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.
LewisBollard
Karma: 1,529
How can we get the world to talk about factory farming?
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.
I think there’s a lot of potential in regulatory reform, though I’m probably more optimistic about its prospects outside the US. E.g. I think DEFRA in the UK or the European Commission are more likely to make meaningful regulatory changes than the USDA.
My top priority US regulatory reform would be to get the USDA to interpret the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act to apply to birds too. Courts have held that its within the USDA’s discretion to decide this, but decades of on-and-off advocacy by HSUS and AWI have failed to get them to do so. I do think it’s worth trying again if we get a more sympathetic USDA secretary (I’m confident Vilsack wouldn’t do this).
I think the options under the other laws are more limited. My understanding is that few animals are transported for more than 28 hours anymore, so the 28 Hour Law’s protections aren’t that helpful. And I don’t think the Animal Welfare Act or Horse Protection Act could be extended to apply to farm animals (though better enforcement of the AWA could help a lot of lab animals).
Finally, we looked into the potential to move APHIS on the inhumane methods use to kill animals during disease outbreaks. Unfortunately it seemed pretty intractable at the present time.
Sorry, I can’t share our internal numbers. To date, we haven’t focused on making direct comparisons between GHW and FAW. Instead, we’ve focused on trying to equalize marginal returns within each area and do something more like worldview diversification to determine allocations across GHW, FAW, and Open Philanthropy’s other grantmaking. Luke has written about moral weights in the past, we’ve commissioned more recent work by Rethink Priorities, and we hope to do more research ourselves in the future—on moral weights and also on other components of BOTECs that would allow comparisons between animal and human focused work (e.g., welfare range, the difference between the number of humans and chickens, respectively, affected by a marginal intervention in each area), as well as our overall framework for making this decision. That said, the timing is TBD.
Thanks Rachel. I think there are people trying the kind of holistic systems-change approach you’re describing.
I’m personally skeptical that we have anywhere near the resources to globally destabilize the existing factory farming system. (And I think destabilizing it on a more local basis would have little global impact.) I think the primary drivers of factory farming—especially the demand for cheap meat—are so deep-rooted and widespread that they would take immense resources to change.
Instead our focus has mostly been on reducing the suffering caused by factory farming, by trying to both reduce the suffering of each animal and reduce the number of animals factory farmed. I think some of the interventions to do so, like developing alt proteins, probably overlap with some of the things you’re thinking of.
Thanks for the question. I agree that cultural change is important, both for farmed and wild animals. I’m actually thinking about writing a future newsletter on the topic.
Our challenge funding in this area has been identifying funding opportunities that seem likely to influence cultural change on a large scale. As you allude to, it’s not clear that a lot of our movement’s past efforts at education and awareness-raising have been effective in this goal. And I’m not clear that past movements have achieved this absent a huge organic grassroots movement (civil rights) or huge funding (anti-tobacco) or both (climate change).
What sorts of interventions do you have in mind? And do you see any examples of past success at cultural change in our movement? It’s obviously much easier to scale up successful approaches than to hope for the success of untested ones.
Yeah both statements are true. The US Better Chicken Commitment lacked a list of approved breeds for many years due to delays at the Global Animal Partnership, which was in turned delayed by a study on breed welfare outcomes at the University of Guelph. My understanding is that a lot of those delays were due to attempts by the Guelph researchers to address concerns from the breeding companies about how to ensure the fairness of the study’s methodology. Of course the breeding companies dismissed the study’s results—finding welfare problems wit their fastest growing breeds—anyway.
My understanding is that most US companies with BCC pledges are yet to make any progress on adopting higher welfare breeds in their supply chains. I suspect that’s mostly because it’s the most expensive change in the BCC, since higher welfare breeds grow slower and have a worse feed conversion ratio. But it doesn’t help that most major US chicken producers have refused to even meet their corporate customers’ requests to raise higher welfare breeds.
As usual, things are going better in Europe. The Danish and Dutch retail sectors now sell almost entirely chicken from higher-welfare breeds, while I think French retailers are making solid progress. Still, there’s a lot more work to do!
Whoops, I put this answer under the wrong question. Here it is here. I think Emily’s Forum comment from six months ago remains most relevant here. In particular:
To date, we haven’t focused on making direct comparisons between GHW and FAW. Instead, we’ve focused on trying to equalize marginal returns within each area and do something more like worldview diversification to determine allocations across GHW, FAW, and Open Philanthropy’s other grantmaking. In other words, each of GHW and FAW has its own rough “bar” that an opportunity must clear to be funded. While our frameworks allow for direct comparisons, we have not stress-tested consistency for that use case. We’re also unsure conceptually whether we should be trying to equalize marginal returns between FAW and GHW or whether we should continue with our current approach. We’re planning to think more about this question next year.
On your specific question, the raising of OP’s GHW cost-effectiveness bar did not affect animal welfare interventions.
Thanks Vasco. We actually used to share grantees’ applications (with their permission) by default. I suspect you can still find them linked on the older grant pages.
My experience was that this significantly limited the information grantees were willing to share in their application, or forced them to create a second application just for sharing. I was also frustrated at how often these were taken out of context. For example, the meat industry used the Guardian’s proposal to us to fund content on factory farming (which we posted) as evidence that the Guardian was biased and just in this for the money.
I’m not sure if GiveWell should share less info. But I’d note that they’re in a very different position to Open Phil, in that their aim (as I understand it) is to influence individual donors through rigorous analysis. If I thought we could positively influence the donations of lots of individual donors through longer write-ups, I’d probably think it was worth us doing them.
I agree with Michael that a ban on all fishing, or even just industrial fishing, seems politically infeasible. I think it’s possible that an island nation heavily dependent on tourism might do this, but that would probably just increase the catch of unregulated fishing ships outside of their territorial waters. I don’t see any path to the world doing this.
The other complication is that a ban on wild-caught fishing might just increase the spread of aquaculture, which is worse for each fish involved. Most wild-caught and farmed fish demand is interchangeable—people are just looking to buy fish. If the wild-caught fish becomes unavailable, I’d expect most of that demand to switch to farmed fish, which would fuel an even bigger boom in aquaculture. Sadly I expect that would be even worse for the fish involved :(
We are though funding work to reduce the suffering caused by current fishing methods. I think work to make the experience of capture and slaughter less horrific is really important.
I’m most excited about reforms that can affect the largest numbers of animals, which normally means focusing on political reforms in the largest nations and states where such reforms are feasible. I think the following reforms are currently most feasible:
Advocating for the next European Commission revives its stalled farm animal welfare legislative revision proposal, and then ensuring its passed by the European Parliament and Council.
Advocating for key European nations, especially France, Germany, and the UK, to follow through on promised major farm animal welfare reforms.
Advocating for governments globally with large public R&D budgets to devote some of that funding to alternative protein research.
Advocating for sympathetic governments, mostly in Europe, to subsidize the transition to higher welfare animal agriculture.
Potentially advocating for more US states to adopt popular farm animal welfare reforms, whether through ballot measures or legislatures.
I hope so one day, but I think it’s a long way away because there’s still so much scope in cage-free and BCC work. In particular, I view the corporate campaign priorities as:
Completing the EU and US transition to cage-free. They’re at ~60% and ~40% cage-free respectively, so there’s a lot of work to do to ensure that companies follow through on their cage-free pledges, most of which come due in 2025-26.
Increasing implementation of existing BCC and ECC commitments. Companies have been slow to implement their broiler welfare policies, especially on breed.
Securing new BCC and ECC commitments. Most European and American retailers haven’t yet committed to these critical broiler welfare reforms.
Implementing global and regional cage-free pledges. Cage-free is just starting in key Asian and Latin American markets, so there’s a lot of scope to increase percentages there with existing policies.
Securing new global and regional cage-free policies. I think most of the world’s biggest food companies now have global cage-free pledges, but a lot don’t, nor do a lot of regional food giants in Asia, LatAm, the Middle East, and Africa.
I see lots! Here are the ones that first come to mind:
Analysis paralysis. I’ve seen a bunch of philanthropists spend years trying to learn and perfect their strategy before giving any money. I think they’d learn more, and do more good, by viewing giving as an iterative process, where they can give, learn, and strategize simultaneously.
Wanting to solve every problem at once. I often see philanthropists deride alt proteins because they’re still “ultra-processed” or welfare reforms because they don’t “change the system.” Unfortunately my experience has been that when philanthropists seek solutions that solve every problem at once, they normally end up solving none of them.
Following future stories, over past track records. I see some philanthropists fall for ideal stories of the future (e.g. “this campaign will end factory farming by X date”). I’d encourage these philanthropists to review whether the group’s past track record suggests they have any hope of achieving their story’s ending.
Too must trust in our future selves. I’ve seen philanthropists who say they’re saving to give in future or just that they’ll step up their giving when they retire, get richer, or whatever. I’ve also seen this often not work out. I think this is especially a risk with people who are earning to give, and may get trapped in more expensive lifestyles than they expected to.
Too much concern about things that don’t affect impact. I see some philanthropists fixate on CEO pay, revenue growth, or other factors that places like Charity Navigator think are important. They’re really not.
Interesting question! I think my relationships with grantees has become more formal / professional over the years, and less informal / friendly. I think a few factors drove this:
Concern about conflicts of interest, or the perception of them, from being too friendly with any group (I now recuse myself from grant renewal consideration for groups where I’m friends with the leaders).
Relatedly, not wanting to be perceived as having personal favorites, especially given it’s easier for US advocates to become friends with me than advocates in other countries.
Not having the time to maintain a lot of friendships in the community, mostly because we now have many more grantees than we used to.
I’m not sure if this has made me more or less effective as a grantmaking. On the plus side, it’s probably reduced my bias a bit and freed up some time. On the downside, I think I learn less gossip than I used to when I had more informal friendships with grantees, and sometimes this gossip matters to impact. I also miss being friends with such an incredible group of people!
Things I believe. Though I’m really torn on the Huel vs. Soylent one