Aaron Boddy🔸

AIM’s new ap­proach to in­cu­bat­ing for the an­i­mals (ap­pli­ca­tions open!)

Why now might be the best time ever to start an an­i­mal charity

EA Liver­pool meetup: June 2026

EA Liver­pool meetup: May 2026

EA Liver­pool meetup: April 2026

Play­books: Turn­ing Am­bi­tion into Action

• Aaron Boddy🔸 12 Feb 2026 22:28 UTC

  5 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: feijão’s comment on: Turn­ing Farms into Welfare Labs

  Thanks for the thoughtful comment!

  I guess what I mean by Welfare Labs in this context is something lower down on the Scientific Evidence Pyramid. There doesn’t seem to be an agreed-upon version of the evidence pyramid (especially in animal welfare), but often it looks something like this:

  • 1 - Systematic Reviews /​ RCTs

  • 2 - Primary Studies

  • 3 - Observational Studies /​ Case Reports

  • 4 - Expert Opinion

  Where the lower down the pyramid you go, the weaker the evidence is. I think that academic research and the process you outlined above falls in the category of Primary Studies. But I think that leaping from Opinion to Primary Study often misses out this useful middle step of Observational Studies. And I think farms are well placed to rapidly test hypotheses, before committing to a Primary Study with more rigour.

  To answer your specific questions:

  1. This very much depends on the farm, but I think it can be surprising how well equipped some farms are to collect data (I think many have more data than they know what to do with)

  2. I think Universities aren’t really incentivised to be quick—and I’d imagine there are a bunch of ways you could structure work like this to be more streamlined than university research

  3. Yeah I think this very much depends on the question you’re trying to answer, but I do think that by jumping straight to Primary Studies, you can miss important insights from Observational Studies

Turn­ing Farms into Welfare Labs

EA Liver­pool: Con­su­la­tion on Ban­ning Cages—UKVFA

Killing the wasps

EA Liver­pool meetup: March 2026

EA Liver­pool meetup: Fe­bru­ary 2026

• Aaron Boddy🔸 12 Dec 2025 15:41 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Shrimp Welfare Pro­ject’s path to helping 100 billion shrimps per year

  Personally, I agree that pursuing research into soil animal welfare would likely be valuable. In general, I’m extremely impressed by how much salience you have brought to this issue over this past year. My intuitions around how to think about these animals currently seem to generally align with Bob Fischer’s thoughts.

  Even if soil animals become the most cost effective use of marginal dollars, I still think we need opportunities in the animal space with high absorbency. I don’t think that this research could absorb millions in the way other animal orgs could. I still think we need more aquatic animal projects and that the animal movement needs to be thought about as an ecosystem, rather than a single org.

• Aaron Boddy🔸 9 Dec 2025 19:04 UTC

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ideas for en­g­ineer­ing project

  Have you heard of High Impact Engineers?

  They recently relaunched and have their own Forum—the Impact Forge—which could be a good place to crosspost this question :)

• Aaron Boddy🔸 24 Nov 2025 19:00 UTC

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Johannes Pichler 🔸’s comment on: Shrimp Welfare Pro­ject’s path to helping 100 billion shrimps per year

  Thanks for the kind words, Johannes!

  That’s a great question, and you’re exactly right that our “increasing confidence” is focused on answering questions like that.

  One of the reasons we started the Humane Slaughter Initiative was to deploy stunners in different regions and contexts in order to remove barriers to uptake. The industry was telling us that humane slaughter wasn’t possible in this or that context for one reason or another. We thought it made sense to try it out and understand the barriers in each context better.

  We’re still very much in this learning phase, and due to the variety of contexts we’ve deployed stunners in, there isn’t really a “given stunner”—effectiveness varies significantly by context, equipment type, species, and operational practices. Additionally, we’re exploring New Solutions & Protocols, which further complicates providing a single answer.

  What I can say is that:

  • We’ve seen successful implementation in multiple contexts, but with notable variation

  • Our monitoring suggests that proper training and ongoing support are critical factors

  • This variation is exactly why we’re prioritising better M&E systems and implementation support

  I’m hesitant to give a specific confidence curve right now because (1) it would likely be context-dependent rather than universal, and (2) improving this is an active focus area for us, so any number I give today could anchor people’s thinking even as we make progress.

  It’s a goal of ours to publish more research and data as we collect over the next 12 months. This will help donors and industry partners better understand effectiveness across different contexts. So, stay tuned for those developments in the coming year :)

Shrimp Welfare Pro­ject’s path to helping 100 billion shrimps per year

EA Liver­pool meetup: Jan­uary 2026

EA Liver­pool meetup: De­cem­ber 2025

EA Liver­pool meetup: Novem­ber 2025

The im­pacts of AI on an­i­mal advocacy