More good news! Norwegian meat industry announced that they will stop using fast-growing chicken breeds by the end of 2027. These breeds are source of immense suffering due to the toll such rapid growth takes on animal’s body.
This will be the first country to stop using them.
More here: https://animainternational.org/blog/norway-ends-fast-growing-chickens
Oh. I find this negative and personally upsetting.
Effective altruism brought to animal advocacy a strong norm of collaboration and this feels like undermining years of work. I wrote about it some time ago:
Back in the days, the movement was constantly infighting and spending significant time attacking and criticizing each other. There were a lot of personal attacks, hostile takeovers, and constant attempts to bring individuals down.
In this post I won’t get into details, but many ambitious projects stopped due to this culture, and I suspect many people have drifted away from the movement because of it.
This campaign seems like a well made one, but I think it contributes to polarization and I worry of alienating potential talent that is motivated by helping animals. It feels off to use a name for campaign that uses other charity’s name in a negative sense—feels like an attack. Finally, very adversarial tone toward plant based choices undermines some of the charities’ work recommended by FarmKind, like Dansk Vegetarisk Forening.
So, overall it feels like optimizing for bringing money at the expense of collaborativeness and at the expense of other factors that contribute to the impact of the movement, like alienating talent.
I hope I’m wrong and that I’m missing some considerations, but I think effective altruists should have moral guardrails that make them unlikely to engage in certain behaviors and, to me, collaborativeness is one of the virtues that should not be discarded easily.
If anything, it feels a bit like a missed opportunity for some collab with Veganuary, but maybe FarmKind had reached out to Veganuary.
One happy news for the world—Poland just banned fur farming. The legislative battle is over, the president of the country signed the bill, which is the last chapter of the process.
Small update—thanks to Eurogroup For Animals’ insight on how to connect with the EU infrastructure, we enabled https://act.animainternational.org/ to bypass the EU portal and to have preselected answers and AI help to write input where applicable. This should substantively cut the time needed to fill the submissions.
I’ve edited the post to add this change.
You mean The European Union’s page?
Well, probably nothing made the EU more talked about, even decades of peace and cooperation, than their ability to affect the UX of an average internet user. They need to live to the expectations of their brand.
Just wanted to say, as someone from the animal side of things, that if this is indeed the case (no strong opinion either way), I’m sorry this happened to you and I appreciate that you’re pointing this out. Separating agreement from post quality is something I deeply value in the discourse here, and we should police the correct use of voting.
Awesome work Andres. Your charisma really worked well here to fit in the comedic framework, but at the same time present the case thoroughly. :)
Are you able to share whether Ronny was sympathetic to EA?
Thinking about it for 5 minutes from a global perspective,[1] EA funding would be >85% responsible. It’s hard to say what “work” means here, but most of the strategy was created by The Humane League,[2] not effective altruism.
But counterfactuals here are hard, people who pushed for this could maybe find new donors, but back then animal advocacy wasn’t too excited about cage-free work. So it could take some effort to find funding and most of the current funding would definitely not be found. A good way to think about it is that if Open Philanthropy disappeared now I think there would be no one to step in and fill the gap. And this despite it being 2025 and despite how tractable we now know this work is.
In my very personal take, EA was crucial for modern animal advocacy to achieve what it achieved. I wrote more about it here—https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GCaRhu84NuCdBiRz8/ea-s-success-no-one-cares-about
How people who write on the EA Forum and on LessWrong can have non-obvious significant positive impact by influencing organizations (like mine) - both through culture and the merit of their reasoning.
I enjoyed this post (upvoted, but disagree-voted). I think skepticism about animal charities is well-placed for the reasons you outlined—we don’t really have robust evidence. But I wanted to quickly comment on your description of corporate outreach. I won’t go into details, especially because people like Fai provided more elaborate answers, but I want to provide some anecdata to counter your partner’s one.
As a person who have seen corporate work from animal advocacy from inside for the last 10 years. I can tell you just a different tactic can produce outsized difference. In Poland, we have tried different tactics—trained by The Humane League—and in a few months we had enormous wins from the biggest national players. I also saw Open Wing Alliance training groups and after just few weeks of such training they were delivering wins when before that they were stuck sometimes for years. I think the counterfactual impact of groups like The Humane League was vast.
I think it’s good to think about corporate work as a coordination problem with multiple agents having their own goals and incentives, especially big companies, so how it works is not as straightforward as you described.
This is not to say that any corporate outreach work is tractable or that you should donate to animal charities. There are other conditions that need to be fulfilled for things to work, etc. But my main point is that we should not simplify or downplay these changes, at least in cage-free cause area.
I deeply appreciate you writing this and much agree.
I sometimes worry that EAs may optimize for consequences rather than for integrity and this may be the reason people distance themselves from EA.
[In my view it then creates a dangerous world of “solitude, filth and ugliness”. :) ]
by illegitimate means and I’m a target of aggression
Can you give example of that? Not saying you are not right, but not sure I can easily picture what falls into these categories. Pls ignore if this would drain you more.
Just want to say that I love it and it made my day. Awesome idea!
Thanks for the info. Subscribed.
Really devastating news. I had a pleasure to meet Steven. His dedication and warmth was deeply inspiring to me, and his down to earth character made him fun to be around. You will be missed. :(
Beautiful and moving post.
It reminded me of very good post by Ben Kuhn about the risk of grifters—https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nqt3kasPieQEKihCp/the-biggest-risk-of-free-spending-ea-is-not-optics-or