I agree with everything above, especially how lucky we are that Dustin and Cari both give generously and defer to experts (neither is common amongst the few other billionaires I’ve talked with). Although I think our funding is the vast bulk of our impact, I don’t think we’d have been so effective without EA. I think the EA ideals and community have helped the whole animal movement maximize its impact … something I may write a post on sometime.
LewisBollard
Karma: 961
This is why we can’t have nice laws
Lessons from two pioneering advocates for farmed animals
AMA: Lewis Bollard, Open Philanthropy
Open Phil’s farm animal welfare team is hiring!
Thanks, this is a good point. I agree that it’s not obvious we should choose A) over B).
My evidence for A) is that it seems to be the approach that worked in every case where farm animal welfare laws have passed so far. Whereas I’ve seen a lot of attempts at B), but never seen it succeed. I also think A) really limits your opportunities, since you can only pass reforms when liberals hold all key levers of power (e.g. in the US, you need Democrats to control the House, Senate, and Presidency) and they agree to prioritize your issue.
My sense is that most historic social reforms also followed path A), e.g. women’s suffrage, child labor, civil rights. In the UK, cross-party support was also critical to abolishing slavery, while in the US, where abolition was more politicized, it took a Civil War.
That said, the farm animal welfare successes of A) mostly occurred in past decades when politics was less polarized and I think some modern movements like climate change suggest A) may be the only plausible path today. I also wonder if we might be able to do some of A) and B). E.g. try to make being pro-factory farming an unpalatable opinion for anyone on the left or moderate right to hold—leaving just the most conservative rural representatives championing it.
Thanks for sharing this Daniela. I’m very sorry to read of what you experienced. I completely agree we should stop normalizing activists’ mistreatment and discriminatory practices, and that organizations need to develop active policies to prevent these situations. (I’ll address your point about continued grants as part of my reply to Eze below.)
On the policy point, over the last three years we’ve strengthened our requirements for grantees around sexual harassment policies and procedures. We now require all of our farm animal welfare grantees to implement a list of best practices prepared by our law firm. Most recently, in response to specific concerns raised, we added two more requirements: (1) forbidding grantees from asking for NDAs in harassment cases, and (2) requiring grantees to commission outside investigations of all harassment cases involving leadership. We also provide special grants to cover grantees’ costs to develop stronger policies, implement them, and train staff to abide by them.
And yes, it’d be great to discuss this with you further — I’ve just emailed you to find a time.
Thanks for the questions Eze. I encourage readers to also check out my answers to Ula and Daniela above, since they apply here too. I’ll focus here on your specific questions about how Open Phil addresses problems at grantees.
In general, when we learn of problems at grantees — like mistreatment of employees — we first try to learn more about the specifics of the situation. We then have a range of proportional responses we consider and adjust depending on how they go. This ranges from extensive discussions with grantee leadership to specific demands of them (e.g. that they adopt an independent board or investigate a particular case) to ultimately cutting off funding.
We have cut off funding to grantees that have proven unwilling to address major problems. But we do treat this as a last resort after all attempts at internal leverage and change have failed. We take this approach because we’re such a large portion of most grantees’ funding that us cutting off funding will typically result in them having to lay off employees, in some cases many. For this reason we often find that employees raising concerns with us don’t want us to cut funding to their employer (to be clear, this is not dispositive — it’s one consideration). In that case we also lose our leverage to insist on improvements.
I can’t get deeply into the specifics of any individual or organization. But I’ll say broadly that we have engaged extensively with Animal Equality leadership about the issues you’ve identified, and used our leverage to push for a number of changes there — and we’ll continue to do so. I would like to hear more about your experience and other cases you’re aware of — I’ve just emailed you about this.
Thanks for looking into this Saulius! I’d seen a few things re baitfish and it has been on my list to look more into for a while. But this will raise its priority—and make my task easier by providing a lot of the underlying sources. I’ll discuss this with some of the farm animal groups to see if they have ideas. In the meantime, let me know if you find more info.
Thanks for drawing attention to this important issue Ula. I’m very sorry to read of the experiences you and others have shared, which I’ll address here and in separate replies to Daniela and Eze’s posts below.
I completely agree the animal movement needs to do better to ensure it’s a safe place for all its employees and volunteers. We’re supporting a number of groups and individuals working to create a more inclusive and supportive global movement. For instance, we’re major funders of Encompass, ACE, and Animal Advocacy Careers, as well as a number of regional efforts (like a new China EAA fellows program). And in response to complaints last year about the FAST listserv not being a safe place, we funded Amanda Cramer to work full-time on fixing it. But there’s a lot more work to do, and we’re always looking for new initiatives we could fund to help.
More broadly I think our movement needs to continue to professionalize its approach to management, HR, and employee development. I’ll address more specific issues around sexual harassment and mismanagement in my answers to Daniela and Eze below. But I’ll say for now that we’ve encouraged grantees to raise salaries and invest more in management training, and have provided funding to support both aims. And we’re very supportive of Neysa Colizzi’s work to improve leadership and governance at a number of our major grantees, for instance by coaching executive directors and assembling new independent boards.
On the specific examples you gave: we’re supportive of the action that Anima International took in the case you describe, and my understanding is that the employees affected are still with Anima and supportive of how the situation was resolved. (I don’t think I can say any more without violating their confidentiality.) I don’t know the answers on the ProVeg case — they’re not a grantee and we’re limited in our ability to inquire into issues at non-grantees.
Thanks Charlie and Oat for sharing your experiences with Animal Equality. I understand your skepticism and I’m sorry to hear about how things have gone for you and too many others.
You’re right that we spoke with a lot of former and current AE employees in 2019. We heard concern about practices but also concern about the potential fallout of us just cutting funding. It was a tough decision, but we chose to use our leverage to push for changes rather than to cut funding.
I wish I could get into more specifics of the conversations with AE leadership, but think it would violate both their trust and that of a number of employees we spoke with. So all I can really say is that we’ve had ongoing candid conversations with AE leadership about our concerns and think they’re taking a number of significant actions based on our conversations, for example adding new independent directors to their board, making key personnel changes, and working closely with a consultant on management changes. But we’re continuing to monitor and engage on this—including continuing to welcome new information.
Hey Daniela!
Invertebrates: I’d love to see more research on invertebrate sentience and welfare, of the kind that I know you and Rethink Priorities are doing. We’re also excited to see more advocacy on the welfare of aquatic invertebrates, which seems like it may be more politically feasible than work on other invertebrates’ welfare. For instance, we recently funded Crustacean Compassion to push for the inclusion of crustaceans in UK animal welfare laws. I’d love to see more researchers and advocates working on invertebrates, since the numbers are obviously huge and my sense is that a lot of low-hanging fruit remains. For instance, I was very pleasantly surprised to see CP Foods, the world’s largest shrimp producer, last year announcing an end to eyestalk ablation — it would be great to see more work on reforms like this.
Wild animals: I’m excited about the work that Wild Animal Initiative is doing to build an academic field of research in welfare biology. I think we need a lot more research on questions like the relative welfare of different species in different ecosystems and the prevalence and severity of various welfare harms like disease and starvation. I’d also like to see more study of the total welfare implications of things that humans are already doing to actively manage wildlife, for instance existing government wildlife vaccination and predator control programs. I think one potentially promising aim would be to have animal welfare become a goal of government land management policies, alongside existing goals like preserving game species, maximizing biodiversity, etc.
Research Qs: in addition to the questions above, two questions I’m always interested in for advancing tractability are (a) what are the low-hanging fruit for reforms, and (b) what are the key obstacles to progress? For instance, on aquatic invertebrates, I’d love to see a survey of shrimp and prawn producers on how hard various welfare reforms seem, and what’s stopping them from implementing them. I’m guessing the most common obstacle will be cost. But I’d be especially interested in reforms where the obstacle is more like “we’d need to see a pilot project to show that’s commercially feasible.” For instance, given CP Foods is ending eyestalk ablation after minimal pressure, I’m guessing this is a low-hanging fruit, and I’d be interested in researching how we could get other shrimp producers to follow suit.
Thanks for the question Michael. A few thoughts:
I think cultivated meat could be a game-changer. It seems to have a clear route to competing with the most expensive animal products (think foie gras or bluefin tuna) and to improving plant-based meats as an additive at a low percentage. But the biggest prize would be if cultivated meat could compete with cheap animal products at scale. We commissioned this report because we’re uncertain about whether cultivated meat can reach that price point.
The report outlines a number of major technical challenges to lowering the cost of cultivated meat. I encourage people to read the whole report. But the tl;dr is that growing animal cells in bulk is really hard, and in particular constraints on bioreactor size and sterility make this really challenging. As a result, you should probably be skeptical of claims that cultivated meat will be price-competitive at scale within the next decade.
I think how much the report should update you beyond that depends on your priors, and what they’re based on. For someone who thinks, based on media articles or some general intuition like Moore’s Law, that it’s inevitable that cultivated meat will become price-competitive, this might be a pretty large negative update. But for a scientist at a cultivated meat startup this probably isn’t much of an update at all.
My biggest takeaway is that we need more publicly available work on the science of cultivated meat. Because most of the research is being done by startups who need to protect their IP, not much gets published. So I’d love to see this paper serving as one input in an ongoing scientific discussion, rather than being the final word. In that vein, I recommend this Techno-economic assessment of animal cell-based meat, published last year by UC Davis scientists. And I’m looking forward to a similar assessment that GFI commissioned, which should be released any day now.
Otherwise I feel pretty unsure on the right takeaways / way forward. This does make me more pessimistic that startups can reach cost-competitiveness within a time frame that investors will accept — though it’s possible they’ll find a business model in competing with pricier animal products or blending with plant-based. And I think it suggests the need to diversify approaches, e.g. in also pursuing plant-based and fermentation approaches, and moral advocacy, given there’s no one sure silver bullet here. But it also makes me think there’s greater importance to more patient academic research on cultivated meat, since it suggests a longer timeline and the potential payoff remains huge.
Hey Brian, I think it’s too early to judge both of the HSA grants we funded because they’re for long research projects, which have also gotten delayed. We’d like to fund more similar work for HSA but there have been capacity constraints on both sides. We also tend to weigh prolonged chronic suffering more highly than shorter acute suffering, so slaughter isn’t as obvious a focus for us. So I think funding HSA or similar slaughter-focused groups is a good idea for EAs like you who prioritize acute suffering. On slaughter, you might like to also look into the Shrimp Welfare Project (OP-funded, but with RFMF).
This is a major question for us, and one we continue to research. Our current very rough estimate is that our average $ spent on corporate campaigns and all supporting work (which is ~40% of our total animal grant-making) achieves the equivalent of ~7 animals spared a year of complete suffering. We use this a rough benchmark for BOTECs on new grants, and my best guess is this reflects roughly the range we should hope for the last pro-animal dollar.
Of course there are many caveats! They take two forms. First we have lots caveats on the number above. There’s lot of empirical uncertainty: about the # of animals impacted by each corporate campaign, the likelihood of implementation of each corporate pledge, how much the campaign sped up the reform relative to the counterfactual, the welfare of animals before the corporate reform, how much the reform improves that welfare, etc. And there’s a lot of moral uncertainty: about how to compare acute and chronic suffering, how to compare welfare improvements with sparing an animal from living in a factory farm at all, how to compare across species etc.
Second, we have caveats on how to apply the benchmark and how much to expect it to reflect the last pro-animal dollar. The biggest uncertainty is the future pace / tractability of reforms. As noted above, our space has proven hard-to-predict on a five year timeline—some campaigns have gone far faster than we expected, some much slower. So it’s of course much harder to predict progress on a 50+ year timeline for a last pro-animal dollar. That said, I think the best we can do is make lots of predictions and continue to score how they go—we’ve been doing that for five years now, and seem well-calibrated even as we remain unsure on lots of specifics. And while I think there are plenty of good reasons why things might get less cost-effective over time, I think there are also plenty of good reasons why things might get more cost-effective.
I’d love to see more EA researchers (a) trying to independently assess the cost-effectiveness of various animal interventions, (b) trying to estimate the cost-effectiveness of the last pro-animal dollar, and (c) making and scoring predictions on key milestones.
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Good Q Peter. I’m hoping to put out a set of research Q’s that I’d find useful in the new year. But I’m most excited about Q’s you and other EAs come up with independently because they’re more likely to identify opportunities we’re not thinking about or scrutinize claims we take for granted.
Interesting Q! I think there’s a lot that would surprise 2015-me. A few highlights:
Plant-based meat: I didn’t expect Impossible to get into Burger King so quickly, the popularity of the Beyond Meat IPO, the surge in sales of plant-based meat in US retail over the last few years, or the resulting investing boom in the space in the last few years. I think following the industry more closely would have given me a bit more foresight here, but I’m not sure it would have resulted in a lot more good grants, since there are limited grant opportunities (and the top investment opportunities all got taken without us).
Corporate campaigns: I didn’t expect advocates to so quickly get most large North American food and European food businesses to commit to go cage-free, or to succeed in extending these campaigns globally. But I also didn’t expect US broiler welfare campaigns to get as slowed down as they have. I think the main update here is the significance of momentum. I think one wrong lesson would be that we should ask for more—this was a lesson that we took from rapid US cage-free progress which I think led us to ask for too much on the US broiler ask.
Mismanagement and sexual harassment at some groups. I think the movement had more internal problems than we realized, see e.g. the above comments. As a funder it’s hard to learn about these issues—you’re mostly talking to group leadership and it’s hard to have informal conversations with regular employees. But I think these issues have updated us on a number of things, including the importance of (a) trying to have more informal conversations with non-leaders, (b) requiring strong sexual harassment policies and procedures from grantees, (c) encouraging orgs to invest in org-development, e.g. higher salaries, and better governance, e.g. independent boards.
I could go on. There are many more things that have surprised me, though I think most have been positive and due to the fact that we’re still a young fast-growing movement where there’s less of a stable baseline to predict forward.
This is a tough one. I recently surveyed a dozen of the most informed and aligned people on their estimate of the average welfare gain per life-year—a mix of aligned animal welfare scientists and EA researchers—and got a very wide range of answers. There’s lots of reasons for that uncertainty but the biggest is that the underlying broiler welfare science isn’t all that helpful. That’s in turn mainly due to a combo of (1) it’s really hard to measure the subjective experience of animals (preference tests are the best evidence we have, but they’re not that helpful for cases with many interacting variables), and (2) most welfare science hasn’t traditionally focused on the subjective experience of animals, but instead on weakly related factors like mortality and health.
But there’s a broad consensus amongst the informed / aligned researchers that the welfare gain of the Better Chicken Commitment outweighs the potential increase in life-years. This is mainly because the higher welfare breeds most likely to be adopted are only slightly slower than conventional breeds—we’re most likely talking about a 10-20% increase in days, not a >30% increase or anything. (Some approved breeds are much slower, but no big producer is going to adopt them.) And a little bit of that increase in days will be offset by decreased demand at a higher price point. By contrast, the welfare reforms—especially on breed and stocking density—seem likely to make a pretty substantial difference to outcomes like chronic pain and stress.
FWIW, my very rough estimate is that, accounting for the life span increase, the BCC will alleviate ~40% of the suffering of US broilers and ~25% of the suffering of EU broilers. (The EU number is lower because EU broilers start in better conditions than US broilers.) But those are very rough numbers—my 80% confidence interval would span something like 5-75% of suffering reduced. And I think others reasonably have very different estimates here.
This one’s tricky because I think the limiting factor on promising new interventions is more often a lack of talent wanting to pursue them—and established groups not wanting to do too many things at once—rather than a lack of support or good ideas. (To be clear: I think the movement as a whole is funding constrained; this only applies to new speculative interventions.)
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of new interventions I’d like to see tried which I think some EAs would be well-positioned to do:
Working with large aquatic invertebrate companies to assess and improve welfare.
Working with insect farming companies and investors to implement welfare standards.
Piloting new fundraising approaches, e.g. optimizing online small-donor response to fundraise for EAA groups.
Piloting new corporate campaign approaches to strengthen existing campaigns, e.g. new online campaign tools etc.
Running EA-aligned fellowships to build the pipeline of diverse talent for our movement.
Solving very specific alt-protein scientific challenges, e.g. replicating the texture of a particular species like shrimp.
Engaging with international institutions (e.g. OIE, FAO, IFC, EBRD) and banks (e.g. Rabobank, BNP Paribas) that already have farm animal welfare standards to strengthen and implement them.
A few caveats on what this list isn’t: (1) my “top priorities”—I’ve excluded lots of great ideas that people are already pursuing or which I think would be hard for people to pursue without significant capital or specific expertise, (2) all the new interventions I’d like to see—I only spent 10 mins on this and would likely change the list with more reflection, (3) a guarantee we’d fund a new initiative on one of these topic—this would also depend on whether the people who wanted to launch the initiative had the necessary expertise / experience, and how good their plan was. That said, if you think you’re well-positioned to launch a new initiative on one of those topics, please do reach out to me.
Haha thanks Howie! I want to also give a shout-out to Amanda, who’s been a leader on this work at Open Phil since 2018. And to the hundreds of EAs, including Jakub, who have done the hard work to turn funding into results for animals :)