their lives are overall net negative (or positive) and to what extent, that I forgot to precise this huge caveat here.
We still don’t have good enough data, and there are large uncertainties (e.g. what is the impact of climate change if it makes siberia more habitable?)
But this could indeed change the overall sign of the impact of humanity (and there are some futures where we take better care of wild animals—which would be great).
But yeah, more solid data is needed on that topic.