A couple of survey results which may be interesting in light of this debate:

• When we surveyed the community on what portion of the community's resources they believed should be allocated to these two cause areas, the average allocation to GHD was higher. This was true among both low/high engagement EAs, though the gap was smaller for highly engaged EAs.
• However, if we compare this to actual allocations (in 2019, since these were the most up to date we had at the time), we see that the average preferred allocations are higher for AW and lower for GHD.

This is in line with the debate week results showing a strong preference for an additional $100mn going to AW, but the continued preference for a larger total percentage going to GHD seems worth noting.

Some other factors not mentioned here but I sometimes think about:

-PETA used to do welfare campaigns and proudly own up their work on welfare campaigns when they talk about their history. But they stopped doing welfare campaigns around 10 years ago and even published public statements against some of the initiatives. I keep wondering whether that has anything to do with EA entering into space, refusing to fund PETA, and PETA withdrawing from welfare work to differentiate itself from welfare campaigning organisations in response. That would reduce cost-effectiveness of welfare campaigns significantly.

-One part I often see missing from human-animal comparisons is that animal welfare work prevents very extreme types suffering that would be classified as torture in human contexts. If I were to choose between extending a human life for 50 years versus preventing a person from suffering for one full year in a wire coffin, I would choose the latter. Similarly choosing between preventing 20.000 years of non-stop chicken torture vs. saving a human life is a lot different from saving the lives of 20.000 chickens versus saving the life of a human being. I think $5000 is currently able to fund... (read more)

I basically endorse this post, as well as the use of the tools created by Rethink Priorities that collectively point to quite strong but not overwhelming confidence in the marginal value of farmed animal welfare.

I'm a bit of a Benthamite "The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?'"

For any plausible (to me) guess about which non-human animals are capable of suffering, there are far far more non-human animals living in terrible conditions than humans in similarly bad conditions, and there just seems to be so many underfunded and underexplored ways we could help reduce that suffering. I've also seen some cost-effectiveness estimations that indicate you can help thousands of animals a lot for the same cost as helping one person a lot. ("a lot" being very vague!)

The only reason why I'm not at 100% agree is because helping humans become healthier might cause larger positive flow on effects, and this might add up to more impact in the long run. That's super tentative and could go either way - e.g. it seems possible that helping animals now could lead to our species being more ethical towards sentient beings in the long run too.  

1. The basic case for chickens is very strong, even under views that are sceptical of small animals having a high chance/degree of sentience, because it's so easy to affect their lives cheaply compared to humans, and their lives seem v easy to improve by a lot
2. $100m in total is not a huge amount (equiv to $5-10m/yr, against a background of ~$200m). I think concern about scaling spending is a bit of a red herring and this could probably be usefully absorbed just by current interventions

I think the cost-effectiveness of additional spending on animal welfare interventions is much higher than that on global health and development:

• Buying organic instead of barn eggs, which is supposed to be a proxy for an animal welfare intervention with very low cost-effectiveness, is 2.11 times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.
• School Plates, which is a program aiming to increase the consumption of plant-based foods at schools and universities in the United Kingdom, is 60.2 times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.
• Corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 1.51 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.
• Shrimp Welfare Project's Humane Slaughter Initiative is 43.5 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.

I believe animals are much more neglected than humans. I calculated the annual philanthropic spending on farmed animals is 0.0514 % of that on animals plus humans, whereas I determined that the annual disability of farmed animals is 97.2 % that of animals plus humans.

Animal suffering is larger-scale and more neglected. As explained in my post on 'Seeking Ripple Effects', I'm especially moved by the possibility of transformative innovations (e.g. economical lab-grown meat) improving human values at a key juncture in history, even though I think it's very unlikely.

OTOH, I'm a big fan of global health & development on more general and robust 'ripple effect' grounds, which is why I'm close to the center on this one.

1. Causing unnecessary suffering is morally bad. Causing intense unnecessary suffering is morally worse.
2. Non-humans have the capacity to physically and psychologically suffer. The intensity of suffering they can experience is non-negligible, and plausibly, not that far off from that of humans. Non-humans have a dispreference towards being in such states of agony.
3. Non-human individuals are in constant and often intense states of agony in farmed settings. They also live short lives, sometimes less than 1/10th of their natural lifespan, which leads to loss of welfare they would have experienced if they were allowed to live till old age.
4. The scale of farmed animal suffering is enormous beyond comprehension; if we only consider land animals, it is around 100 billion; if crustaceans and fish are included, the number is close to 1000 billion; if insects are accounted for, then the number is in several 1000s of billions. Nearly all of these animals have lives not worth living.
5. The total dollar spent per unit of suffering experienced is arguably more than a thousand times lower for non-humans compared to humans. This seems unreasonable given the vast number of individuals who suffer in farmed sett

99% yes for me.
This is like 50% of the yearly global budget for farmed animals. A lot can be done with this money, and it's not too outrageous an amount that it wouldn't be absorbed efficiently. Speciecism aside, the bang for these bucks could be incredible. 
Moreover, if among the spillover effects of this was lower consumption of animal products, this would be an additional win for public health (at least in countries where too much animal products are eaten). 

There is the meat eater problem where more animal lives would likely be lost by increasing the human population. It also seems much more cost effective per dollar to suffering spared to help animals and factory farming is spreading rapidly through Asia and Africa, making this a hingey time.

On a purely ideological basis, I would have placed myself as a "strong agree". However, on a more practical level, I am concerned that the most popular animal welfare interventions (specifically corporate campaigns) may have a risk of actually having a negative impact on animal welfare. For example, if corporation X signs a promise to switch to higher welfare standards, its comms/PR around this switch might be so effective that an individual who could otherwise have been convinced to reduce their meat consumption on animal welfare grounds (or even go vegan, the best possible outcome), actually feels satisfied that their choice to continue consuming meat from corporation X is ethical and therefore continues to consume meat at the same or even greater rate. Maybe this is baseless speculation, but intuitively, this feels like a real risk which hasn't been explored enough. 

Even though the expected value of corporate campaign work is high, I feel instinctively very uncomfortable donating money to an intervention that has what I worry is a real chance of actually making the issue worse. This might just reflect my personal low appetite for risk.

By contrast, I can't think of an equivalent problem for popular GHD interventions - the worst outcome in this context appears to be that money is donated to an intervention that, in reality, isn't as effective as assumed, and the money could therefore have been better spent elsewhere.

As a result of all of this, I have bumped my response down to only a "slightly agree" rather than a "strong agree".

Large scale animal funding is in a worse state compared to global health. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GFkzLx7uKSK8zaBE3/we-need-more-nuance-regarding-funding-gaps 

I see no legitimate justification for attitudes that would consider humans as important enough that global health interventions would beat out animal welfare, particularly given the sheer number and scale of invertebrate suffering. If invertibrates are sentient, it seem animal welfare definitely could absorb 100m and remain effective on the margin, and probably also if they are not (which seems unlikely). The reasons I am not fully in favour is mostly because the interaction of animal welfare with population ethics is far stronger than the interaction of global health developments, and given the signifciant uncertainties involved with population ethics, I can't be sure these don't at least significant reduce the benefits of AW over GH work

I mostly agree with Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare by Ariel Simnegar 🔸, as some others have already referenced. My animal moral weights are probably close to RP's, and so higher than Open Phil's.

Open Phil spent around $100M on animal welfare in each of 2021 and 2022.

An extra $100M for animal welfare would be best spread across multiple years, given organizational constraints to scaling. I'd mostly have in mind outreach/campaigns/lobbying targeting corporations, certifiers, institutions and governments, and ballot initiatives for animal welfare policy change.

There might be more direct ways to purchase animal welfare that would scale and still beat global health, but we could probably do much better with higher leverage policy interventions.

Some cost-effectiveness analyses here, here and here.

In general, I agree with the position that investing an additional $100m into animal welfare opportunities would be more impactful than global health opportunities even under views that use moral weights on the lower end of the scale for nonhumans, and potentially way more impactful if we use moral weights that grant nonhumans greater capacity for sentience (which I think we probably should).

In short—I think the scale of animal suffering is much larger (even when only considering animal agriculture, and not wild animal welfare); animal ... (read more)

I think the money goes a lot further when it comes to helping non human animals then when it comes to helping humans.

I am generally pretty bought into the idea that non human animals also experience pleasure/suffering and I care about helping them.

I think it is probably good for the long term trajectory of society to have better norms around the casual cruelty and torture inflicted on non-human animals.

On the other hand, I do think there are really good arguments for human to human compassion and the elimination of extreme poverty. I am very in favor of th... (read more)

I don't really know... I'm suspect some kind of first-order utility calculus which tallies up the number of agents which are helped per dollar weighted according to what species they are makes animal welfare look better by large degree. But in terms of getting the world closer on the path of the "good trajectory", for some reason the idea of eliminating serious preventable diseases in humans feels like a more obvious next step along that path?

Humans kill about 1 trillion animals every year. https://sentientmedia.org/how-many-animals-are-killed-for-food-every-day/#:~:text=Chickens:%20206%20million/day,existed%20is%20just%20117%20billion. Many of them lead harsh, painful lives in factory farms and/or die a brutal death. And this doesn't even touch on wild animals suffering from non-human causes. 

To contrast, there are only 8 billion humans on Earth. 

8 billion is less than 1 trillion.

In this post last year, I describe why I think animal welfare is 100-1000x better than global health on the margin. In this post, I describe why I still think that, and give some responses to objections I didn't discuss in the previous post.

Two important considerations to strongly favor animal welfare 

1. Saving a human life is likely net negative due to increased meat consumption and animal suffering. According to a survey, most people believe the welfare of a farmed chicken is negative and equal in size to the positive welfare of a human. Also most people believe the welfare of birds count almost as much as the welfare of humans (they give animal welfare relative to human welfare an 8 on a scale from 0 to 10). But there are more farmed chickens than humans on earth (3 chickens per human),

• AW seems clearly more neglected in terms of funding inside the effective giving space and on net.
• There is plenty of room for funding in the AW space, I would be surprised if $100M couldn't  be spent down over the next 10 years in the AW space at > 50% of the cost-effectiveness of the current marginal dollar (on average).
• Most of my uncertainty comes from some credence that human lives are vastly more important than non-human animal lives, or medium-term growth being accelerated by GH interventions which could make GH work much more leveraged.

I'm pretty confident (~80-90%?) this is true, for reasons well summarized here.

I'm interested in thoughts on the OOM difference between animal welfare vs GHD (i.e. would $100m to animal welfare be 2x better than GHD, or 2000x?)

• I am directionally sympathetic to the arguments in this post.
• Good Ventures dropping out of some AW focused areas makes me think there might currently be promising gaps to fill (although it sounds like immediate gaps in some shrimp + wild animal orgs might be covered?)
• I'm not marking myself as higher mainly because I don't have good taste on how good the marginal AW focused funding proposals are right now, vs the marginal GH focused ones.

I think animals are generally more efficient/effective as a way of converting money into short-term (the next 50 years) well-being.

My impression is that the mean global health intervention does not significantly improve the long-term future. However, I could definitely be convinced otherwise, and that would get me to change my answer.

All that said, if one is focused on improving the long-term future, it seems suspicious to focus on global health, as opposed to other interventions that are clearly more focused on that. 

I think "EA orthodoxy" pretty strongly supports this conclusion, so the main question is whether the orthodoxy is trustworthy on this question. One possible concern is that GiveWell's estimates tend to follow a highly skeptical methodology, and I worry that most comparisons with GiveWell aren't comparing apples to apples on that front. I could imagine there being orders of magnitude in this, but from skimming the other comments on the thread I would guess not enough orders of magnitude to bridge all of the gap (i.e. even a GiveWell-skeptical assessment of ... (read more)

The vast majority of sentient beings are non-human animals, and the problem of animal suffering is far more neglected compared to global health. I think it's also worth noting that we are probably quite biased against taking animal suffering as seriously as we should (we live in an extremely speciesist culture, we belong to the human species, animal suffering tends to be hidden/out of sight, etc). 

Animal welfare getting so little^[1] EA funding, at present, relative to global health, seems to be an artefact of Open Phil’s ‘worldview diversification,’ which imo is a lacklustre framework for decision-making, both in theory and (especially) in practice: see, e.g., Sempere (2022).

Cost-effectiveness analyses I’ve seen indicate that animal welfare interventions, like cage-free campaigns, are really excellent uses of money—orders of magnitude more effective than leading global health interventions.

Though not central to my argument, there’s also the mea... (read more)

I think animal welfare is much more cost-effective, my slight skepticism comes from the idea of positive feedback loops and the knock-on effects in other cause areas.

Both are shockingly underfunded. But I think future generations will be even more shocked by how we treated (i.e. actively caused great suffering to) farm animals than by how we failed to help humans in dire need. 

A few reasons immediately come to mind for me:

1. There are many more animals in factory farms than humans (scale)
2. The average suffering of these animals is likely worse than the average suffering of humans (because animals are almost uniformly kept in horrendous conditions, while humans are not) (scale)
   1. My intuition is that the "moral multiplier" of human ability to suffer is not much higher than 1, if at all, for many animals. Animals have central nervous systems and nociceptors just like we do. Mammal suffering in particular might be close to par with humans,

I'm fairly convinced by the scale arguments for animal welfare, but have a slight hesitation due to worldview diversification considerations, optics, and a possible lack of room for more funding. If I had to irreversibly allocate the $100m in the next ten minutes, however, I would choose animal welfare.