I can imagine some of these forecasts influencing funding and advocacy decisions, especially on neglected species/regions and meat consumption. I’m an animal welfare researcher/advocate (currently, I work for Animal Ask and I’m co-founding the Center for Wild Animal Welfare). Sorry for a late reply!
Ben Stevenson
Karma: 937
N.B. We’ve updated the original post to give more info on how supporters can make tax deductible donations.
In short, we can also accept tax deductible donations from the Netherlands, and above a certain threshold from Canada, Germany and Switzerland. Supporters would need to donate to Rethink Priorities through a supporting org (Giving What We Can in UK/NL; Effektiv Spenden in Germany/Switzerland), then forward their recept to development@rethinkpriorities.org and team@wildanimalwelfare.org and request that the gift is restricted for CWAW. We might be able to facilitate tax deductible donations from other countries too.
If anybody has further questions about this, please reach out :)
Hi Hugh! Thanks for the question.
UK donors who want to claim gift aid can:
donate to Rethink Priorities through Giving What We Can (at this link)
then forward their receipt to development@rethinkpriorities.org and request that the gift is restricted to CWAW. (please also cc team@wildanimalwelfare.org)
It’s important to do step 2 :)
Thanks for your kind words, Angelina! The $60k is our fundraising target, but we would definitely welcome support beyond that.
We’ll meet our initial budget if we raise $60k, together with $60k in matched funding. Additional funding would be used for stretch purposes (e.g., running public polling, hiring consultants, etc). It would also help us build up a runway for future years, reducing uncertainty. So our priority is to get to $60k, but we’d certainly welcome additional funding.
Strongly upvoted.
Bans on octopus farming are huge: preventing a moral atrocity before it happens.
At Asia for Animals in Taiwan, ALI participated in the first-ever aquatic welfare panel in the conference’s food systems track (opened by Taiwan’s President)
Also: wow!
It’s always hard to know whether meta work is cost-effective but if you’re excited by pro-animal community-building, I reckon Hive is a promising bet.[1]
Global Ambassador Program: Our newest initiative provides targeted, culturally-sensitive support for advocates in underserved and underfunded regions, starting with Asia and Latin America.
Here’s a blog post/interview with Angel, the Asia Ambassador. I’ve been pleased to see this program take off (although I’ve not followed implementation very closely), and I’d be excited to see it expand next year, especially in Africa.
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I’m a bit biased as a friend of Hive, but I’m friend because I think they do good work!
Another relevant article is this RP report, which argues “Knowing a group of organisms produce many offspring, have high mortality rates, small body size and are short-lived is not sufficient to determine that their lives are a net negative (or positive)”.
Strongly upvoted. I think WAI are one of the best opportunities to help animals.
All photos by Wild Animal Initiative staff
Also: what a flex! Great photos :)
Thanks Siobhan!
Thanks Nick—we like to keep the community on their toes! Hopefully we’ll have positive updates soon. Best of luck with your important work in Uganda!
I would argue that, assuming you believe that reducing soil animal populations is your top moral priority, you should work in the Real Estate Development sector.
Why do you think Open Phil funded housing policy reform?
Hi Dilan! Thanks for writing this piece; I agree with others that it’s an excellent contribution to an important conversation.[1]
Some small challenges to the piece:
I agree with Thom that many “short-term pragmatists” have a fairly clear theory of change for how their work will contribute to eventual abolition.
I agree with James that many “short-term pragmatists” want to see a diversity of tactics.
I feel confused about how far the pro-animal movement can accomodate conflicting visions. As you say, the US gay rights movement cohering about, broadly, one ask (gay marriage) and, even more broadly, one vision (freedom to marry) seems to have been very helpful.
Something I really liked about the piece: your framing of “short-term pragmatism vs passionate idealism” resonates with me. I agree that “welfarism vs abolitionism” isn’t helpful, not only because new welfarists support abolition, but also because when people invoke “welfarism vs abolitionism”, they tend to collapse a few different, complicated things into one binary (e.g. disagreements about ethics, movement strategy and culture).[2] “Short-term pragmatism vs passionate idealism” helpfully zooms in on mindsets as one dimension of disagreement.
And, from my conversations with advocates, I do think mindset is an important crux. I’m specifically thinking about an influential pro-animal activist who describes themselves as very optimistic, finds it hard to imagine things going wrong and, crucially, thinks this mindset is necessary for success because people need to believe change is possible for social change to ever succeed at all.[3] The optimist in me sees where they’re coming from, but the pragmatist in me finds it very reckless. This seems like an underdiscussed crux relative to, e.g., “welfare vs rights” and “radical vs incremental action”.
I like that the post ends with some recommendations for cultivating visionary pragmatism. I’m generally very interested in ways we advance strategic conversations and disagree productively within the pro-animal movement; and I agree with Josh Baldwin that this post is most helpful if it can guide practical decision-making. Some thoughts:
The movement should think about the validity of different milestones. For example, I’m skeptical that polling against factory farming counts for very much, for reasons similar to those discussed in this article. (You could counter that it still counts somewhat, which I would concede, but that takes us into an interesting conversation about how strong our evidence needs to be...)
Theory of victory mapping should include estimates for how likely a given milestone is. This should be (a) within a certain timeframe, and (b) given a proximate milestone. I think soliciting people’s intuitions about this would be a first step towards productive disagreement. Ambitious Impact’s research reports (sometimes? always?) give probabilities for their theories of change.
There should be some efforts to conduct ‘theory of failure’ mapping. I think sitting down and grappling with the ways a project could go wrong (including probabilities, as above) would add some helpful pragmatism for folks who lean towards the visionary.
There should be strong coordination to avoid negative externalities on other theories of victory. There’s been a recent conversation about an Animal Rising campaign to block new factory farms in the UK.[4] I think it’d be great to see a theory of victory/failure diagram that makes explicit how un/likely it is that this campaign causes some harms (e.g. production is displaced to lower welfare farms arboad) and some benefits (e.g. people power, narrative power). The campaign also cuts against good work done by other groups in the UK to secure more space per farmed chicken (point #2 in James’ comment). So I’d ideally like to see some way to do theory of victory/failure mapping that acknowledges that some groups’ milestones might be in competition with other groups’ milestones, and coordination mechanisms to avoid negative externalities on each others’ campaigns as far as possible.
Finally: I like your long, treacherous hike metaphor, and I think you might like the long, treacherous space journey metaphor in this post.
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And sorry I missed the conversation at Revolutionists Night!
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@Aidan Kankyoku teases some of these apart in his new blog post, which I recommend to anybody who found Dilan’s post interesting.
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I’m paraphrasing their views based on a few conversations.
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Sorry to pick on Animal Rising; it’s a helpful, fresh-in-the-mind example.
Thanks Mal. I really liked your EAG talk and I’m very pleased this post can share the ideas more widely. I agree with ~everything here.
The “ecologically inert” perspective makes a good deal of sense to me, but I can also find it ~frustrating that a worldview with such a vast and ambitious moral convas (wide moral circle, serious consideration of cluelessness and backfire risks) tends to recommend such “tiny shifts at the margin”. So I really appreciated your paragraph about finding a decision theory that permits the possibility of radically transformative changes.
Call off the Long Reflection
Thanks!
I agree that alternative proteins can probably make a dent in meat consumption even if they aren’t a silver bullet. On other meat reduction strategies, I would recommend this database from Rethink Priorities, as well as Björn’s blog More Than Meats The Eye and Seth’s blog Regression To The Meat. (Puns goes hard in the meat reduction space).
A few people hold something maybe close to this view (e.g.) but I do think that’s a bit of a straw man argument.
Thanks for writing. This is interesting; it’s especially cool to learn more about biobanking.
You identify precision fermentation as the most cost-effective way to reduce agricultural land use (by reducing meat consumption). It’s not clear to me that alternative proteins are the most cost-effective way to reduce meat consumption, and I feel uncertain that precision fermentation in particular would be the most cost-effective ‘buy’ in alternative proteins. I’d be curious to see you compare precision fermentation with other ways to reduce agricultural land use (e.g. other meat reduction strategies, the Tropical Forest Forever Facility).
I like to see people using the EA toolkit to analyse global priorities beyond the conventional cause areas. That said, I do think there’s an unfinished conversation about why people (especially sentientists) should care about biodiversity, and how this intersects with wild animal welfare. Appreciate that it’s unwieldly to set out your whole ethical framework (and maybe unappetising to invite philosophical debate with EAs) but I would enjoy learning more about your perspective here :)
If blocking factory farms at the planning stage stopped working, for example, and activists spent a year trying hard to restart it but failing, then I would change my mind
Slightly tangential, but the current UK government (and also a bloc in the opposition) want to make it harder to block or stall developments at the planning stage. If the campaign stops working, I think the most likely explanation would be YIMBY-ist reforms, not anything directly related to animal rights. Not sure if that undercuts your point or not.
I don’t understand why you think some work on animal wefare post-ASI looks valuable, but not (e.g.) digital minds post-ASI and s-risks post-ASI. To me, it looks like working on these causes (and others?) have similar upsides (scale, neglectedness) and downsides (low tractability if ASI changes everything) to working on animal welfare post-ASI. Could you clarify why they’re different?
Thanks for your support!