EA - [Cause Exploration Prizes] More Animal Advocacy RandD by Open Philanthropy

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [Cause Exploration Prizes] More Animal Advocacy R&D, published by Open Philanthropy on August 19, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This anonymous essay was submitted to Open Philanthropy's Cause Exploration Prizes contest and posted to the Forum with the author's permission. If you're seeing this in summer 2022, we'll be posting many submissions in a short period. If you want to stop seeing them so often, apply a filter for the appropriate tag! Summary Of the approximate $200 million in funding aimed at improving the lives of farmed animals, only about 3% is spent on research and measurement and evaluation. This seems remarkably low, given how little the animal advocacy movement knows about which interventions are actually effective in changing behaviours, influencing policy or affecting animal product production. My very naive BOTEC puts the leverage factor of improved research at about 12x, meaning I believe $2 million of animal advocacy R&D could influence $23 million (2% of the next five years of funding). Funding intervention research early-on can improve the trajectory of the animal advocacy movement, and counterfactually improve the number of animals we help over the long-term. Not only does it provide a large value of information, I believe it is fairly tractable. For example, one can: Increase the pipeline of talented researchers by funding summer research fellowships Support existing academic research groups by academic network building, providing administrative support and hiring, as done by BERI. Release requests for proposals on large-scale and neglected advocacy methods. Incubate a new charity to support animal advocacy charities in conducting measurement and evaluation on their interventions. This organisation could also start conducting highly empirical cost-effectiveness analyses of various interventions and charities a la Givewell. Despite this, I have some large uncertainties on the cost-effectiveness of the last animal dollar, the popularity of the Food System Research Fund amongst researchers, and how easy it is to influence funding. Importance There are approximately 70 billion land animals and up to 2.3 trillion wild fish killed for food each year. Most land animals are chickens, who experience high levels of suffering throughout their lives whether they’re an egg-laying hen or a broiler used for meat. Some estimates believe that 74% of all farmed land animals are in factory farms, with this number being even higher for farmed fish. In addition, the number of animals killed each year for food is growing, driven primarily by an increase in chicken numbers and increasing wealth across the world. The farmed animal welfare (FAW) movement is trying to reduce the suffering of farmed animals, and support interventions that either improve the welfare of farmed animals or reduce the number of animals being warmed. Estimates by Farmed Animal Funders (FAF) puts the farmed animal movement at a size of approximately $200 million per year of funding, which has been steadily growing for the past few years. Despite $160 million of this being spent in the UK, Western Europe and the US, meat consumption for these three countries and regions still seems to be stable or still rising. However, there has been considerable success in corporate welfare reforms, with over 2,400 commitments since 2010. This juxtaposition in relative success in improving welfare but failing to affect total meat and dairy consumption potentially points to some particular difficulties in improving farmed animal welfare. Specifically, we have very little evidence on most animal interventions, specifically around ones that affect consumer preferences or non-corporate welfare institutional asks, e.g. the impact of media, different messaging strategies, humane education or grassroots move...