Ren Ryba

Minor poli­ti­cal par­ties as an ad­vo­cacy strat­egy: The case of an­i­mal politics

• Ren Ryba 19 Apr 2022 2:39 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Lucas Lewit-Mendes’s comment on: Minor poli­ti­cal par­ties as an ad­vo­cacy strat­egy: The case of an­i­mal politics

  Thanks Lucas—good question. If Farrer’s theory is on the right track (which I think it is), then traditional orgs and political parties are substitutable strategies to achieve any particular policy goal. The most effective strategy would depend on the goal and the context. Given this, it would make perfect sense for EA grant makers to also consider funding political campaigns by minor parties. I’ve seen that grant makers often explicitly exclude political parties, which I gather is an understandable concession to optics.
  
  An argument against this is neglectedness—at least in my experience with the AJP, the party can readily generate its own funds through fundraising around election time. The government also provides funding for parties that achieve a particular threshold (not sure if this happens in other countries). Since minor political parties have access to these two sources of funding, this is a good reason why grant makers might choose not to fund political parties.
  
  To me, it would make sense for EA grant makers to consider funding campaigns (subject to optics considerations of course), but it would also make sense for grant makers to require a strong argument why the political party in question can’t get its funding from sources like these.

• Ren Ryba 19 Apr 2022 11:32 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Tom Bry-Chevalier’s comment on: Minor poli­ti­cal par­ties as an ad­vo­cacy strat­egy: The case of an­i­mal politics

  Thank you for offering your thoughts. It’s great to hear about similar work in other countries.

  I read on Wikipedia (https://​​en.wikipedia.org/​​wiki/​​Animalist_Party) that the Animalist Party got 2.16% in the 2019 European Parliament. Is that right? It seems like a solid result and similar to the results the Animal Justice Party typically gets in Australia—and, as you say, a way to build the legitimacy of animal-related issues.

  Good luck for some positive outcomes in the future elections, both French and EU. I’ll keep an eye on the results!

• Ren Ryba 21 Apr 2022 2:17 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: MichaelDello’s comment on: Minor poli­ti­cal par­ties as an ad­vo­cacy strat­egy: The case of an­i­mal politics

  I had a quick look at EA grant makers at the beginning of the SA state campaign. I found that every EA grant maker I checked (can’t remember which ones) had a clause saying that they won’t fund political parties or campaigns. So I imagine there’d have to be a conversation with grant makers first about their policies—which may, understandably, be a tricky conversation.
  
  The Australian government website says: “In late 2018 the Parliament passed legislation to ban political donations of $1,000 or more from foreign sources. … The new rules ban donations from foreign donors: a person who does not have a connection to Australia, such as a person who is not an Australian citizen or an entity that does not have a significant business presence in Australia.”
  So yes, that could be a hurdle. But perhaps this idea could still work for parties in countries that do not have a law like this, or the funding could come from EA orgs or grant makers based in Australia.
  
  I’m in two minds about the party being funding constrained. To be funding constrained would mean that extra funding would translate to either a higher vote or a better outcome in some other measure of influence. I haven’t seen any evidence to either support or refute that claim. The SA state campaign’s spend in 2022 was $100,000 and resulted in a vote of 1.5%, while in 2018 the spend was $18,000 and resulted in a vote of 2.17%. Obviously that’s just a single comparison, and the contexts varied wildly between those two years, but it’s not obvious to me that extra spending would increase the vote (or other measures of influence). I previously looked at obtaining data from state branches on this question, but I don’t believe I went ahead with that project.

• Ren Ryba 20 Jun 2022 2:26 UTC

  9 points

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  on: Cri­tiques of EA that I want to read

  I think in particular not working on insect farming over the last decade may come to be one of the largest regrets of the EAA community in the near future.

  This is something that I find myself thinking about a lot. If you could wave a magic wand, what changes would you implement? I’m aware of Rethink’s work to incubate the Insect Welfare Project—with that in mind, do you have any recommendations for other EAAs to help out with insect work in the meantime, even if this requires a large commitment (like starting a new org)? (I am aware of your past research on insects and that of other Rethink staff.)
  
  Something to note—the other thing that keeps me up at night is whether the EAA movement is missing out on the impact from animal-inclusive longtermism, which is something else you’ve argued for and I agree with. I’m currently chatting to some people in that space about possible ways forward.

A di­rect way to re­duce the catch of wild fish

• Ren Ryba 4 Jul 2022 5:12 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Charles He’s comment on: A di­rect way to re­duce the catch of wild fish

  Thanks for engaging with my ideas and my post. I think we seem to be in agreement that farmed fish experience avoidable suffering at a very large scale and therefore should attract serious attention from animal advocates. I nevertheless believe, at the same time, that wild-caught fish advocacy should still be a top priority, alongside farmed fish advocacy. Would you agree?
  
  Even if it is agreed that fish in aquaculture appears to involve more avoidable suffering than cause wild-caught fish (a claim I do currently agree with), there are reasons why the effective animal advocacy movement might want to commit some amount of resources to wild fish advocacy, alongside farmed fish advocacy:
  1. Someone (e.g. an EA looking for a cause to work on) could have a moral theory that cares about things other than only suffering. The most compelling of these, to me, are theories that recognise animals’ right to life. Another popular view are those that invoke “naturalness”, the integrity of biological communities, and so on—I personally find such views uncompelling, but they are very popular, particularly among environmentalists. Under either of these views (an interest in life, or environmentalist-type ideas), wild fish could be far more compelling to work on, even if it is agreed that wild fish experience less avoidable suffering.
  2. An advocate looking for a cause to work on might have a particular skillset, live in a particular country, have particular connections, etc, such that a decision to focus on wild-fish advocacy may have the higher impact in that advocate’s context.
  3. An organisation or the EA movement wants to diversify its portfolio of causes, worldviews, etc, for either philosophical reasons (e.g. worldview diversification) or practical reasons (e.g. attractiveness to donors). This idea seems widely accepted among the EA community to me.
  4. The movement may do the most good in the long run by looking out for new ideas and experimenting with ones that could conceivably have extremely high impact, even if most of these experiments are expected to fail.

• Ren Ryba 4 Jul 2022 5:26 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Vgvt’s comment on: A di­rect way to re­duce the catch of wild fish

  Thanks for your thoughts. I’m somewhat familiar with these issues from my background in fisheries management and wildlife biology.

  It seems to me that your concern is that what you could call the “indirect effects” (e.g. giving money to the wrong people, encouraging policies that harm other animals) might be worse than the “direct effects” (saving the lives of the specific animals). I think this is a valid concern, and somewhat similar to the risks I raised in my post.

  In my experience (limited to a few developed countries), fisheries catch shares work a bit differently to how you’ve explained hunting licenses. In most cases, the government uses catch shares to limit how much fishing can happen—so catch shares are not so much a product that is sold to consumers, but rather a tool used to limit the amount of fish that the commercial industry can take.

  In most cases, we would be buying the catch shares off of the commercial fishers who hold them. This would give money to those fishers, which might be used for harmful things (e.g. fishing in another fishery instead), and I list that as a concerning risk in my post. But I don’t think this would be as obviously bad as providing money to a hunting program.

  I agree with your point about raising fish for release. This could plausibly be a bad thing in fisheries where fish are raised for release, although it’d be possible to do research to understand the size of this risk, given a particular fishery.

• Ren Ryba 4 Jul 2022 5:28 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: A di­rect way to re­duce the catch of wild fish

  Hey Michael, thanks for your thoughts. Would you agree that these risks could apply to any intervention that seeks to reduce the amount of commercial fishing that happens? In that case, it seems to me that these would be two important crucial considerations for the wild fish advocacy movement, and hence very important to research further.
  I think we’ve discussed these points briefly before—let me know if you’re keen to talk about them further, I’d be interested in collaborating on some questions like these in the future.

• Ren Ryba 20 Jul 2022 10:26 UTC

  3 points

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  on: Re­duc­ing aquatic noise as a wild an­i­mal welfare intervention

  I find this post subjectively very cool. I did my PhD in a marine biology lab which had other scientists doing research on ocean “soundscapes”—which includes reducing the types of noise you talk about here, but also increasing the types of noises that are beneficial for wild animals (from a purely conservation perspective). For example, one colleague had a project where they installed underwater speakers, playing recorded reef noises, on a newly restored reef and showed that this increased the settlement of juvenile invertebrates onto the reef. This sort of work wasn’t the focus of this article, but it might have implications for the welfare of wild juvenile invertebrates and does seem pretty tractable. This wasn’t the focus of my own work (which was in a different area in marine policy) but happy to chat further over DM if anybody reading this article is feeling inspired.

• Ren Ryba 8 Sep 2022 11:57 UTC

  4 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: In­cen­tivis­ing peo­ple to learn about plant based eat­ing by pay­ing them.

  Intriguing idea, thanks for sharing. In general think it’s worth at least doing some tentative exploration all ideas to increasing the popularity of plant-based diets.

  There seems to be an implicit assumption in your post that courses/​coaching on plant-based eating will either increase the probability that somebody adopts a plant-based diet, or increases the probability that they stick with it. Has this assumption been tested, to your knowledge? It could also be that this intervention would mostly reach people who are keen on plant-based eating anyway, which is why I think it’d be good to test these assumptions in reality (pilot study or similar).

  You might also get some useful feedback by sharing this idea with the RECAP group (https://​​www.recapresearch.org/​​join-recap) or Faunalytics, if you haven’t already, as both of those groups have people thinking along these lines. I also mention this because—in my opinion—we should be focusing on whatever plant-based interventions appear to work the best. So, for this idea to be deserving of resources (in the long-term, after the idea is tested) it would also need to be shown that this idea works as well as, or better than, other plant-based interventions available to us. (Admittedly, I’m not sure what the best plant-based interventions are right now, but Faunalytics has loads of research on this.)

• Ren Ryba 30 Sep 2022 11:24 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Duarte M’s comment on: CCTV cam­eras in slaugh­ter­houses: Modest benefits for an­i­mal welfare

  Thank you for the positive feedback :)

• Ren Ryba 30 Sep 2022 11:28 UTC

  7 points

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  in reply to: Fai’s comment on: CCTV cam­eras in slaugh­ter­houses: Modest benefits for an­i­mal welfare

  Hey Fai! According to the crime research, the deterrent effects of CCTV depend on the slaughterhouse workers’ perceived probability of detection, not the true probability of detection. So, in principle, it’s possible for CCTV to have a meaningful deterrent effect even if the videos aren’t watched 100%.
  
  For example, a government could identify which slaughterhouses have the highest risk of non-compliance and focus on those footage, then very quickly and clearly respond to any incidents they do detect. These visible, rapid responses would help convey the impression to slaughterhouse workers that the feeds are being monitored, which would increase the perceived probability of detection despite not all feeds being watched.

  What links here?

  • Fai's comment on Pro­ject Idea: The cost of Coc­ci­dio­sis on Chicken farm­ing and if AI can help by Max Harris (30 Sep 2022 13:02 UTC; 3 points)

• Ren Ryba 30 Sep 2022 11:34 UTC

  9 points

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  in reply to: lukasj10’s comment on: CCTV cam­eras in slaugh­ter­houses: Modest benefits for an­i­mal welfare

  Thanks for the positive feedback :)
  
  If you consider on-farm (rather than slaughterhouse) CCTV, the welfare benefits increase significantly, as you’re monitoring a much longer period of each animal’s life. However, the tractability of an on-farm CCTV campaign would probably* be much lower. Farmers often have closer, more personal relationships with their farms than slaughterhouse owners do with their slaughterhouses. Proposing to install CCTV on farms would likely trigger a lot of backlash from farmers (particularly given the common public image of the ‘family farm’).
  
  *Admittedly, this is mostly speculation (although speculation that we checked with experts). It could be the case that an on-farm CCTV campaign is more tractable than we think. If somebody tests a campaign and finds it to be tractable, then yes, my opinion of such a campaign would increase significantly. That would start to look like a highly impactful campaign. But you would first need to show that the campaign is tractable, which I don’t have high hopes for. I could imagine that you might be able to increase the tractability by only focusing on industrial/​factory farms, which would capture almost all of the impact for animals anyway.

• Ren Ryba 3 Oct 2022 23:36 UTC

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Fai’s comment on: CCTV cam­eras in slaugh­ter­houses: Modest benefits for an­i­mal welfare

  Yes—all else being equal, a higher probability of detection is a good thing, as it would lead to a stronger deterrent effect (as long as the authorities respond to violations with clear, effective enforcement actions)

• Ren Ryba 11 Nov 2022 4:27 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Sarah Cheng’s comment on: Sub­sidies: Which re­forms can help an­i­mals?

  Thanks for the feedback :)

  No, that was probably poorly expressed on my part. What I’m saying is: if you catch reducing fishing effort now, you catch fewer fish in the short-term, but many more fish in the long-term. This means that the total number of fish being caught (and thus suffering) could increase.

• Ren Ryba 11 Nov 2022 4:46 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: PV’s comment on: Minor poli­ti­cal par­ties as an ad­vo­cacy strat­egy: The case of an­i­mal politics

  Thanks a lot, I’ve sent you a message :)

• Ren Ryba 15 Nov 2022 3:44 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Sarah Cheng’s comment on: Sub­sidies: Which re­forms can help an­i­mals?

  Very roughly, yes.

  If you assume that bringing a wild fish into existence is bad (and outweighs the benefits from not catching fish), then fishery subsidy reform looks bad. The assumption of net negative lives is one position from which you can arrive at this conclusion. There are other positions from which you can arrive at this conclusion too.

  If you think that bringing a wild fish into existence is good or neutral, then fishery subsidies reform looks more promising.

  In practice, we don’t know whether bringing a wild fish into existence is good, bad, or neutral, and there are plausible arguments supporting all three of these. But it does seem that a large proportion of the moral value of fishery subsidy reform comes from bringing additional wild fish into existence. Since it’s unclear whether that is good or bad, we are not able to recommend this as a clearly good intervention.

• Ren Ryba 4 Dec 2022 22:14 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: minthin’s comment on: In­de­pen­dent Office of An­i­mal Protection

  This is exciting to see. I definitely agree—sometimes getting your foot in the door, either at the local level or with a more limited version of the policy, can let you expand the policy later when people have seen the benefit. And your scorecard approach is similar to what Australian Alliance for Animals has recently done: https://​​www.allianceforanimals.org.au/​​victorian-election-2022

• Ren Ryba 6 Dec 2022 0:00 UTC

  1 point

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  on: [Cause Ex­plo­ra­tion Prizes] Farmed An­i­mal Welfare in Sub-Sa­haran Africa

  Thanks, this is a super useful article.

  In case readers of this article are interested: we recently completed a collaboration with Animal Welfare Competence Centre for Africa, a new charity based in Uganda. Our recommendations centred on both welfare reforms and limiting the spread of industrialised farming practices. Our write-up is available here: https://​​www.animalask.org/​​post/​​farmed-animal-advocacy-in-uganda

  Currently, we (Animal Ask) are also doing some research on the trajectory of animal agriculture in developing countries and how moldable it is, as the author mentions.