| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | AA | AB | AC | AD | AE | AV | AW | AX | ||
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1 | Charity | Cost-effectiveness analysis | Quality of evidence ... | Limiting factors | Externalities | Other | First decision making meeting | Second decision making meeting and OVERALL CONCLUSION | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
2 | ... that a charity can make this change happen | ... that the change has the expected welfare effect | Experts | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
3 | ideas | How speculative | CEA results | Overall quality of the evidence | Overall likelihood of success | Overall quality of the evidence | Overall likelihood of success | Expert opinions | Talent (founders & key hires) | Access to information | Industry opposition | Funding | Scale of the problem | Neglected- ness | Externalities [& risks?] | Value as step in long run toc | Remaining uncertainties | Other notes | Conclusion | Avg Score | Notes | Conclusion | Avg Score | NOTES | Reason for decision | Reviewer 4 | |||||||||
4 | Ban import of low welfare goods | We have estimated that the cost of enforcement is the same as the cost of enforcement of cross-border compliance with organic standards in the EU. Uncertain how likely this to be true. Some of the WP estimates are extrapolated rather than full reports (E.g. See an illustration of this in the "WP score matrix" tab of this spreadsheet). | WP/$: • 185.99 WP/$ (Charity costs only) • 23.08 WP/$ (Government and charity costs) Animals affected annually: • 8,700,000 fish • 507,364 pigs • 370,000 chicken • 235,000 sheep • 50,000 cows (Modelled New Zealand policy) Link | 74 case studies, though these are mostly for specific products (eg. fur, foie gras) and not a total ban on low welfare imports (I have included Eurogroup's campaign in the EU, an ongoing campaign by RSPCA in the UK, and Sentience Politics campaign in Switzerland as case studies but marked these as "ongoing") | 17.57% (13/74 case studies) | Good evidence removing hens from cages etc is good for animal welfare. Uncertainty on enforcing across borders. Some evidence: case studies, theoretic evidence, enforcement rates. See here. Uncertainty on not leading to new farms being created to fulfil new requirements. Maybe assistance clauses in trade agreements helps. | My main concern is that most of the impact (~96%) comes from the fish affects. Fish are usually left out of legislation with many countries not having any fish welfare legislation, so there could be some concern that they might not want to include fish in an import ban (though NZ do have fish welfare legislation so they do seem to care at least a bit about this) | All experts were very supportive of the intervention idea, though there was some hesitancy about new organizations working in the EU or UK. Experts (2 spoken to) were very pro working in New Zealand as there is currently basically no work being done there. | This is an intervention that would benefit from legal expertise but this is a “nice to have” rather than a necessity. As this is a policy issue, co-founders will need to be comfortable with policy work | Lots of research done and available information on this topic | Industry are supportive as protects them from low welfare imports Could get NZ cross-party support. National Party has a strong farming influence and Labour Party are generally more animal friendly | OpenPhil have given funding to Eurogroup for Animals doing this work in the EU, and EA Animal Welfare Fund have given money to Sentience Politics for their "Abolish Factory Farming" initiative. | Key weakness of idea, after New Zealand: • The EU – Eurogroup for Animals is on it. • The UK – currently a lack of political will. • Switzerland – current initiative, and Sentience Politics • Other – maybe in future... | In New Zealand this is very neglected with just one guy spending his weekends on this. | Positive externalities: • Precedent setting. • Could increase acceptance of high standards as less competition concerns. Negative externalities (DETAILS: HERE): • Potential impacts on farmers in LMIC exporting countries • Potential price increases in NZ and exporting countries | It is likely a critical step to have countries apply animal welfare laws to import. Strong precedent setting. Govs say they worry this intervention is not compatible with WTO. Doing this well may encourage other countries (EU, UK, Switzerland). | From mock decision-making meeting: What will be the negative economic impacts of this in exporting countries? –> This has been evaluated HERE | ~96% of the WPs come from fish | Yes | 7.89 | Everyone liked this idea | Yes | Everyone liked the idea and thought there was a clear case for impact. Were also excited about precedent setting effects. | ||||||||||||
5 | Ban baitfish | A few estimated inputs, esp on sentience and length of time that invertebrates alive | Point estimate 500WP/$ Animals affected in Ohio- 80M, Animals affected in USA per annum- 1.3 billion Total global burden- 10Bn approximately (less certain) Link | A few case studies of this happening and some theoretic evidence | 10%- even though higher quality of evidence, given low p(success) here | The welfare impact is somewhat sensitive to changes in different parameters, especially for insects; overall we feel reasonably confident the intervention is net positive but to be aware of | An update from the previous report on this topic, we have seen some example of success on baitfish, and on recreational practices from an advocacy perspective in recent times. As well as this, there are ecological and biosecurity reasons for this, which make me cautiously optimistic | Cautious optimism from experts, although should perhaps discount this a bit as they all working in this field | No reason for this to be difficult or easy | No reason for this to be difficult or easy | Expect at least some opposition. US states where use of baitfish is still legal are often ones with most baitfish farming. | Should be able to seek funding from EA funders and potentially environmental funders | Reasonably large scale of problem, in USA and likely other countries | Fairly neglected | Some chance be net negative for insects, captured mostly under column H | Seems very unconnected to work to end factory farming. Most baitfish bans have come from environmental points of view that could even be counter to animal interests (if substitution to invertebrates is high). | Could we ask for a ban on the use of all live bait (incl. invertebrates)? | Yes | 6.80 | Mixed views on this. Worries about insect replacement. Overall scale and tractability seem large and insect issue not critical. Idea passed. Could review if prefer milkfish welfare | Yes | Some concerns about the replacement of baitfish with insects, but thought that we could get a pretty good sense of this through more surveys in the states being targeted. Overall seems like a strong idea with some precedent. | |||||||||||||
6 | "Bad-cop" cage-free corporate outreach in Asia | Best guesses were made for the probability of success, % of corporations targeted, and the % of successes attributable to this org. Years of impact before cage-free would happen anyway eg. due to legislation was taken from []' estimate which took into account a number of things but is still quite uncertain. | WP/$: • 92.61 WP/$ Animals affected annually: • 1,159,914 layers (Modelled in South Korea) Link | Lots of evidence on cage free corporate campaigns. Analyses of 2000+ cage free commitments suggests that having a new org working in this space is positive as there doesn't seem to be diminishing returns to more orgs in a single country. | 15% - best guess probability of success for corporate campaigns | That there is a large positive impact of removing layers from cages is probably the most researched question in EAA. There are however uncertainties about how well our understanding of this can and should be applied to the Asian context. | This seems like a very solid intervention. I think the only way I could see the impact being much less than we have measured is if a lot of the chickens would have been covered by global commitments anyway and so this is just counterfactual speed up (Note: this doesn't currently seem to be the case with current global commitments). | [] was excited to see this work and outlined countries where it could be useful and wanted. [] supportive of an organization taking the "bad-cop" approach in their country | Local co-founders would definitely be preferred but not necessary. Could also be a first hire. Could be difficult to find these local founders. | Corporate campaigning is the a well utilised approach by EAA orgs so we could learn a lot from them. This new org could join the OWA and have access to training and existing orgs working in Asia. OWA coordinator in Asia is super and could help. | Standard opposition exists as per corporate campaigns | Lots of funding. Funders want to fund this work in neglected geographies. OWA also funding explicitly for doing cage-free work so this is an additional funding source. | • 89.5% of layers are still in battery cages in Asia. • []. • Lot of work to be done in individual countries so scaling would be less of a concern in the short-term. • Could scale into securing policy once have org's commitments | Very neglected • "Bad cop" approach is being used in some countries [] but not in others. • []. • []. However • Some global commitments cover Asia already. | No strong opinion | Helps improve ability to drive change in Asia which seems necessary | How many layers will be impacted by global commitments that affect production in Asia. Maybe this makes it a lot less neglected, | Pending future work – lean towards yes | 7.00 | Previous concerns were around people/orgs in Asia thinking this would be a bad idea. | No | 6.4 | Less worried about idea not being wanted but concerns raised that this would happen anyway without CE intervention and that this work is very difficult | We ruled out this idea as we thought that it would be very difficult to do, very difficult to find talent, and because this is more likely to happen without CE's intervention than the other ideas on this list (as cage-free is a very popular campaign in the movement, because of OWA etc.) | |||||||||||
7 | Milkfish welfare in the Philippines | Not very speculative. Assumed similar scaling as FWI in terms of the number and the type of farms worked with which might not be the case but this seemed like the best estimate we had | WP/$: • 24.39 WP/$ Animals affected annually: • Average of 686,974 fish (Modelled farmer-level work like FWI but in the Philippines) Link | FWI as a strong, very relevant case study of success | Modelled 50% in the CEA to be comparable with the shrimp welfare CEA from 2020. I think this is conservative (for farmer-level work) as FWI have had greater success than this, mostly deciding not to work with farms for other reasons (eg. ponds too big, too far away, also have shrimp, etc.) and not due to farms not working with them | There is expert consensus that water quality is the most important component of maintaining good fish welfare. There is less consensus and evidence on how to reliably improve water quality, especially for non-salmon and trout species, and especially in LMIC contexts | Work in this space is difficult and unprecedented and therefore it is difficult to quickly find cost-effective interventions. FWI's current welfare standard doesn't improve fish welfare as much as they would like so they are trying to improve it in a cost-effective way. There is some potential that they don't manage to do this and perhaps a new charity would face similar issues and end up having to pivot or shut down. | Experts were pro. FWI are keen to have another organization working in the space. Funders do not seem concerned about having another organization do fish welfare work separate from FWI. | Co-founders will be easy to find but local talent hard to find which could be a key bottleneck. | Will be able to prioritise the top ~3-5 countries with desk research. Hard to find good information on what conditions are actually like on farms with desk research but can overcome this by doing country visits in the top countries. | Could somewhat support industry in creating sustainable profits, especially at the farmer level FWI haven't faced opposition, though have found farmers are unwilling to implement some welfare improvements | Funders want more fish welfare work and more work being done in neglected geographies Don't think there would be competition for funding as enough money and keenness. FWI also not concerned about "competing" for funding. | Huge scale of problem. However, this might not be easy to scale as lots of diversity (local context, farm conditions, fish species, type of farming, size of ponds, farmers willingness, etc.) so model needs adapting not just copying | Work in this space is very neglected with only a handful of organizations working on fish welfare campaigns, with only a small fraction of these having it as their sole focus and working explicitly in Asia. | Lean positive but with some concerns when working on improving water quality as this may allow farmers to increase stocking densities and therefore may help to proliferate the industry. Steps can be taken to minimize these risks, such as including stocking density limits in any welfare standards that are created. | Seems like it would get a head start on expanding FWI learnings to new regions and species but maybe would not be a necessary step | Unclear if should recommend this org does farmer-level work (same as FWI) or whether they should take a different approach - corporate outreach or policy advocacy. Lean towards farmer level (especially in the short term) but some disagreement on this in team | Probably yes | 6.68 | Not sure about best angle. Not sure if really adds much new. Not sure if should wait for FWI to learn more about how to have impact. | Yes | 6.8 | • Agree that: waiting won't help as not sure how long for, FWI want this, Philippines is good for hiring. • Need to make it clear that: the efficacy of this is less tested than other things, staff have to be resilient, clear focus on milkfish in Philippines. | Although it may be difficult to find talent, the Philippines seems like the best place for finding local founders. FWI want this to happen and are unlikely to scale to do this work themselves as they continue to focus on India. Need more people trying to figure out fish. | |||||||||||
8 | Policy reform to improve compliance with existing animal welfare laws | Advocacy for improved enforcement policy: • Quite speculative as very hard to estimate how much different policies such as CCTV etc would affect enforcement Legal work: • Less speculative. However change would likely happen anyway and hard to estimate when. | Advocacy for improved enforcement policy: • CEA1: 4 WP/$ for CCTV in barns in Scotland: (+gov: 1 WP/$, 2m birds) • CEA2: 60 WP/$ for large-scale reform to German policy: (+gov 2WP/$, 28m animal) Legal work: • CEA3: 18 WP/$ to stop routine tail docking in France: (12m pigs) | There is reasonable evidence of legal and policy work to ensure laws are being enforced. Evidence on how this interacts with vague/unenforceable laws is a bit less clear. Not yet found good evidence of advocacy to improve enforcement policy. | 15% - But there may be limited options/scale as legislation tends to be vague | Disagreement between experts, examples from case studies where enforcement has been successful | Good evidence complying with law would positively affect animals. • Improving enforcement: Weak evidence that countries can enforce the law well. No examples of standout countries here. • Keeping to EU law: Good evidence. Some countries do this so can compare. • Stop vague laws: Evidence of contrary. Vague laws are less complied with. | Experts disagreed if this intervention would work (because of poor existing legislation vs. others that thought court cases could be successful) and if it was neglected among animal charities | Co-founders would need to be comfortable with policy work. Depending on option may need legal talent. | There is only very little data on compliance rates. This could be problematic for campaigning for this intervention and finding the best location to focus on | Opposition from industry should be expected. It might be possible to get support from already compliant countries/farmers as well as from the general public | Should be able to get funding but EA funders less excited about the EU focus and lower priority animals. Broiler angle could be of interest (but the BCC is already looking at stocking densities). | Reasonably large. Higher welfare areas like the EU, the UK and potentially the US should be focused on. | Disagreement between experts. It seems less neglected in the EU, but execution of this intervention might be bad. It may be more neglected in the UK. | If successful --> setting legal precedent. Could also lead to a (positive) increase in price, though there is a risk of increasing import of products from lower welfare countries | It is a critical step that animal welfare laws are enforced. | Attitude of small farmers towards larger farms that are not compliant. How good are existing charities at executing on this intervention (especially in the EU) | Probably no | 5.46 | Lack of info and need for more research and clear evidence of impact | No | 3.75 | Tier B idea. Like it but not quite as good and might detract from best ideas. | We may revisit this idea in the future as we like it, but thought that it was't in the same tier of impact as the other ideas recommended and so didn't want to recommend it. Some concern that the impact is limited by the number of strong welfare laws that there are to enforce. | |||||||||||
9 | Pet snake food: Improve rodent welfare | Speculative how much is imported/ bred locally, probability of success quite hard to gauge and less concrete than other interventions, otherwise seems reasonable | 75 WP/$ Number of rodents - 60M USA - 35M Indonesia -22M Germany -13M UK Difficult to get overall world numbers but reasonably high scale Link | Only theoretic evidence, no examples of charities working in same space | 10% | Seems overall pretty likely that basic welfare improvements would have the expected effect, reasonably good data for that from evidence in rodents used in scientific experiments | I think the overall likelihood of success here is very speculative. Nobody is working on this, so we have no evidence other than theoretic. However, given that we think that farmers and pet snake owners in general are potentially likely to care about welfare and there are biosecurity reasons for this, we think that this isn't too unreasonable | Very few experts and therefore hard to form an opinion here | As this is a policy issue, co-founders will need to be comfortable with policy work | May struggle to identify location, scale of issue, solutions | If working with farms industry might support. If policy change likely some standard opposition, unclear how strong the lobby is but the market size implies it probably isn't that strong | Should be able to seek funding from EA funders | Likely 2-4 countries where this is a moderate to large scale problem | No other organisation doing this- high counterfactual value of this org | May be slightly risky for people breeding rodents at home, shifting production to other low welfare countries etc. Unclear how significant a problem this is. | Seems mostly independent of work towards ending factory farming. Although maybe is a part of ensuring animal welfare laws apply to animals that are fed to other animals which is a key step in toc. | What conditions on rodent farms are currently actually like and where rodents in Europe are farmed | Probably no | 5.00 | Rodent welfare is a decent idea but not as clear cut high impact as other ideas | No | Too many uncertainties to be confident in recommending this | |||||||||||||
10 | Advancing research into neglected large scale animal welfare issues | Many guessed inputs, CEA may vary by one order of magnitude up or down depending on priors | 22 WP/$ Link | Some evidence of this within animal movement (e.g. WAI) and other orgs e.g. BERi, Thesis support | 25% | Measuring the impact of this intervention is difficult, some moderate theoretic evidence that this would have the expected welfare effect | Meta work is hard to do well and it is hard to measure your impact. I think that there are some reasonable examples of this being done well, and seems to be a few key people behind this, which makes me think that of the meta ideas, this has a reasonably high pre-launch probability of succeeding | Experts disagree somewhat on what is the most important meta need for the animal movement | Might be a little tricky- combination of animal welfare skill, academic awareness, trusted by funders | No reason for this to be difficult or easy | No reason for this to be difficult or easy | Requires more funding since re-granting likely a part of this org, which may be a bit more difficult but should be fine for a talented team | Reasonably large scale of problem across several sectors of the animal welfare movement | Research seems moderately neglected, academic research is neglected to a small to moderate extent | No strong opinion | Research needs to happen so we better understand animal | No | 4.45 | Idea has potential but is difficult – think unlikely to work unless really have a very very good person for this | No | We would be very excited about this idea but think that it will be very difficult to find co-founders for this. Instead this will be something we always have in the back of our mind to try and find founders for and then would incubate it if we found the right people, rather than having it as a traditional recommendation for the program. | ||||||||||||||
11 | EAA meta/movement building - Building and coordinating animal welfare groups [Not yet published] | CEA not done as difficult to do well and not a lot of time | CEA has been successful in growing and coordinating the EA movement Another example could be the international expansion of local groups and opening local branches, eg. Anima International and Open Cages expanding to whole Eastern Europe | 25% | Measuring the impact of this intervention is difficult especially as it would end in the creation of more meta projects. Some moderate theoretic evidence that this would have the expected effect. Animal Empathy Philippines (AEP) are the most obvious case study but are still quite new so perhaps we should wait and see what impact they have. | Meta work is hard to do well and it is hard to measure your impact. Our previous meta charities have been slower to scale than other direct work charities Could see a new meta org do a lot of experimenting and pivoting, at least early on to figure out what works best. | Asia: • [] +ve. Would help them. Not sure if help new orgs. • [] +ve. Would help them. Not sure if help new orgs. • [] -ve. Space is crowded. Latin America: • [] very +ve. Would help them. EA: • [] thinks v good for EA movement | Movement building: • Founders would need to be knowledgeable about movement. Could be hard to find. Latin American focus: • Need spanish. Local founder also seems very important (based on []). | No obvious information barriers for charity | Industry is neutral as this is a meta idea so doesn't really affect them | Work in neglected geographies is of interest to funders. (Probably Asia more than Latin America). | Movement building and coordination - CEA of the animal movement - focused especially in Asia: • There are only 2 groups (AEP and EA Singapore) that focus explicitly on EAA. There are many other EA groups that may want to create their own animal-focused spin-off with support. Solving bottlenecks for Latin American orgs - There are ~10-15 animal orgs working in Latin America • Perhaps could be better helped by eg. scaling AAC and translating their existing services • Other groups who work on cage-free as OWA but also do other work for non-priority animals mostly seem to want funding but I'd be less excited about giving them funding and other support unless it was conditional on only doing cage-free (like OWA funding) | Movement building (in Asia): • [] • [] • [] Latin America: • [] regranting and training • [] plan LATAM work | Increases the available talent in neglected geographies which will be beneficial to the movement as a whole and CE especially if focused mostly on Asia as this is where we recommend a lot of our animal charities work | Unclear – movement building may or may not be crucial | • How much do current EA groups cover EAA topics? • Do current EA groups have people who would be interested in starting their own AEP? • Would this happen without CE's intervention? Movement building work might happen anyway • Would CE doing a regional program be the best version of this? | No | 4.80 | Idea has potential but is difficult – think unlikely to work unless really have a very very good person for this | No | This would also be very difficult to find co-founders for, but we are less excited about the idea in general. | ||||||||||||||
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