There seems to be movement towards animal welfare interventions and away from global health interventions. Here are some ways I can see this going badly:
1. Resistance against being told what to do
People hate being told what to do.
Most of the top global health interventions aren’t imposed (and probably shouldn’t be, because that leads to backlash). People can refuse a mosquito net if they want, the cash incentives, the cataract surgery. A handful of paint manufacturers might feel slightly annoyed about have to change away from lead paint formulations but if the paint’s the same price then people outside that handful won’t care.
Many of the animal welfare interventions are lobbying for new regulations on the way factory farming is done: regulating out chicken cages, regulating how fish and shrimp are farmed and slaughtered. These are impositions on the farmers and, when it increases prices, on consumers. Even lobbying corporations to use more ethical meat/​eggs (e.g. Humane Society Of The United States’s work on encouraging California to ban battery cages) could put unsympathetic consumers offside if it makes their McMuffins more expensive.
Where the intervention is imposed, there will be resistance and that will limit progress.
2. Too socially acceptable to dismiss
Saving children from malaria, diarrheal disease, lead poisoning, or treating cataracts and obstetric fistula is hard to argue against without sounding like a bad person.
It’s quite socially acceptable to make fun of vegetarians and vegans. The movement’s appeal is narrower, the arguments will be more easily dismissed, it’s harder for the ideas to gain traction
3. More politicised = more resistance
Animal welfare is already politicised in a way that global health is not. Even fake meat, which simply adds a new product to the market and doesn’t impose anything on anyone, has become such a threat to certain parties that people are trying to ban it.
Discussions of banning cage eggs or regulations for shrimp welfare will quickly turn into conspiracies about how woke bleeding-heart elites are imposing their values on good, honest cage egg-eaters or shrimp torturers.
Malaria nets and unleaded paint are less politically-charged.
4. The weirdest stuff will put people off the moderate stuff
The animal welfare arguments with the broadest appeal are those that appeal to intuition: Most people would not torture a cow, pig or bird without feeling some sense of intuitive guilt or disgust, so paying a factory farm to do this out of sight obviously doesn’t make sense and this is a strong argument. We don’t need a way of measuring suffering to make this argument because it appeals to beliefs and intuitions that people already have. Arguments can be mounted against cage eggs, sow stalls, mulesing, suffocating animals in CO2 in this way. Depending on the person, you might be able to make arguments for fish or shrimp with these appeals too.
When the question move beyond human intuitions/​beliefs, (generally somewhere at about the point of fish/​shrimp), we run into problems with using analogies like above and the arguments fall back on complex and obtuse utility calculus arguments attempting to compare animal and human suffering/​welfare. Often these complex arguments lead to conclusions that the Average Joe will balk at like “giving 2000 shrimp a less painful death is equivalent to a human life”.
Discussions of shrimp welfare, of mass vaccination eco-engineering projects to limit unnecessary wild animal suffering from disease, of regulating the way that maggots are slaughtered are all weird. Weird ≠incorrect, but it does create blocks to uptake and prevents people from supporting the more moderate parts of the same movement.
Global health doesn’t seem to have as much of a weird fringe.
5. The research may turn out to be futile or counterproductive
I have concerns about the usefulness of a lot of the research being done on animal welfare and I suspect the research might end up reflecting poorly on the EA movement generally when it turns out that it has yielded few useful answers for the resources spent.
The main problem is that once we move beyond intuition-based arguments for animal treatment and into utility-calculus welfare research, the arguments become riddled with measurement problems and confidence intervals too wide to be useful.
Can’t define it, can’t measure it
None of “sentience”, “conciousness”, “suffering”, “pain” are measurable or even clearly defined. Animal welfare research seems to use proxy measures like behaviours:
fruit flies can be made to exhibit depression symptoms that improve with antidepressants
ants supposedly continue to eat when their abdomens are cut off
some insects grow bigger wings in more confined spaces so they can fly away and escape the crowding
maggots take longer to die in a microwave then when blended
You can also use biomarkers of stress like cortisol or growth rates, or look at neural structures, and there are 6-point and 8-point frameworks (as described here) for determining whether something experiences “pain”.
But whether any of these proxy measures is reliable and really tells us anything is unclear and it’s hard to see how it ever will be clear.
Approximations are too approximate
The attempts by the Rethink Priorities Welfare Range Estimates project to create a framework for comparing animal suffering is necessary for doing the cost-benefit analyses we would need to decide whether the cost to humans of an intervention is worth the benefit to animals. Unfortunately these ranges have such wide confidence intervals that, putting aside the question of whether the methodology and ranges are even valid, it doesn’t seem to get us any closer to doing the necessary cost-benefit analyses.
Here’s some research and posts I’ve come across in my brief search that I think suffers from this problem of not being actionable because of the impossibility of doing cost-benefit analyses:
The exception is interventions that don’t cost anything. These we could reasonably implement without the need for cost-benefit analysis. Replacing the killing of maggots with microwaves with some cost-equivalent method that maggots seem to enjoy more, might be reasonable. So might be using red lights for photophobic insect farms. If shrimp stunning was zero-cost (it’s not) and they seemed to prefer it, might as well do it. Where some horrible wild animal disease can be reduced at minimal cost and with confidence of no unexpected downstream problems (big “if” and probably unknowable), let’s do it.
Mostly the interventions will cost human resources in the form of time, money, or human or other animal suffering. Without any way to do this cost-benefit analysis with some confidence (not the Welfare Range’s impractical confidence intervals) the research can’t give us actionable information and may be a complete waste of time.
Beyond the possibility of it being useless, the research could be counterproductive if it uses up resources that could have gone to other things or delegitimises other work by the EA community by making us look silly.
A common refrain I see in animal welfare research on and off this forum is “more research is needed”. Maybe it’s not.
Global health is better set-up for quantitative research and cost-benefit analysis which is why it’s formed the basis of EA.
6. More prone to slippery slope argument
The ever-expanding moral circle of the EA animal welfare community is admirable but it’s hard to know where to stop
The slippery slope fallacy is only a fallacy when there’s some reason why A won’t inevitably lead to Z and in the case of moral circle expansion it is hard to say where or why there is a line that would stop us slipping all the way to the bottom and pondering fungus welfare. This will both 1. generate resistance to even the moderate parts of the animal welfare movement and 2. will have parts of the movement lost in the weeds of crazy town.
This doesn’t apply in global health. “So we get rid of malaria, next you’ll want to get rid of rabies, or trichomoniasis”. Yes.
7. Poor optics of valuing animals over people
The argument that human welfare pales in comparison to chicken, fish or shrimp welfare is a difficult one to make to the face of any of the millions of people currently living in dire poverty deprived of health, education, opportunity. It will come across to many as cold, out-of-touch, privileged, classist.
This will generate resistance to the animal welfare movement and EA more broadly.
8. Will be called culturally insensitive
Animal products are a core part of many cultures. EA Funds directs “grants to advocacy organizations working in 26 countries”. Most of these are in Western countries currently. As time goes on (maybe already?) the majority of animals will be raised/​killed/​consumed in India, Southeast Asia and Africa.
Where these cultures are outside the Western sphere (in which most of EA operates), there will be accusations of cultural insensitivity and “imposition of Western Values™” when EA tells people (or funds advocacy orgs that tell people) to minimise their consumption of animal products or advises how to treat their animals.
Global health is less burdened with accusations of imposed Western Values because not dying of diarrhea, measles or lead poisoning and not having cataracts are mostly universal cultural traits
9. Outcomes will be harder to measure, we won’t get feedback on progress
One of the benefits of global health is that there are usually clear outcomes you can measure to get feedback on your progress: malaria cases, lead levels, polio rates.
Most of the interventions in animal welfare have difficult-to-measure outcomes. First of all we have no objective way to measure animal suffering and compare it to our intuitive feelings about human welfare, but then on top of that many of the interventions are lobbying for regulation in complex political systems so it will be difficult to attribute any outcome to a given action.
Ways I see the global health → animal welfare shift backfiring
There seems to be movement towards animal welfare interventions and away from global health interventions. Here are some ways I can see this going badly:
1. Resistance against being told what to do
People hate being told what to do.
Most of the top global health interventions aren’t imposed (and probably shouldn’t be, because that leads to backlash). People can refuse a mosquito net if they want, the cash incentives, the cataract surgery. A handful of paint manufacturers might feel slightly annoyed about have to change away from lead paint formulations but if the paint’s the same price then people outside that handful won’t care.
Many of the animal welfare interventions are lobbying for new regulations on the way factory farming is done: regulating out chicken cages, regulating how fish and shrimp are farmed and slaughtered. These are impositions on the farmers and, when it increases prices, on consumers. Even lobbying corporations to use more ethical meat/​eggs (e.g. Humane Society Of The United States’s work on encouraging California to ban battery cages) could put unsympathetic consumers offside if it makes their McMuffins more expensive.
Where the intervention is imposed, there will be resistance and that will limit progress.
2. Too socially acceptable to dismiss
Saving children from malaria, diarrheal disease, lead poisoning, or treating cataracts and obstetric fistula is hard to argue against without sounding like a bad person.
It’s quite socially acceptable to make fun of vegetarians and vegans. The movement’s appeal is narrower, the arguments will be more easily dismissed, it’s harder for the ideas to gain traction
3. More politicised = more resistance
Animal welfare is already politicised in a way that global health is not. Even fake meat, which simply adds a new product to the market and doesn’t impose anything on anyone, has become such a threat to certain parties that people are trying to ban it.
Discussions of banning cage eggs or regulations for shrimp welfare will quickly turn into conspiracies about how woke bleeding-heart elites are imposing their values on good, honest cage egg-eaters or shrimp torturers.
Malaria nets and unleaded paint are less politically-charged.
4. The weirdest stuff will put people off the moderate stuff
The animal welfare arguments with the broadest appeal are those that appeal to intuition: Most people would not torture a cow, pig or bird without feeling some sense of intuitive guilt or disgust, so paying a factory farm to do this out of sight obviously doesn’t make sense and this is a strong argument. We don’t need a way of measuring suffering to make this argument because it appeals to beliefs and intuitions that people already have. Arguments can be mounted against cage eggs, sow stalls, mulesing, suffocating animals in CO2 in this way. Depending on the person, you might be able to make arguments for fish or shrimp with these appeals too.
When the question move beyond human intuitions/​beliefs, (generally somewhere at about the point of fish/​shrimp), we run into problems with using analogies like above and the arguments fall back on complex and obtuse utility calculus arguments attempting to compare animal and human suffering/​welfare. Often these complex arguments lead to conclusions that the Average Joe will balk at like “giving 2000 shrimp a less painful death is equivalent to a human life”.
Discussions of shrimp welfare, of mass vaccination eco-engineering projects to limit unnecessary wild animal suffering from disease, of regulating the way that maggots are slaughtered are all weird. Weird ≠incorrect, but it does create blocks to uptake and prevents people from supporting the more moderate parts of the same movement.
Global health doesn’t seem to have as much of a weird fringe.
5. The research may turn out to be futile or counterproductive
I have concerns about the usefulness of a lot of the research being done on animal welfare and I suspect the research might end up reflecting poorly on the EA movement generally when it turns out that it has yielded few useful answers for the resources spent.
The main problem is that once we move beyond intuition-based arguments for animal treatment and into utility-calculus welfare research, the arguments become riddled with measurement problems and confidence intervals too wide to be useful.
Can’t define it, can’t measure it
None of “sentience”, “conciousness”, “suffering”, “pain” are measurable or even clearly defined. Animal welfare research seems to use proxy measures like behaviours:
fruit flies can be made to exhibit depression symptoms that improve with antidepressants
ants supposedly continue to eat when their abdomens are cut off
some insects grow bigger wings in more confined spaces so they can fly away and escape the crowding
maggots take longer to die in a microwave then when blended
You can also use biomarkers of stress like cortisol or growth rates, or look at neural structures, and there are 6-point and 8-point frameworks (as described here) for determining whether something experiences “pain”.
But whether any of these proxy measures is reliable and really tells us anything is unclear and it’s hard to see how it ever will be clear.
Approximations are too approximate
The attempts by the Rethink Priorities Welfare Range Estimates project to create a framework for comparing animal suffering is necessary for doing the cost-benefit analyses we would need to decide whether the cost to humans of an intervention is worth the benefit to animals. Unfortunately these ranges have such wide confidence intervals that, putting aside the question of whether the methodology and ranges are even valid, it doesn’t seem to get us any closer to doing the necessary cost-benefit analyses.
Here’s some research and posts I’ve come across in my brief search that I think suffers from this problem of not being actionable because of the impossibility of doing cost-benefit analyses:
Grinding as a slaughter method for farmed black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) larvae
Farmed Yellow Mealworm Welfare: Species-Specific Recommendations for a Global Industry
Reducing aquatic noise as a wild animal welfare intervention
Welfare Footprint’s work on welfare in salmon farms
Cost-effectiveness of Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative
What matters to shrimps? Factors affecting shrimp welfare in aquaculture
Factory-farming is as bad as one Holocaust every 2 days?
Scale of the welfare of various animal populations
The exception is interventions that don’t cost anything. These we could reasonably implement without the need for cost-benefit analysis. Replacing the killing of maggots with microwaves with some cost-equivalent method that maggots seem to enjoy more, might be reasonable. So might be using red lights for photophobic insect farms. If shrimp stunning was zero-cost (it’s not) and they seemed to prefer it, might as well do it. Where some horrible wild animal disease can be reduced at minimal cost and with confidence of no unexpected downstream problems (big “if” and probably unknowable), let’s do it.
Mostly the interventions will cost human resources in the form of time, money, or human or other animal suffering. Without any way to do this cost-benefit analysis with some confidence (not the Welfare Range’s impractical confidence intervals) the research can’t give us actionable information and may be a complete waste of time.
Beyond the possibility of it being useless, the research could be counterproductive if it uses up resources that could have gone to other things or delegitimises other work by the EA community by making us look silly.
A common refrain I see in animal welfare research on and off this forum is “more research is needed”. Maybe it’s not.
Global health is better set-up for quantitative research and cost-benefit analysis which is why it’s formed the basis of EA.
6. More prone to slippery slope argument
The ever-expanding moral circle of the EA animal welfare community is admirable but it’s hard to know where to stop
If we consider the suffering of fish why not shrimp? If shrimp why not bees? If bees why not maggots? If maggots why not mosquitos? If mosquitos why not demodex mites?, if demodex mites why not nematodes? oysters?
The slippery slope fallacy is only a fallacy when there’s some reason why A won’t inevitably lead to Z and in the case of moral circle expansion it is hard to say where or why there is a line that would stop us slipping all the way to the bottom and pondering fungus welfare. This will both 1. generate resistance to even the moderate parts of the animal welfare movement and 2. will have parts of the movement lost in the weeds of crazy town.
This doesn’t apply in global health. “So we get rid of malaria, next you’ll want to get rid of rabies, or trichomoniasis”. Yes.
7. Poor optics of valuing animals over people
The argument that human welfare pales in comparison to chicken, fish or shrimp welfare is a difficult one to make to the face of any of the millions of people currently living in dire poverty deprived of health, education, opportunity. It will come across to many as cold, out-of-touch, privileged, classist.
This will generate resistance to the animal welfare movement and EA more broadly.
8. Will be called culturally insensitive
Animal products are a core part of many cultures. EA Funds directs “grants to advocacy organizations working in 26 countries”. Most of these are in Western countries currently. As time goes on (maybe already?) the majority of animals will be raised/​killed/​consumed in India, Southeast Asia and Africa.
Where these cultures are outside the Western sphere (in which most of EA operates), there will be accusations of cultural insensitivity and “imposition of Western Values™” when EA tells people (or funds advocacy orgs that tell people) to minimise their consumption of animal products or advises how to treat their animals.
Global health is less burdened with accusations of imposed Western Values because not dying of diarrhea, measles or lead poisoning and not having cataracts are mostly universal cultural traits
9. Outcomes will be harder to measure, we won’t get feedback on progress
One of the benefits of global health is that there are usually clear outcomes you can measure to get feedback on your progress: malaria cases, lead levels, polio rates.
Most of the interventions in animal welfare have difficult-to-measure outcomes. First of all we have no objective way to measure animal suffering and compare it to our intuitive feelings about human welfare, but then on top of that many of the interventions are lobbying for regulation in complex political systems so it will be difficult to attribute any outcome to a given action.