In the short-term (the next ten years), WAW interventions we could pursue to help wild animals now seem less cost-effective than farmed animal interventions.
Out of curiosity: When making claims like this, are you referring to the cost-effectiveness of farmed animal interventions when only considering the impacts on farmed animals? Or do you think this claim still holds if you also consider the indirect effects of farmed animal interventions on wild animals?
(Sorry if you say this somewhere and I missed it.)
Ok, let’s consider this for each type of farmed animal welfare intervention:
Humane slaughter of farmed animals and wild-caught fish. I’m guessing that it doesn’t impact WAW that much.
Reducing animal product production. E.g., diet change advocacy, meat alternatives. Such interventions increase wild populations a lot. If you believe that wild animals live bad lives (which is questionable but I’d give it a 65% probability), then it follows that reducing meat production is likely bad for short-term animal welfare. I personally still think that reducing meat production is good but not for short-term animal welfare reasons. For example, it reduces climate change. According to 80,000 hours, climate change could “destabilise society, destroy ecosystems, put millions into poverty, and worsen other existential threats such as engineered pandemics, risks from AI, or nuclear war.” But I probably wouldn’t myself fund reducing animal product production, at least not with money dedicated to animal welfare, partly due to WAW issues.
Improving farmed animal welfare. Raising higher welfare animals usually requires more resources and more land.[1] So it probably decreases wild animal populations (which is maybe good for WAW?) but causes a bit more of those environmental problems. But I’d say that if environmental costs are ever worth it, this is the case (especially for chickens because they don’t require that much resources per individual either way). I’m not going to sit here with my radiator on and say that chickens should continue suffering bone fractures and not being able to extend their wings because of the small environmental cost.
It seems I hadn’t considered this enough, so thank you very much for the question :)
For example, National Chicken Council argues that slower growing (and hence higher welfare) broiler breeds will have higher environmental costs: more feed, fuel, land, and water will be needed (I think it’s a biased source but the general conclusion makes sense). Similarly, according to Xin et al. (2011), “hens in noncage houses are less efficient in resource (feed, energy, and land) utilization, leading to a greater carbon footprint.” (I adapted this text from this post of mine).
Based on this, I think it is plausible the nearterm effects of any intervention are driven by the effects on wild animals, namely arthropods and nematodes. For example, in the context of global health and development (see here):
I think GiveWell’s top charities may be anything from very harmful to very beneficial accounting for the effects on terrestrial arthropods.
If this is so, the expected nearterm effects of neartermist interventions (including ones attempting to improve the welfare of farmed animals) are also quite uncertain, in the sense they can easily be positive or negative. I still expect neartermist interventions to be positive due to their longterm effects. However, expecting them to be better than longtermist ones would be a surprising and suspicious convergence.
Great question. Yes, I think the claim still holds. It’s a bit tricky to explain why so you will have to stick with me. Let’s assume that:
Chicken welfare reforms are the most cost-effective intervention we found if we only consider the direct impact on chickens,
The indirect impacts of these welfare reforms on WAW are so bad that they outweigh the impact on chickens,
Each 1$ we spend to oppose welfare reforms negates 1$ spent on welfare reforms.
It would follow that if we ignored the impact on chickens, then opposing welfare reforms would be the new most cost-effective intervention because of its impact on WAW. But that would be a very surprising coincidence. I’d call it surprising divergence (as opposed to surprising convergence).
But ah, I’m now realizing that there is much more to this problem. It gets a lot messier. I’ll write more about this later.
Good argument. It might not work if one maintains an act-omission distinction regarding harms to the environment. For example, imagine that
value to farm animals of veg outreach = 1 util/$
value to wild animals of veg outreach = −2 util/$ (due to reducing environmental impact).
If this were the case, we shouldn’t do veg outreach. It would seem that we should try to increase environmental impact by promoting beef consumption, but maybe our act-omission distinction prevents us from wanting to do that. It could also be difficult to explain why one is promoting beef production or get other people concerned for animal welfare on board.
(This example is just for illustration. In reality, if I could push a button to increase vegetarianism in the world, I probably would.)
This is a great question. I totally missed this consideration while reading this post but this question is imperative to keep in mind while thinking about this topic.
Out of curiosity: When making claims like this, are you referring to the cost-effectiveness of farmed animal interventions when only considering the impacts on farmed animals? Or do you think this claim still holds if you also consider the indirect effects of farmed animal interventions on wild animals?
(Sorry if you say this somewhere and I missed it.)
Ok, let’s consider this for each type of farmed animal welfare intervention:
Humane slaughter of farmed animals and wild-caught fish. I’m guessing that it doesn’t impact WAW that much.
Reducing animal product production. E.g., diet change advocacy, meat alternatives. Such interventions increase wild populations a lot. If you believe that wild animals live bad lives (which is questionable but I’d give it a 65% probability), then it follows that reducing meat production is likely bad for short-term animal welfare. I personally still think that reducing meat production is good but not for short-term animal welfare reasons. For example, it reduces climate change. According to 80,000 hours, climate change could “destabilise society, destroy ecosystems, put millions into poverty, and worsen other existential threats such as engineered pandemics, risks from AI, or nuclear war.” But I probably wouldn’t myself fund reducing animal product production, at least not with money dedicated to animal welfare, partly due to WAW issues.
Improving farmed animal welfare. Raising higher welfare animals usually requires more resources and more land.[1] So it probably decreases wild animal populations (which is maybe good for WAW?) but causes a bit more of those environmental problems. But I’d say that if environmental costs are ever worth it, this is the case (especially for chickens because they don’t require that much resources per individual either way). I’m not going to sit here with my radiator on and say that chickens should continue suffering bone fractures and not being able to extend their wings because of the small environmental cost.
It seems I hadn’t considered this enough, so thank you very much for the question :)
For example, National Chicken Council argues that slower growing (and hence higher welfare) broiler breeds will have higher environmental costs: more feed, fuel, land, and water will be needed (I think it’s a biased source but the general conclusion makes sense). Similarly, according to Xin et al. (2011), “hens in noncage houses are less efficient in resource (feed, energy, and land) utilization, leading to a greater carbon footprint.” (I adapted this text from this post of mine).
Thanks for pointing this out, Max!
Based on this, I think it is plausible the nearterm effects of any intervention are driven by the effects on wild animals, namely arthropods and nematodes. For example, in the context of global health and development (see here):
If this is so, the expected nearterm effects of neartermist interventions (including ones attempting to improve the welfare of farmed animals) are also quite uncertain, in the sense they can easily be positive or negative. I still expect neartermist interventions to be positive due to their longterm effects. However, expecting them to be better than longtermist ones would be a surprising and suspicious convergence.
Great question. Yes, I think the claim still holds. It’s a bit tricky to explain why so you will have to stick with me. Let’s assume that:
Chicken welfare reforms are the most cost-effective intervention we found if we only consider the direct impact on chickens,
The indirect impacts of these welfare reforms on WAW are so bad that they outweigh the impact on chickens,
Each 1$ we spend to oppose welfare reforms negates 1$ spent on welfare reforms.
It would follow that if we ignored the impact on chickens, then opposing welfare reforms would be the new most cost-effective intervention because of its impact on WAW. But that would be a very surprising coincidence. I’d call it surprising divergence (as opposed to surprising convergence).
But ah, I’m now realizing that there is much more to this problem. It gets a lot messier. I’ll write more about this later.
Good argument. It might not work if one maintains an act-omission distinction regarding harms to the environment. For example, imagine that
value to farm animals of veg outreach = 1 util/$
value to wild animals of veg outreach = −2 util/$ (due to reducing environmental impact).
If this were the case, we shouldn’t do veg outreach. It would seem that we should try to increase environmental impact by promoting beef consumption, but maybe our act-omission distinction prevents us from wanting to do that. It could also be difficult to explain why one is promoting beef production or get other people concerned for animal welfare on board.
(This example is just for illustration. In reality, if I could push a button to increase vegetarianism in the world, I probably would.)
This is a great question. I totally missed this consideration while reading this post but this question is imperative to keep in mind while thinking about this topic.