Thanks for flagging that Hugh. I wavered on whether to include that grant given its inclusion of insect-based protein, which I agree is concerning.
Thankfully most alternative protein grants don’t include insects. (And, as CB points out, GFI doesn’t include insects in their definition.) But the term is increasingly contested, as insect producers—with the backing of the pet food and aquaculture industries that are their primary customers—are pushing for alt protein funds to cover them.
Thanks Fai! Yes I’m trying to express more often the deep appreciation that I feel for the incredible donors and advocates in our space. I’m glad to hear you find it encouraging :)
Hey Lucas, thanks for engaging with the newsletter. A few quick replies:
Rethink’s 8-20% support in a national poll seems consistent with the 36% result in Denver because (1) Denver is very liberal and very urban, which I expect are the two strongest predictors of support for a ban, (2) as Jason notes below, there are a lot of reasons why people might not want a slaughterhouse in their city, but would oppose banning them nationally, e.g. NIMBYism, (3) a lot of the campaign focused on things unique to this one slaughterhouse, e.g. its uniquely bad animal welfare and environmental record, and (4) this was a lamb slaughterhouse and lamb is both a niche meat and comes from an animal with more public sympathy (vs., e.g., banning a chicken slaughterhouse).
We’re not sitting on the biggest pile of animal-advocacy cash on the planet. One of the funders of the Denver slaughterhouse ban is. But you’re right that, presumably like them, we didn’t think this was the best use of marginal funds to help animals.
I’m sorry I missed the Berkeley initiative. Had I seen it I would have included it. I’m skeptical though that we can take a lot from a symbolic vote on whether to allow factory farms in a dense urban area that has no factory farms.
I agree that history is full of radical shifts. My personal read of history is that they involved lots of smaller wins and progress before advocates reached the point where they could achieve women’s suffrage or abolition. But I appreciate that I’m unlikely to persuade you there, and I agree this is a good debate for our movement to continue to have on strategy.
Great piece, thanks Tyler! I didn’t see this before sending out my take on the election results yesterday and, if I had, my take would have been better for it. I agree with most of your analysis, with the exception of this headline conclusion:
I fear the policy landscape for farmed animal protection work is looking more and more bleak.
I think that’s true of the EATS Act, which could really hurt state ballot initiative work. But I’m not sure it’s true more broadly:
I don’t think the abolitionist ballot measures did any worse than they would have if brought in prior years. “Banning meat” has always been incredibly unpopular. For the same reason, it’s not clear to me that politicians opposing banning meat indicates a change of opinion, vs. just an increase in salience of the debate, which may or may not be a good thing.
We’ve always had opponents on the left and the right in politics. As James Ozden points out, we now also have more public supporters on the right than ever before. I’m not sure if they’ll be able to affect policy, but we may have a better shot than in any prior administration.
The state cultivated meat bans are bad signals, though they’re almost certainly preempted by federal law. I agree there’s a risk that a Trump FDA could ban cultivated meat nationally. But I think it’s more likely they’ll deregulate FDA policy in a way that helps cultivated meat.
Of course, there’s huge uncertainty on all this. And none of the above makes me think we should prioritize US policy work for farmed animals. Instead, I continue to think that our best opportunities lie elsewhere.
Thanks for the feedback and interesting info! I agree I overstated the importance of 2004-12 R&D. I chose that time period because it felt most comparable to where alt proteins are at, but I should have clarified that earlier R&D was more important.
I based my assessment of the importance of govt R&D policies to reducing solar prices on this IEA analysis—mostly the graphs showing their assessment that govt R&D policies (both publicly-funding and market-stimulating policies) drove ~two thirds of solar cost-reductions from 1980-2012.
But you clearly know more about the broader literature here than I do. And the IEA’s analysis may be consistent with yours if their “R&D: market-stimulating policies” category includes deployment subsidies. Either way, thanks for the thoughtful reply!
Thanks Nick! I agree that “keep it positive” isn’t always the right call. In fact, it was very negative footage that first got me to care about factory farming.
My advice was intended for navigating social media algorithms and media editors, who both seem to favor the positive. But I agree the history of social movements suggests you also need to explain the gravity of the issue and elicit outrage.
Thanks Nathan! I like your idea of mapping the key arguments that stop people from helping farm animals. My sense is there are different blocking arguments depending on the ask. For high-welfare meat, I suspect the blockers are:
“I already buy humane meat” (easy to believe this when most meat is labeled with ‘all natural’ and other meaningless labels)
“High welfare meat is too expensive” (true of truly high-welfare, but not necessarily of med-welfare)
“I have no way of knowing which meat is high welfare” (it’s really hard because in most countries the meat industry is free to mislabel their products with fake certifications and lots of meaningless claims)
You’re absolutely right that a major challenge is that portions of the animal movement don’t negotiate. Some high welfare meat is easily 50% better, but if you claimed that on Twitter you’d get drowned out by abolitionists claiming it’s all equally bad.
I’m pessimistic about changing individual diets in general, whether to higher welfare meat or plant-based, simply because of the scale of people you need to reach. So I’m more excited about mobilizing people to support corporate and political change. I suspect there the biggest blockers are a mix of “my action won’t make any difference” and “I’m too busy with other stuff.”
I’d welcome any additional thoughts you have!
Things I believe. Though I’m really torn on the Huel vs. Soylent one
Yeah that makes sense. I think you’re right that it’s plausible that new funding could decrease Open Phil funding in the space. I just think it’s low odds, and would only be to a much lower extent than the size of new funding.
Thanks Yves! I’ll check out those links and groups.
Thanks Aidan. I agree that much social change is nonlinear and hard to predict. I also agree that violent opposition preceded some significant social changes, though I’m more inclined to see that as a symptom of the issue having achieved high social salience rather than as a cause of the change.
I studied historic social movements in college and it’s been my hobby since, and it’s left me wary of extracting general lessons from past movements, since I think they often fit our prior beliefs. For instance, I see in the US civil rights movement a movement that for decades clocked up small achievable incremental legal and political wins in service of several larger incremental wins (two key federal laws and several Supreme Court rulings) but that failed in its more radical goals (racial and economic equality). I see in gay marriage a movement that largely sidelined radical calls to end marriage and other oppressive institutions in favor of a disciplined focus on a quite narrow practical goal: marriage equality. And I see the US abolitionists’ radical goals and tactics as largely a failure alongside the UK abolitionists’ more moderate ones, which achieved abolition decades earlier and without a war. But I suspect this is largely me projecting my beliefs on the past.
We’re supporting a lot of work that relies on nonlinear theories of change, for instance our work to build a field of farm animal advocacy across Asia, to build a field of fish welfare advocacy and research, and to promote hard-to-predict alt protein R&D. I’m not confident though that that work will have better secondary effects on social change than our linear work. For example, I’ve seen cage-free campaigns build public momentum, activist morale, and support for political reforms. But I agree it’s likely we’re missing important work to seed future nonlinear reforms. I just find it hard to work out what that work is.
Thanks Michael. Yeah I agree with those three categories. In practice we support a lot of interventions with much worse short-term cost-effectiveness than cage-free campaigns, in part for information value, in part so we can scale them up if they do work out, and in part for diversification purposes.
Thanks Vasco. On (1) and (2), I think that the grant sizing process is messier than it may seem. So the portion of a group’s budget we can be is often a major factor, but not necessarily the limiting one. And I don’t think our considerations all boil down to us setting a given target revenue for a group, in large part because we don’t want to create a perverse incentive for other funders to not fund groups we do and for our grantees to not fundraise.
On (3), I agree there’s some chance that in aggregate your donation will flip a group into a different funding category. I just think it’s quite rare, because the ideal revenue level for a group is not our only consideration in funding levels. See also the point above about us explicitly trying to avoid gaming other funders or groups’ fundraisers.
On the final point, I think you’re wrong to assume that if funding for farm animal welfare increased by $100M then there’s a 100% chance our program’s funding would decline by $100M (which to be clear is more than our program’s budget). I think reduced neglect could influence Open Phil leadership to allocate less funding to a cause area. But I think the odds it did so are much below 100% and the amount it would do so by is far less than the increased funding in the space (here $100M).
I think the most likely causes of the decline in plant-based meat sales are:
A failure to meet consumers’ expectations on taste and perceived healthiness. There was a high trial rate with a lot repeat purchase rate.
A significant turn in the media and popular discussion on plant-based meat from overwhelmingly positive (and high volume) to largely negative (and low volume).
A reduced willingness to pay the price premium for plant-based meat in a period with higher inflation / a perceived cost-of-living crisis.
I think some good strategies to build career capital in the animal welfare spare are:
Read about current and past interventions in the space, e.g. through books like Ethics into Action and research like Rethink Priorities reports.
Attend movement events, like the Animal and Vegan Advocacy Summit, and volunteer with groups, e.g. with The Humane League.
Develop skills most in need in the animal welfare space, which I think include corporate outreach, campaigning, fundraising, people management, and operations.
Thanks Neil. Good catch, and sorry I’m only replying now—I hadn’t checked the Forum over the break. I assumed that the original article was referring to all cage-free production because:
The 15% cage-free immediately follows a claim referring to all Brazilian production: “This type of production did not exist in Brazil until 2017. Mantiqueira was the first one. Seven years later, [cage-free] production represents almost 15% of the total.”
The next sentence reads: “We were a driving force.” This implies they were a driving force in an industry-wide change, and doesn’t really make sense if it refers to their production, i.e. “We were a driving force in getting ourselves to go 15% cage-free.”
But I think this could be a translation issue. And I don’t have any other sources, while the sources you found seem more likely to be accurate. So I suspect you’re right that sadly Brazil has made less progress thatn we thought.