Organisations using Rethink Priorities’ mainline welfare ranges should consider effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails.
I appreciate you championing this view Vasco, despite all the pushback. I found your reasoning pretty convincing, and it seems to me like if it’s wrong, it will be because of more general philosophical problems with utilitarianism or expected value reasoning.
I’m curious who in particular you think it making this strategic error? Is it mostly academics promoting PLF or are there NGOs / thought leaders doing it?
I agree with this, although I’m not an expert on cattle rearing. It seems to me like cows on grazeland generally have net positive lives, and cows on feedlots have arguably net negative lives (although it still seems way less bad than a pig or chicken CAFO). The longer a cow spends on pasture the more likely they had a net positive life, e.g. 100% grass-fed cows in the US might have pretty decent lives.
I agree that the elections results were disappointing for animals, and particularly that the EATS act seems significantly more likely to pass in a republican-controlled government.
However, I think you’re a little too pessimistic on what this means for animal-focused policy work in general. The ballot initiatives that failed this cycle were mostly abolitionist / vegany in vibe, which I think is significantly less popular than initiatives that are welfarist in vibe like Prop 12.
The EATS Act is primarily pushed by industry lobbyists, and doesn’t necessarily reflect that these sorts of laws are getting less popular.
I think you’re spot on, and I appreciate you writing this post. However, I think you’ve maybe missed the most important reason that you’re correct, which is that the focus on ending factory farming makes the movement significantly less accessible to the broader public than it otherwise could be.
Most people are broadly on board with welfare changes that animal activists push for (e.g. moving away from battery cages or gestation crates), but less on board with “ending factory farming.” And they’re even less on board if it’s made explicit that what most activists mean by ending factory farming is achieving a world with no or significantly less meat than there is now.
A lot of the paths to greater impact for the movement go through harnessing broad public support, or building broad coalitions. This is significantly harder to do when the center of gravity of the movement is around something so radical in relation to public opinion. More so when the focus on ending farming pushes the movement towards theories of change that are also unpopular, such as veganism and cultivated meat.
One might counter this by saying that social movements need a radical flank, and I think there’s merit to this argument. However, the current animal groups pretty much all use messaging around ending factory farming, even the ones perceived to be more “moderate.” I would argue that the movement right now lacks a moderate flank.
Another reason the framing is bad that you don’t mention is that it makes the industry significantly more skeptical of activists. All businesses look skeptically on external activists to an extent, but I think this is especially so in animal agriculture. Producers know that when activists advocate for e.g. cage-free reforms, their actual goals are to get people to eat fewer eggs, and eventually to get people to stop eating (factory-farmed) eggs all together. Some activists say this explicitly in public. For producers, this makes the activism a battle over the future existence of their industry, not a debate over current practices on the margin, making progress significantly more challenging.
Animal welfare is more important and more neglected, although tractability is less clear.
Hi saulius—thanks for those thoughts (and for your previous work on this issue).
Re pet stores, that could also be an impactful way to go, although a few considerations suggest to me it might not be as impactful. Many of the reptile stores that sell large amounts of mice seem to be small local businesses, not large companies with brands they’d want to protect. There are some international pet companies like PetCo that sell rodents, but I don’t think their volume is that big. Also, many of the smaller pet stores specialize in reptiles, so perhaps people who shop at those stores would have a sense of what’s going on and not be so upset by it, whereas people that go to zoos probably don’t think at all about how the animals are fed. I agree with your point about auditing, I think there’s still more work to do in figuring out exactly what change you’d ask for.
It’s definitely possible that lots of rodents are fed to other types of animals, particularly birds of prey, although it’s not something that came up much in our research. The UK report at the very end talks about this a lot, which I found somewhat surprising. I don’t have a good sense of how much this might change our estimates.
The point about average age is something we indeed thought about a lot and asked a few industry people about this. For example, rodent imports are reported by weight, so we tried to estimate the average size of the rodents to figure out how many rodents were being imported. We ended up estimating that the average mouse was a “fuzzy” or “small” which would make them 5-21 days old. For rats it was “pups” and “weaned” which would make them 14-28 days old. I think these were just gut estimates though, so could be wrong.
I appreciate the kind words, although to avoid taking too much credit I should say that this research was conducted under the umbrella of an existing organization, although we elected to not publish under the name of that organization for various reasons :)
Thanks for your work trying this out, and for this informative writeup!
One thing you might consider for next time on the outreach side is the notion of “leading with value.” I think you’re right that fish farmers will get lots of sales-y outreach all the time, so even if you’re framing yourself as “farmer friendly,” you probably need some way to grab their attention or stand out.
One way to do this is to first find a way to provide some sort of value to them before you’ve officially connected. What this looks like will differ based on the audience, but it seems like you developed strong expertise over the course of your research that I think opens up some options, even for an under-resourced group. For example:
You could develop some super clear and easy to read resources for farmers and put them up on your website. For example, you could write up a “market snapshot” that discusses all of the ESS products on the market, and their relative merits. Or you could map out which seafood companies are using which machines, so that companies can easily compare what they’re doing to their competitors. Then, when you do outreach, you can start with those resources and say “I wanted to make sure you saw this. Also, we’d love to have a conversation to understand what other information we could provide that would be useful.”
It’s often surprisingly easy to get articles publishes in trade press for smaller industries like aquaculture. For example, you could closely track what’s happening with ESS around the world, and then when there’s e.g. a development in Asia or North America you can pitch that story to trade journalists in Europe along with a quote from you. Or you could pitch an oped directly for trade press that outlines the basic case for using ESS. Then, when you reach out to producers you can lead with a link to the article as a demonstration of your expertise.
Generally I think business will be unlikely to engage with a new entity unless they have a strong sense there will be some value for them in it. If you can find some way to provide even a little bit of value to them immediately, then I think they would be more likely to engage. Just a thought!
Are there any notable differences in your ability to have impact in the different areas you conduct research? E.g. one area where important novel insights are easier / harder, or one area where relevant research is more easily translated into practice
Have you considered doing an Animal Charity Evaluators review? I personally think Rethink puts out some of the most important animal-related research out there!
Thanks for the detailed comment Jamie! I appreciate you taking the time to write out your thoughts.
I’m not sure I understand your first point. Do you believe that the dominant effect of something like a cage-free corporate campaign is “public discussion, connections between advocates and decision-makers, activist recruitment etc”? If so, then I disagree. I think the primary effect is the better lives the chickens have when not in cages.
I think more likely what you’re saying is that the secondary effect of “momentum towards further change” outweighs the other secondary effect of complacency. I agree in the case of cage free campaigns, and I also agree it’s less clear in the case of animal welfare technologies. However I’ll say:
The best way to commercialize many (though not all) technologies involves public discussion (i.e. marketing). For example, in-ovo egg sexing tech has already led to numerous mainstream articles about the problem of male chick culling in the egg industry. I actually think promoting tech could be a particular good way to generate public discussion about animal ag in a non-antagonistic, non-inflammatory way. Similar comments apply for connections w/ decision makers and recruitment.
The dominant effect is still the birds not being in cages. Even if you thought cage-free campaigns led to some complacency, they could still be worth it because of the massively important primary effects. Same thing goes for animal welfare technologies.
On the general point of humanewashing, there’s a ton of discussion on that on the internet, and I don’t have anything particularly novel to say about it. I’ll just note how I currently think about it:
Concerns about humanewashing apply to many activist-y welfare-focused efforts that EAs tend to support (e.g. corporate cage-free campaigns) as well as animal welfare technologies.
Abolitionist-focused and alt-protein-focused activist efforts have a huge risk of the small animal replacement problem, which is a major way that efforts can cause unintended harm. Directly targeting the most problematic practices is one of the best ways in my experience to avoid the SRAP. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any way to avoid just doing your best with expected value and accepting some risk of causing unintended harm.
Practically speaking, often the efficiencies from an animal welfare technology are minor, and the effects on welfare often huge. Technologies that have major implications for efficiency are more likely to happen without intervention. For example, in the long-term, I think in-ovo egg sexing could be a cost-saver for hatcheries, causing egg prices to decrease by some fraction of a percent. Ultimately, I think it’s well worth it to save billions of chicks from being ground up alive, but I acknowledge there’s room for disagreement there.
On your question regarding counterfactual value, I’m not sure I understand. I was saying that if a company actively seeks us out for collaboration, then that suggests we can help them do something that they can’t do on their own, i.e. we’re providing counterfactual value. I do think that interventions in the category of “supporting X” often have the effect of both “making X more likely to happen rather than not” and “making X happen faster,” and the two effects can be difficult to disambiguate. Both are positive effects though.
Hope this all makes sense, please let me know if I’ve misunderstood something!
Thanks Kevin! You pose a great question, and I’m not sure about the answer. I’m hoping to learn more as I get further along with this. A few hypotheses come to mind:
The large meat companies are the most powerful voices in the sector, and they have interest across all types of animal products. In particular, they have a lot of influence in the NCBA, which is the main group that one might think would be interested in these arguments.
Cultural factors that define the space of possible things that one could do to help ranchers. Similar to why I haven’t really heard about this strategy from the animal welfare side of things, despite it being (as you say) pretty straightfoward.
It seems like there’s recently been a noticeable uptick in the quality and quantity of animal-related posts by group like Rethink Priorities, Animal Ask, and many others. This puts the movement in a much better place than just a few years ago where it was very hard to know how to effectively help animals.
Just wanted to say this is awesome, and keep up the good work!
Thanks for doing this important work! I think this is one of the most important findings in animal advocacy research, so understanding it deeply and accurately is critical.
My operating model of the underlying psychology is that “slaughterhouse”, “factory farm” and “animal farming” can suggest to varying degrees the idea of “place where animals are treated poorly.” People generally don’t want animals to be treated poorly, so they express support for banning such places. Then, if it’s made clear that, in fact, slaughterhouses are just where animals are killed for meat, this support goes away.
If we think of people as being pro-animal welfare, but also pro-meat, all the data is explainable. As activist, it can be easy to go from “animals are mistreated on farms” to “we shouldn’t eat them,” but for most people I think the more natural response is “The people mistreating them should stop.”
Just wanted to throw this out there, since I think all this data is still consistent with a surprisingly pro-welfare stance of a lot of people :)
It doesn’t seem to me like AI could radically change the economics of higher welfare products / alternative proteins without other broader transformative effects, or at least if it does, it seems like it would be for a pretty brief period of time before things get very weird. So I think “past X years” ( to use the framework of your comments) there should be heavy discounting and I wouldn’t recommend a save and invest strategy. So to address your four types of interventions:
Short-term, large payoff interventions are going to look good under any model of the world, I’d go further and suggest short-term, small/medium payoff interventions may start to look better.
Interventions actively seeking to navigate and benefit animals through an AI transition—I’m skeptical of tractability here, but I’m supportive of the general idea
Interventions that robustly invest in movement capacity—I would think that short timelines actually push us against capacity building on the margin, curious what you meant here
Interventions that seem unlikely to change through an AI transition—again skeptical of the tractability, but I support the general idea