Neil_Dullaghan🔹

• Neil_Dullaghan🔹 26 Nov 2025 11:54 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: EA An­i­mal Welfare Fund’s 3-Year Grant­mak­ing Strategy

  Hi Vasco,
  Please see the response to Fai’s question on caged broiler farming, where the answer is the same in this case.

• Neil_Dullaghan🔹 26 Nov 2025 11:52 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Fai’s comment on: EA An­i­mal Welfare Fund’s 3-Year Grant­mak­ing Strategy

  Yes it’s on our radar, partly thanks to you!
  
  Part of AWF’s resources will be allocated to uncovering new areas (new in terms of currently not receiving a lot of attention and resources from the movement) where opportunities might offer the same or larger counterfactual impact as existing areas. Caged broiler farming is an idea that will be considered as part of our process for shortlisting “new areas” to explore and actively support, in collaboration with the animal advocacy community. If anyone wants to work on this issue, we’re very happy to learn more from them.

• Neil_Dullaghan🔹 25 Nov 2025 19:24 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Fai’s comment on: EA An­i­mal Welfare Fund’s 3-Year Grant­mak­ing Strategy

  Thanks for the question Fai!
  Various projections of rising meat consumption and with it farming more animals in more intensive conditions seems one of the ways animal suffering gets much larger in future decades and exeracerbates the moral atrocity already happening.

  This is why we are intentionally spending more of our effort looking for opportunities in Africa to prevent and roll back intensive farming methods liked caged hen farming and other forms of new animal farming that could be more scalable in Africa than Europe or the USA due to lower costs and more room to grow.
  However, we don’t expect AWF will deliver most impact by focusing on reducing meat consumption in Africa specifically. There are other sources of funding specifically focused on that work and other promising opportunities that others won’t support that we think AWF should prioritize. Furthermore, we haven’t identified tractable, cost-effective opportunities to reduce the growth of factory farming in general, and that’s why we focus on particular practices and efforts that affect welfare of animals trapped in the system.

• Neil_Dullaghan🔹 25 Nov 2025 19:19 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: EA An­i­mal Welfare Fund’s 3-Year Grant­mak­ing Strategy

  Thanks for your question Vasco, and raising this issue in the community. Currently, we believe reducing uncertainty about the sentience and conditions of such animals is the first step, before considering interventions to affect them or how interventions aiming to reduce suffering of other animals affects these soil animals. Figuring out ways to reduce this uncertainty is an area we’d be happy to receive applications about.

EA An­i­mal Welfare Fund’s 3-Year Grant­mak­ing Strategy

An­i­mal Welfare Fund: Pay­out recom­men­da­tions from April to June 2025

An­i­mal Welfare Fund: Pay­out recom­men­da­tions from Jan­uary to March 2025

EU Farmed An­i­mal Welfare Policy: Strate­gic Assess­ment (2025)

An­i­mal Welfare Fund: Pay­out recom­men­da­tions from Oc­to­ber to De­cem­ber 2024

• Neil_Dullaghan🔹 4 Jan 2025 15:09 UTC

  17 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Aus­tralian poli­ti­cian posts about shrimp welfare

  Great to see.
  The animal party in the Netherlands did something even more bold back in mid 2024

  
  “Thanks to a proposal put forward by the Party for the Animals and approved by the House of Representatives, the Dutch government will be pushing for a European import ban on shrimps whose eyes have been cut off without the use of an anaesthetic. The Minister of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality will also be calling on Dutch supermarkets to stop selling these mistreated shrimps.”

  
  https://​​www.partyfortheanimals.com/​​pt/​​a-successful-achievement-the-dutch-house-of-representatives-aims-to-end-eyestalk-ablation-in-shrimp

• Neil_Dullaghan🔹 23 Dec 2024 14:51 UTC

  16 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Ten big wins in 2024 for farmed animals

  I was pretty positively surprised to read “In Brazil, where large-scale cage-free production didn’t exist a decade ago, about 15% of hens are now cage-free.” So I hope I’m wrong about the point below.

  To me the article cited seems to instead say just that Mantiqueira, the largest egg producer in Brazil, has almost 15% cage-free production (and will reach 20% with the additional of 3 new cage-free units discussed in the article), not that total Brazilian production is 15% cage-free. (A Bloomberg article suggests the company has 5% organic and 15% “happyEggs” for a total of 20% cage-free production.)

  Other sources seem to suggest the total Brazilian hen population is closer to 5% cage-free (e.g., the Latin American Egg Institute says 95% caged referencing 2023 production). Luiz Mazzon, president of the Certified Humane Brasil Institute in an article in May 2024 said “In Brazil, 5% of egg production comes from cage-free or free-range farms”, and this 2023 paper says the same thing (95% in conventional cages). Though this is where it was in 2019 (see this 2019 government-associated report) so maybe they’re all referencing old data, not that the share of cage-free production hasn’t increased at all (though also consistent with cage-free production increasing, just not as much as non-cage free production increased)
  
  It’s still great that the largest egg producer reached the 2.5M cage-free hen goal a year and a half ahead of schedule, and doesn’t take much away from the genuine progress in cage-free. I assume these statistics above are old data and don’t capture some of the progress that’s happening and the projected increase in cage-free from the 35 cage-free commitments that have been fulfilled & 56 reporting (according to ChickenWatch). If you (or anyone in Brazil) have another source on the 15% that’d be really encouraging to read.
  
  

• Neil_Dullaghan🔹 22 Dec 2024 19:47 UTC

  18 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: emre kaplan🔸’s comment on: Ask Us Any­thing: EA An­i­mal Welfare Fund

  Thanks Emre,
  
  In practical terms, each grant manager gives a score +5 to −5, with +5 being the strongest possible endorsement of positive impact, and −5 being a grant with an anti-endorsement that’s actively harmful to a significant degree. We then average across scores, approving those at the very top, and dismissing those at the bottom, largely discussing only those grants that are around the threshold of 2.5 unless anyone wanted to actively make the case for or against something outside of these bounds (the size and scope of other grants, particularly the large grants we approve, is also discussed). So the “bar for funding” is when the average of fund manager’s votes is ~2.5 (though we now also have an additional mechanism for comparing applications just above or below the bar). And the votes take into account not just the welfare improvement from an intervention, but other factors like where it fits into broader theories of change, scalability, the value of funding (analyzing counterfactuals and long-term sustainability). For a list of our criteria, refer to a question in our FAQ: “How Does the EA Animal Welfare Fund Make Grant Decisions?”.

  However, if you mean what’s the bar in terms of impact per $, we’re currently trialing a few different approaches for how we estimate that (see our answers about use of welfare capacity, SADS, and benchmarks), and would like to arrive at a common unit and threshold (or range) that would be constant across species & interventions. But again, this would just be one input and arguably the estimates shouldn’t be taken literally, but more as providing intuition pumps.

  Regarding how many animals or animal-years should be affected per dollar for the listed welfare improvements, this will very much depend on how those reforms were achieved (corporate campaigns, producer outreach, policy advocacy, strategic litigation, etc.). Unfortunately, at this time we can’t share a cost-effectiveness estimate for these common interventions from averaging the estimates across all relevant grant applications. There are some publicly shared estimates that we refer to as potential benchmarks (see below).

  On cage-free and broiler welfare: Corporate welfare campaigns over 13 years (2005-2018) to commit corporations to sell only cage-free eggs and higher welfare chicken meat were estimated to impact 10 to 280 animals per dollar spent (9.5 to 120 animal years) (Šimčikas 2019). The author of the report, Saulius Šimčikas, made a comment on the Forum in 2021 about unpublished estimates of chicken welfare reforms, suggesting cost-effectiveness was two to three times lower in 2019-2020 than in 2016-2018 (“According to this new estimate, in 2019-2020 chicken welfare reforms affected 65 years of chicken life per dollar spent.)”. Similar sentiments about the lower cost-effectiveness of such campaigns today are discussed here and here. There’s also the separate cost-effectiveness for various ballot initiatives, including cage-free ones (Duffy 2023) and speculative broiler ballot initiatives (Khimasia 2023), and the various cost-effectiveness analyses from Vasco Grilo. Furthermore, in a comment in 2023, Emily Oehlsen, Managing Director of Open Philanthropy, a major funder of these chicken corporate campaigns, reported that since 2016, “we’ve covered many of the strongest opportunities in this space, and we think that current marginal opportunities are considerably weaker,” and that “We think that the marginal FAW funding opportunity is ~1/​5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis” referencing Šimčikas (2019).
  So it seems fair to believe many cage-free and broiler welfare corporate campaigns being funded today are less cost-effective than the 2019-2020 estimate Saulius provided. Sagar Shah also created some prospective fish pre-slaughter stunning corporate campaign estimates suggesting such campaigns in Europe might only affect a few hours of life per dollar spent- though there are many caveats and assumptions in that estimate, including the very important consideration of how one weights excruciating pains.

  What links here?

  • Vasco Grilo🔸's comment on An­i­mal Welfare Fund: Pay­out recom­men­da­tions from Oc­to­ber to De­cem­ber 2024 by KarolinaSarek🔸 (25 Jan 2025 13:50 UTC; 5 points)

• Neil_Dullaghan🔹 22 Dec 2024 19:36 UTC

  9 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Ask Us Any­thing: EA An­i­mal Welfare Fund

  Thanks for another great question.
  Similar to the answer about pain intensities, we’re trialing this in our cost-effectiveness models (though we are using the full range of the RP welfare capacity placeholder estimates, not just the median). ( I, Neil, also an employee in the RP animal welfare department, want to be cautious of any bias before the RP moral weights become a permanent feature). I also think the broader point about the RP placeholder welfare capacity ranges still holds- it is non-welfare capacity range factors that will often be more decisive. Based on the evidence assembled so far, using that methodology, the welfare capacity ranges between species are likely not many orders of magnitude different and so it mostly matters when you’re comparing animal populations of similar sizes which just doesn’t seem to be the comparison we’re making very often—in most cases, it still comes down to raw number of animals affected or years of suffering, cost to achieve the impact, and probability of success.

• Neil_Dullaghan🔹 22 Dec 2024 19:35 UTC

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Ask Us Any­thing: EA An­i­mal Welfare Fund

  Thanks for the question!
  
  

  I’d refer you to an answer we gave in a previous post about how the fund has historically relied on a range of factors to judge marginal cost-effectiveness for the majority of grants and it’s less often the case we have the evidence and the grant size merits a formal cost-effectiveness model. Having said that, we are currently trialing different approaches to cost-effectiveness modeling as that becomes a more standard feature of our deep evaluations (see more in our FAQs on our grantmaking process) and making explicit BOTECs a required part of evaluations. Among these, models we’re investigating include how a range of different pain category intensities weightings (as described in Grilo 2024, Ryba 2024, Schuck et al. 2024) could affect our cost-effectiveness estimates.
  There are reasonable grounds to put some credence in the most severe harms causing farmed animals at least as much disutility as the longest-lasting harms they experience (McAuliffe and Shriver 2023, also see Parra 2024, Ryba 2023).We make sure to note in the evaluation if the overall assessment would hinge on such a consideration (or other more philosophical/​ fundamental questions where people have reasonable disagreements) to guard against being systematically biased towards one perspective. However, in practice, this may only be a crux for a handful of grant applications (e.g., those focused on pre-slaughter stunning)
  Often to make a grant decision we don’t need to get a precise estimate down to the exact total hours of intensity-adjusted pain, just what would one need to believe for this grant to be at least competitive with other opportunities and does that seem like a reasonable belief to hold.
  

  What links here?

  • Neil_Dullaghan🔹 's comment on Ask Us Any­thing: EA An­i­mal Welfare Fund by KarolinaSarek🔸 (22 Dec 2024 19:47 UTC; 18 points)
  • Neil_Dullaghan🔹 's comment on Ask Us Any­thing: EA An­i­mal Welfare Fund by KarolinaSarek🔸 (22 Dec 2024 19:36 UTC; 9 points)

Ask Us Any­thing: EA An­i­mal Welfare Fund

An­i­mal Welfare Fund: Pay­out recom­men­da­tions from April to Oc­to­ber 2024

An­i­mal Welfare Fund: Pay­out recom­men­da­tions from May 2022 to March 2024

• Neil_Dullaghan🔹 29 May 2024 21:42 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Model­ling the out­comes of an­i­mal welfare in­ter­ven­tions: One pos­si­ble ap­proach to the trade-offs be­tween sub­jec­tive experiences

  Thanks for this!
  Two small comments and I may come back with more substantive questions later
  
  1. Downloadable version in pdf doesn’t work for me (just redirects to a page saying forbidden). The PDF download link on the Animal Ask website works though
  
  2. Perhaps I missed it, but do you intend to make a shareable version of this framework that allows users to plug in their own values (like a spreadsheet template with your toy example)?

Shal­low overview of in­sti­tu­tional plant-based meal cam­paigns in the US & Western Europe

The EA An­i­mal Welfare Fund (Once Again) Has Sig­nifi­cant Room For More Funding