LewisBollard

Karma: 3,944

LewisBollard 6 Aug 2026 17:12 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: The AI Windfall
Good clarification, thanks for adding that Nick!

LewisBollard 7 Jun 2026 14:47 UTC
48 points
10 ∶ 0
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: animal welfare has an evidence problem
Thanks Nick. I’m really glad to see that Cynthia Shuck of the Welfare Footprint Project has just commented around the specifics on cage-free, so I’ll defer to her on that. I’ll just add a few quick thoughts on your comments here.
“If there had been 50 studies which compared mortality between two global health intervention and overall results was unequivocal, we would probably conclude that there was no major difference between the two … Mortality in hens seems pretty easy and likely inexpensive to measure.”
- To clarify: the results are not unequivocal. Different studies point to very different results. This is both due to study design, but also due to lots of variation in actual conditions (lab vs on-farm, small farms vs. big farms, experienced farmers vs. inexperienced, healthy pullets vs. unhealthy, etc).
- Mortality on-farm is indeed easy and cheap to measure, but very few farmers will allow researchers on-farm to measure this or publicly share their own results. So a lot of these studies end up being in unrepresentative lab conditions or on individual farms that may not be representative.
- That said, I think the on-farm data that Cynthia cites (the “database from a breeder for countries around the world”) is probably the best data we have. And it does indeed conclude there isn’t a major difference between the two systems.
“Before this post I thought it was super obvious that cage free was way better and it was just a magnitude-of-good question. After this post, I would appreciate a post on the forum actually laying out why there is a “high likelihood of cage free bring robustly net positive”.”
- I don’t think this post should be a major update for you on whether cage-free is better than caged. It’s just not clear that mortality is that good a proxy for total welfare. E.g. everyone agrees that mortality is highest in free-range and pasture-based farming, but few conclude from that that these systems are worse for total welfare than intensive confinement.
- Given how hard it is to measure animals’ actual subjective wellbeing, I think we should look to lots of different sources of evidence and reasoning, not just the few indicators we can objectively measure. My personal view that cage-free is better is probably based on something like: ~40% priors that pretty much all animals like to move around and have more space, ~30% preference studies showing that hens really value the things they can only access in cage-free (nesting boxes, perches, dustbathing, etc), ~10% my sense that pretty much all independent animal welfare scientists agree it’s better, ~10% my experience with rescued battery cage hens who have a very strong preference to stay out of cages, ~10% that mortality is pretty much the only indicator suggesting it could be worse and actually that data is very messy. (TBC: not an official CG view, and it’s possible I’d change those numbers a bunch on reflection. I share them just to suggest that resolving the mortality debate wouldn’t be transformative for my views.)

LewisBollard 6 Jun 2026 18:49 UTC
109 points
21 ∶ 2
on: animal welfare has an evidence problem
Thanks for writing this post! Thanks too for sharing it in advance, and sorry I didn’t have time to review it. For the same reason, I won’t have time now to go into the detail that I’d love to on your specific claims. (It’s great to see such a vibrant discussion in the comments! I’d love to see more critical discussion of the evidence like this in the EA animal welfare space.) So I just wanted to share three high-level reflections.
First, I agree with you on the need for more evidence collection on the animal welfare outcomes of popular interventions. We’ve funded >$20M of such evidence collection work (e.g. the Welfare Footprint Institute, Rethink Priority’s review of evidence across multiple areas, the shrimp slaughter study you cite, a Guelph study on broiler genetics welfare outcomes, and a dozen other studies and meta-analyses). We’ve also done a ton of internal analysis on this, e.g. we have a complicated model of estimated rates of factory farm meat displaced by alt protein in various scenarios. And yet we need to do a lot more! I’m really excited that the likely inflow of more animal welfare funding will enable a lot more high-quality evidence generation. And I completely agree we should prioritize it.
Second, I think we need to be realistic about how much certainty that evidence collection will create—and how quickly. I think your cage-free example is a good one. There have been 50+ studies and large-scale data collection efforts on relative mortality in caged vs. cage-free housing systems and we still don’t have a clear answer on it. And yet mortality is just one of 20+ metrics we could look to as partial proxies for what we really care about: “what is the relative overall welfare of caged vs. cage-free birds?” I think we should also fund studies and commercial data collection on all those other metrics (or at least the ones current tech allows us to measure). But that will take many years and, even then, people will reasonably debate the relevant importance of each of those 20+ metrics to the welfare of birds.
(I should note that I really admire the work you’re doing to try to significantly accelerate the pace of this kind of research, starting with shrimp slaughter. I think I agree with you on everything you think should be funded to accelerate it further, and am confident we will fund that full agenda—please tell me if there’s something we’re not covering. And I hope that advances in AI can accelerate the evaluation and syntheses of existing evidence too.)
Third, I think we need to continue to act to alleviate suffering even in the face of significant uncertainty. I’m jealous of global health direct service provision (e.g. anti-malarial bednets, cash payments) where I think you can have perhaps the closest to total certainty of positive impact of any areas. But I think for basically any advocacy intervention in EA (whether in AI safety, bio, farm animal welfare, or even global aid advocacy) you have to accept significant uncertainty not just about the immediate impacts but also about second, third, etc. order effects. That’s not an excuse for ignoring the uncertainty. But I think when a cluster of evidence points to a high likelihood that something is robustly net positive—as I believe it does for cage-free (sorry I don’t have time to go into all the specifics here!) -- than we should move forward on it. I think the opportunity costs of waiting for a higher confidence level of evidence are too high.
Thanks again for writing this! One of the things I love most about EA is the application of critical thinking and evidence to disrupt commonly accepted wisdom, and I think this is a good example of this. I disagree on some of the specifics—wish I had the time to explain more—but I’m really glad you wrote and published this.

LewisBollard 11 May 2026 17:04 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Adrian Spierling🔸’s comment on: Save Our Pigs!
I’m afraid I can’t think of much beyond publicizing this effort and its importance

LewisBollard 13 Mar 2026 16:27 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: SiobhanBall’s comment on: Make Cruelty Unprofitable Again
I agree that’s the best solution, but I think it’s unfortunately much less tractable in most places than corporate campaigns. In the one large producer where it is right now, the EU, we’re investing heavily in legislative work.

LewisBollard 13 Mar 2026 16:26 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: David_R 🔸’s comment on: Make Cruelty Unprofitable Again
Thanks! Claude deserves all the credit for the charts :)

LewisBollard 30 Dec 2025 20:45 UTC
75 points
24 ∶ 3
in reply to: ClimateDoc’s comment on: Pagw’s Shortform
I’m not wild about this campaign either. I’ve shared this feedback privately with Aidan and Thom, but think there’s value to doing so publicly to make clear that EA / the animal movement’s moderate wing / FarmKind’s funders don’t uniformly endorse this approach. (To be clear: I’m writing in my personal capacity and haven’t discussed the following with anyone else at Coefficient Giving.)
I’m a huge fan of FarmKind’s team. I’ve personally donated to them and directed funding to them via Coefficient Giving. I thought they did an incredible job during the Dwarkesh fundraiser earlier this year and I admire their ingenuity and grit in pursuing the very hard challenge of bringing in counterfactually new funds to effective animal advocacy. I appreciate that they meant well with this campaign, which I think they saw as using a a playful fake-feud with Veganuary to generate media.
But I thing this campaign was a mistake for three reasons:
1. This feels like an incitement to infighting, which has long plagued the animal movement. In recent years, I’ve seen the abolitionist / more radical wing of the animal movement take major good faith steps to reduce this infighting (see, e.g., my session with Wayne Hsiung at this year’s AVA). Whether Veganuary was in on this or not, I’m seeing vegan activists reasonably interpreting this as an attack on their advocacy. I think we should have a very high bar for deliberately starting a fight in the movement, and I don’t think this meets it.
2. This feels like an attack on vegans. I think we should also have a very high bar for attacking well-meaning people doing good in the world, whether vegans, EAs, organ donors, aid workers, or longtermists. I appreciate that attacking vegans wasn’t the campaign’s intent, but I think it was the predictable result, and certainly how the folks in the Daily Mail’s comments sections have (gleefully) interpreted it.
3. This feels dishonest. To be clear: I don’t think FarmKind intended it this way and I think the people behind it are deeply ethical people. But I think our movement is at its best when we hold ourselves to high standards and that includes not deliberately misleading people. And creating a fake “meat-eating campaign” feels like it crosses the line for me.
Again, this isn’t to question the intent or abilities of FarmKind’s team. Instead, I’m sharing how I personally feel about this campaign. I hope we can avoid campaigns like this in future, while continuing to pursue the innovation in tactics that the animal movement and EA needs.
What links here?
- ClimateDoc’s Quick takes by ClimateDoc (7 Jan 2022 8:40 UTC; 2 points)

LewisBollard 6 Nov 2025 22:28 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: David_R 🔸’s comment on: The Protein Problem
Thanks David! That’s very kind of you :) And TBC: I wouldn’t have skipped the whole newsletter—just weighing on ideal protein consumption, which was a bit of a digression from the main point. (And I had actually considered just saying something like “I don’t know how much protein you should eat, but it doesn’t matter because we can’t influence it much.”)

LewisBollard 6 Nov 2025 15:15 UTC
19 points
7 ∶ 0
in reply to: Mjreard’s comment on: The Protein Problem
Totally fair feedback. I agree that I should probably have just argued that the general concept of UPFs is nonsense. My sense is that most of the evidence for the harms of UPFs is correlational and based on studies that look at high consumption of fast food and other junk food that we know is based for you based on high sugar, salt, and caloric levels. (I.e. where you don’t need to add UPF to explain why they’d be unhealthy.)
My sense is also that the evidence for food additives like emulsifiers, stabilizers, colorings, and artificial sweeteners posing health risks is surprisingly weak given the public uproar. And while I agree that chicken doesn’t contain those things, chicken feed typically contains a whole different set of things that would scare people if they had to disclose them, like antibiotics, animal by-products, and lots of artificial ingredients to make up for nutritional deficiencies from a corn/soy-based diet. (Though, to be clear, I think the evidence that those feed additives pose direct health risks is also weak, with the possible exception of antibiotics contributing to antibiotic-resistant Salmonella.)

LewisBollard 6 Nov 2025 2:10 UTC
12 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: David_R 🔸’s comment on: The Protein Problem
Thanks David. Yeah I agree that something closer to 1.6 gram per kilogram is probably ideal for gaining muscle mass, per what your ChatGPT answers say. But my guess is that most Americans aren’t doing the required weights to actually gain muscle mass. And my guess would be that caloric restriction / GLP-1s are surer ways to loss weight. But I’m also far from an expert on any of this, so on reflection I should have just skipped weighing in on this point at all.

LewisBollard 16 Sep 2025 20:50 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: WilliamKiely🔸’s comment on: My TED Talk: How to end factory farming
Only a relatively smaller number of breeding hens laying ~275 eggs each per year

LewisBollard 15 Sep 2025 16:45 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: WilliamKiely🔸’s comment on: My TED Talk: How to end factory farming
Yep that’s about right. I think it’s roughly 7B new male chicks and 7B new female chicks each year. The population of egg-laying hens (~8B) is a big higher than the number of chicks because they each live for a bit longer than a year on average (though that’s partly offset by 5-10% annual mortality on egg farms).

LewisBollard 10 Sep 2025 18:10 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Manuel Allgaier’s comment on: My TED Talk: How to end factory farming
Thanks Manuel! TED will post this on its YouTube channel in the next few weeks. (They stagger out posting talks across the year, and typically post them for a few weeks just on TED.com before they go on YouTube.)

LewisBollard 8 Sep 2025 16:19 UTC
9 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Research report: adding a plant-based option (or two) doesn’t change behavior
Thanks for doing and publishing this study! It’s so helpful to get a clearer picture on this, even if we don’t like the answers. As a validation of your findings, in 2015, Chipotle told Vox that sofritas were 3.5% of sales, very close to your 3.8%.

LewisBollard 10 Jul 2025 0:49 UTC
62 points
10 ∶ 2
on: A shallow review of what transformative AI means for animal welfare
Thanks Lizka and Ben! I found this post really thought-provoking. I’m curious to better understand the intuition behind discounting the post-AGI paradigm shift impacts to ~0.
My sense is that there’s still a pretty wide continuum of future possible outcomes, under some of which we should predictably expect current policies to endure. To simplify, consider six broad buckets of possible outcomes by the year 2050, applied to your example of whether the McDonald’s cage-free policy remains relevant.
1. No physical humans left. We’re all mind uploads or something more dystopian. Clearly the mind uploads won’t be needing cage-free McMuffins.
2. Humans remain but food is upended. We all eat cultivated meat, or rats (Terminator), or Taco Bell (Demolition Man). I also agree McDonald’s policy is irrelevant … though Taco Bell is cage-free too ;)
3. Radical change, people eat similar foods but no longer want McDonald’s. Maybe they have vast wealth and McDonald’s fails to keep up with their new luxurious tastes, or maybe they can’t afford even a cheap McMuffin. Either way, the cage-free policy is irrelevant.
4. Radical change, but McDonald’s survives. No matter how weird the future is, people still want cheap tasty convenient food, and have long established brand attachments to McDonald’s. Even if McDonald’s fires all its staff, it’s not clear to me why it would drop its cage-free policy.
5. AGI is more like the Internet. The cage-free McMuffins endure, just with some cool LLM-generated images on them.
6. No AGI.
I agree that scenarios 1-3 are possible, but they don’t seem obviously more likely to me than 4-6. At the very least, scenarios 4-6 don’t feel so unlikely that we should discount them to ~0. What am I missing?
What links here?
- What Animal Interventions are Fast Enough for Short AI Timelines? by Hazo (22 Jul 2025 2:39 UTC; 63 points)

LewisBollard 10 Feb 2025 21:26 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: David_R 🔸’s comment on: In defense of the certifiers
Thank you! I’m not aware of any US certifiers using CCTV, though I know several use unannounced audits to follow up on farms with bad prior audits or allegations of abuse. My sense is that most European certifiers are similar, though I may be wrong.
Sadly both audits and CCTV footage are almost always kept private. My sense is that there’s not yet a big enough carrot (i.e. price premium on certified products) or stick (i.e. reputational harm from refusing public CCTV) to push certified farms to agree to this. My guess is it would require a retailer to say “we’ll only sell your products if you install CCTV and share the footage.” I hope they’ll eventually get there.

LewisBollard 2 Jan 2025 20:05 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Neil_Dullaghan🔹 ’s comment on: Ten big wins in 2024 for farmed animals
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.

LewisBollard 23 Dec 2024 0:06 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Hugh P’s comment on: Ten big wins in 2024 for farmed animals
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.

LewisBollard 20 Dec 2024 17:32 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Fai’s comment on: Ten big wins in 2024 for farmed animals
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 :)

LewisBollard 15 Nov 2024 1:36 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lucas S’s comment on: What do the US elections mean for farmed animals?
Hey Lucas, thanks for engaging with the newsletter. A few quick replies:
1. 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).
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.