What is your bar for funding for some of the most common welfare interventions? On the margin, how many animals or animal-years should be affected per dollar for the following welfare improvements:
a. Cage-free transition for egg-laying hens
b. Stunning before slaughter for farmed sea bass and sea bream
In practical terms, each grant manager gives a score +5 to ā5, with +5 being the strongest possible endorsement of positive impact, and ā5 being a grant with an anti-endorsement thatās actively harmful to a significant degree. We then average across scores, approving those at the very top, and dismissing those at the bottom, largely discussing only those grants that are around the threshold of 2.5 unless anyone wanted to actively make the case for or against something outside of these bounds (the size and scope of other grants, particularly the large grants we approve, is also discussed). So the ābar for fundingā is when the average of fund managerās votes is ~2.5 (though we now also have an additional mechanism for comparing applications just above or below the bar). And the votes take into account not just the welfare improvement from an intervention, but other factors like where it fits into broader theories of change, scalability, the value of funding (analyzing counterfactuals and long-term sustainability). For a list of our criteria, refer to a question in our FAQ: āHow Does the EA Animal Welfare Fund Make Grant Decisions?ā.
However, if you mean whatās the bar in terms of impact per $, weāre currently trialing a few different approaches for how we estimate that (see our answers about use of welfare capacity, SADS, and benchmarks), and would like to arrive at a common unit and threshold (or range) that would be constant across species & interventions. But again, this would just be one input and arguably the estimates shouldnāt be taken literally, but more as providing intuition pumps.
Regarding how many animals or animal-years should be affected per dollar for the listed welfare improvements, this will very much depend on how those reforms were achieved (corporate campaigns, producer outreach, policy advocacy, strategic litigation, etc.). Unfortunately, at this time we canāt share a cost-effectiveness estimate for these common interventions from averaging the estimates across all relevant grant applications. There are some publicly shared estimates that we refer to as potential benchmarks (see below).
On cage-free and broiler welfare: Corporate welfare campaigns over 13 years (2005-2018) to commit corporations to sell only cage-free eggs and higher welfare chicken meat were estimated to impact 10 to 280 animals per dollar spent (9.5 to 120 animal years) (Å imÄikas 2019). The author of the report, Saulius Å imÄikas, made a comment on the Forum in 2021 about unpublished estimates of chicken welfare reforms, suggesting cost-effectiveness was two to three times lower in 2019-2020 than in 2016-2018 (āAccording to this new estimate, in 2019-2020 chicken welfare reforms affected 65 years of chicken life per dollar spent.)ā. Similar sentiments about the lower cost-effectiveness of such campaigns today are discussed here and here. Thereās also the separate cost-effectiveness for various ballot initiatives, including cage-free ones (Duffy 2023) and speculative broiler ballot initiatives (Khimasia 2023), and the various cost-effectiveness analyses from Vasco Grilo. Furthermore, in a comment in 2023, Emily Oehlsen, Managing Director of Open Philanthropy, a major funder of these chicken corporate campaigns, reported that since 2016, āweāve covered many of the strongest opportunities in this space, and we think that current marginal opportunities are considerably weaker,ā and that āWe think that the marginal FAW funding opportunity is ~1/ā5th as cost-effective as the average from Sauliusā analysisā referencing Å imÄikas (2019). So it seems fair to believe many cage-free and broiler welfare corporate campaigns being funded today are less cost-effective than the 2019-2020 estimate Saulius provided. Sagar Shah also created some prospective fish pre-slaughter stunning corporate campaign estimates suggesting such campaigns in Europe might only affect a few hours of life per dollar spent- though there are many caveats and assumptions in that estimate, including the very important consideration of how one weights excruciating pains.
What is your bar for funding for some of the most common welfare interventions? On the margin, how many animals or animal-years should be affected per dollar for the following welfare improvements:
a. Cage-free transition for egg-laying hens
b. Stunning before slaughter for farmed sea bass and sea bream
c. Transition to ECC/āBCC standards
Thanks Emre,
In practical terms, each grant manager gives a score +5 to ā5, with +5 being the strongest possible endorsement of positive impact, and ā5 being a grant with an anti-endorsement thatās actively harmful to a significant degree. We then average across scores, approving those at the very top, and dismissing those at the bottom, largely discussing only those grants that are around the threshold of 2.5 unless anyone wanted to actively make the case for or against something outside of these bounds (the size and scope of other grants, particularly the large grants we approve, is also discussed). So the ābar for fundingā is when the average of fund managerās votes is ~2.5 (though we now also have an additional mechanism for comparing applications just above or below the bar). And the votes take into account not just the welfare improvement from an intervention, but other factors like where it fits into broader theories of change, scalability, the value of funding (analyzing counterfactuals and long-term sustainability). For a list of our criteria, refer to a question in our FAQ: āHow Does the EA Animal Welfare Fund Make Grant Decisions?ā.
However, if you mean whatās the bar in terms of impact per $, weāre currently trialing a few different approaches for how we estimate that (see our answers about use of welfare capacity, SADS, and benchmarks), and would like to arrive at a common unit and threshold (or range) that would be constant across species & interventions. But again, this would just be one input and arguably the estimates shouldnāt be taken literally, but more as providing intuition pumps.
Regarding how many animals or animal-years should be affected per dollar for the listed welfare improvements, this will very much depend on how those reforms were achieved (corporate campaigns, producer outreach, policy advocacy, strategic litigation, etc.). Unfortunately, at this time we canāt share a cost-effectiveness estimate for these common interventions from averaging the estimates across all relevant grant applications. There are some publicly shared estimates that we refer to as potential benchmarks (see below).
On cage-free and broiler welfare: Corporate welfare campaigns over 13 years (2005-2018) to commit corporations to sell only cage-free eggs and higher welfare chicken meat were estimated to impact 10 to 280 animals per dollar spent (9.5 to 120 animal years) (Å imÄikas 2019). The author of the report, Saulius Å imÄikas, made a comment on the Forum in 2021 about unpublished estimates of chicken welfare reforms, suggesting cost-effectiveness was two to three times lower in 2019-2020 than in 2016-2018 (āAccording to this new estimate, in 2019-2020 chicken welfare reforms affected 65 years of chicken life per dollar spent.)ā. Similar sentiments about the lower cost-effectiveness of such campaigns today are discussed here and here. Thereās also the separate cost-effectiveness for various ballot initiatives, including cage-free ones (Duffy 2023) and speculative broiler ballot initiatives (Khimasia 2023), and the various cost-effectiveness analyses from Vasco Grilo. Furthermore, in a comment in 2023, Emily Oehlsen, Managing Director of Open Philanthropy, a major funder of these chicken corporate campaigns, reported that since 2016, āweāve covered many of the strongest opportunities in this space, and we think that current marginal opportunities are considerably weaker,ā and that āWe think that the marginal FAW funding opportunity is ~1/ā5th as cost-effective as the average from Sauliusā analysisā referencing Å imÄikas (2019).
So it seems fair to believe many cage-free and broiler welfare corporate campaigns being funded today are less cost-effective than the 2019-2020 estimate Saulius provided. Sagar Shah also created some prospective fish pre-slaughter stunning corporate campaign estimates suggesting such campaigns in Europe might only affect a few hours of life per dollar spent- though there are many caveats and assumptions in that estimate, including the very important consideration of how one weights excruciating pains.