AMA: Lewis Bollard, Program Director of Farm Animal Welfare at OpenPhil

OP currently uses the welfare ranges that Luke Muehlhauser produced as part of his 2018 moral patienthood report. He lists species’ ranges here, though we use point estimates he produced internally. Luke’s numbers are steeper / more hierarchical than Rethink’s.

We sometimes test the sensitivity of species-specific grants to using Luke or Rethink’s welfare ranges. So far this hasn’t often been action-guiding, since we’re already primarily funding work focused on the most numerous farmed vertebrates (chicken and fish) and our funding on invertebrate welfare is more limited by other factors.

My views are pretty aligned with most EA-minded animal advocates. But in the interests of finding disagreement, here are a few possibilities:

• Work to achieve legal personhood for animals is unlikely to help farmed animals.
• Cultivated meat is unlikely to significantly displace factory farmed meat in our lifetimes.
• Huel is tastier than Soylent.

Sorry to not be more disagreeable ;) 

Fun question! Here’s a rough hierarchy, with my most optimistic up top. Note that these are averages globally, and some approaches might be much more promising in certain countries, or when done by certain groups.

Corporate animal welfare campaigns
Alternative proteins
Farm animal welfare technologies and innovations
Movement-building in LMICs
Legislative animal welfare advocacy
Movement-building in rich countries
Institutional meat reduction
Litigation for farmed animals
Persuading people to be vegan
Holistic food systems reform
Farm transitions

Of course there are lots of other interventions being tried! Let me know if you want my thoughts on any others.

This is a cool idea! As you note, we’re wary of telling grantees how to run their organizations. We’ve generally preferred to fund groups that can work with grantees to help them implement best practices that work for them. For example, Scarlet Spark, Mission Realization Partners, and (previously) Sharpen Strategy. But we’ll think about whether we could prepare an anonymized write up like you suggest. 

I’m not sure there’s one neat article. I’d love someone to write such an overview. In the meantime, your best bet might be Our World in Data’s cool new section on animal welfare. For a wrap up on progress over the last decade, you could also read my 2022 year-end newsletter. 

No. I think it’s near impossible to slow the growth of a major industry like aquaculture. You could slow its growth in particular countries but, so long as demand remains constant, production will just expand elsewhere. That’s especially true given the vast majority of aquaculture is in countries where we have no hope of slowing its growth. 

You could try to reduce demand for farmed fish, but we’ve never succeeded in reducing demand for such a popular food in the past. (And even if you did, people would probably just switch to wild-caught fish. This might just boost demand for farmed fish, since wild-caught fish are supply constrained, and most people view wild-caught and farmed fish as interchangeable, so most marginal fish demand is satisfied with farmed fish.)

Alien invasion.

We’re about a quarter of global farmed animal welfare advocacy spend, based on a broad definition of such advocacy, i.e. including alt protein work, vegan advocacy, etc. We’re a larger share of what I’d consider evidence-based or EA-aligned advocacy. Depending on what you include in that category, we’re about half to two thirds of funding for such work.

It would be very valuable to have additional major funders! For example, I’m excited to see the Navigation Fund coming online shortly. In addition to enlarging the pie of total farmed animal welfare funding, new funders could add a greater diversity of perspectives and provide more stability for groups. (We’ve seen that groups majority funded by us are often wary of investing in long term growth because they’re nervous about being so reliant on one funder.)

I spend a chunk of my time trying to bring new major funders into the space. We’re also funding work with Farmed Animal Funders and Focus Philanthropy toward the same goal. I welcome ideas on how we could do better at this!

Yeah both statements are true. The US Better Chicken Commitment lacked a list of approved breeds for many years due to delays at the Global Animal Partnership, which was in turned delayed by a study on breed welfare outcomes at the University of Guelph. My understanding is that a lot of those delays were due to attempts by the Guelph researchers to address concerns from the breeding companies about how to ensure the fairness of the study's methodology. Of course the breeding companies dismissed the study's results -- finding welfare problems wit their fastest growing breeds -- anyway.

My understanding is that most US companies with BCC pledges are yet to make any progress on adopting higher welfare breeds in their supply chains. I suspect that's mostly because it's the most expensive change in the BCC, since higher welfare breeds grow slower and have a worse feed conversion ratio. But it doesn't help that most major US chicken producers have refused to even meet their corporate customers' requests to raise higher welfare breeds.

As usual, things are going better in Europe. The Danish and Dutch retail sectors now sell almost entirely chicken from higher-welfare breeds, while I think French retailers are making solid progress. Still, there's a lot more work to do!

Thanks Aidan. I agree that much social change is nonlinear and hard to predict. I also agree that violent opposition preceded some significant social changes, though I'm more inclined to see that as a symptom of the issue having achieved high social salience rather than as a cause of the change.

I studied historic social movements in college and it's been my hobby since, and it's left me wary of extracting general lessons from past movements, since I think they often fit our prior beliefs. For instance, I see in the US civil rights movement a movement that for decades clocked up small achievable incremental legal and political wins in service of several larger incremental wins (two key federal laws and several Supreme Court rulings) but that failed in its more radical goals (racial and economic equality). I see in gay marriage a movement that largely sidelined radical calls to end marriage and other oppressive institutions in favor of a disciplined focus on a quite narrow practical goal: marriage equality. And I see the US abolitionists' radical goals and tactics as largely a failure alongside the UK abolitionists' more moderate ones, which achieved abolition decades earlier and without a war. But I suspect this is largely me projecting my beliefs on the past.

We're supporting a lot of work that relies on nonlinear theories of change, for instance our work to build a field of farm animal advocacy across Asia, to build a field of fish welfare advocacy and research, and to promote hard-to-predict alt protein R&D. I'm not confident though that that work will have better secondary effects on social change than our linear work. For example, I've seen cage-free campaigns build public momentum, activist morale, and support for political reforms. But I agree it's likely we're missing important work to seed future nonlinear reforms. I just find it hard to work out what that work is.

Interesting question, Aidan! Relatedly, I liked 80,000 Hours' podcast Cass Sunstein on how social change happens, and why it’s so often abrupt & unpredictable. One of the topics they discuss is whether the way the world treats farmed animals could abruptly change.

I’m not aware of anyone currently working on this. The immediate priority is to stop Congress from preempting Prop 12 / Question 3 and other laws like them. House Republicans have put text in their version of the Farm Bill to do so, so there will be a major fight on this in the coming months.

If we survive that fight, I’d like to see more ballot measures with popular farm animal welfare reforms. There are a few constraints to be aware of:

• Only 22 US states allow for useful citizen-initiated laws. (Another four allow for veto referendums or constitutional amendments, neither of which would work for us.) Most are conservative-led states where the legislature would likely overturn a pro-animal initiative result, leaving perhaps 10 states where we could bring these measures. 
• An initiative needs to be simple enough to attract votes (confused voters vote no), but complex enough to address the biggest animal welfare challenges (e.g. try defining higher welfare broiler breeds in a way the average voter will endorse). This limits the number of topics that can be covered.
• A state-wide initiative requires a major campaign and expertise. The group that traditionally ran them, the Humane Society of the US, seems to have lost its appetite. So another major group would probably need to be willing to pick this up.
• Federal law and the Commerce Clause limit the potential scope of such initiatives where they cover the sales of factory farmed products. So anyone thinking of doing this should talk with major groups (or me) to ensure we don’t set bad case law. 

There are two separate funging worries here. First, will donating more to THL mean that OP gives less to THL? Answer: probably not, for a few reasons. (1) One factor limiting our funding for THL and other groups is how much of their budget we're both comfortable with OP being. So donating to them could actually increase our giving by lowering our portion (though see next point that any additional funds will come from elsewhere within the farm animal welfare budget). (2) Room for more funding / neglect is only one consideration in our grant sizing for groups, including THL, and (3) Our grant sizing for big grantees like THL is quite coarse: we only consider it once every three years and are unlikely to be swayed by small fluctuations in their funding.

Second, will donating to THL mean that OP gives less to farm animal welfare? Answer: almost certainly not. OP’s farm animal welfare team has a set budget, so even in the unlikely event we funged your gift to THL, our funds would go to other animal groups instead. In theory, new outside funding could lead OP to view farm animal welfare as less neglected, affecting our budget, but I don't think perceived lack of neglect is a limiting factor on our budget. (And I don't think it would become one until funding increased by a huge amount, e.g. >$50-100M.)

Fwiw, I still personally donate to THL (and other groups).

I think this is a fair criticism. For now, I think the costs to longer write-ups outweigh the benefits. I see the costs primarily as:

• The time to write something longer and align with the grantee on acceptable language
• The reduced willingness of groups to share confidential info with us if they know it will end up online
• The risk that people will take our analysis out of context, e.g. making confident statements based on rough cost-effectiveness analyses

The benefit also feels limited given my sense is that few people would read these write-ups, and most wouldn't have the ability to move significant funding or org decision making based on them. But feel free to make the case for this in the replies!

I'm excited about the growing field of the economics of animal welfare, including research papers like the two you mentioned. I'm not sure the field will play a significant role in increasing the spending on animal welfare interventions (though curious to hear how you see that happening). But I see a number of important other roles it can play:

• Influencing public policy, by allowing the integrating of animal welfare benefits into cost-benefit analysis. I've seen a number of animal welfare regulatory proposals be stopped in part because regulators assigned zero value to the animal welfare benefits.
• Influencing effective advocacy. I think experiments, like those done at college dining halls on the meat consumption impacts of lectures and leafletting, can lead us toward more cost-effective interventions.
• Influencing the rest of academia. For example, my sense is that fields like environmental economics currently often exclude animal welfare from their considerations, leading to conclusions that can help the environment but harm animal welfare.

In no particular order:

• Double down on what works. Our most successful grants have mostly been cases where we scaled up an already successful campaign or program.
• Focus on tractability. Many projects are focused on large-scale and neglected problems. The distinguishing factor in which ones help many animals is typically how tractable the space they’re operating in is.
• Align on clear goals. Early on we had a number of grants where we disagreed with the grantee on how well things had gone. We’ve found that aligning on specific and measurable goals upfront keeps grants on track and makes renewal discussions easier.
• Create feedback loops. One of the biggest challenges in funding longer-term theories of change is knowing whether they’re on track or not. The best solution we’ve found so far is to build feedback loops, even if only on intermediate outcomes, into the grant plan.
• Make more one-off trial grants. I see two problems with funding new ideas: not enough get funded, but too many keep getting funded after the idea has failed. I think the antidote is to make more one-off trial grants, with no expectation of ongoing funding.

I think journalism can help farmed animals by reporting regularly on their plight. For an upcoming newsletter, we tracked the number of news articles on factory farming related topics (e.g. farm animal cruelty) against articles on climate change, over the last decade. While both numbers rose, the number of articles on climate change rose at a much faster rate. I think the lack of media coverage of factory farming contributes to political and public apathy on the issue.

I’d especially like to see articles or investigations into the actions of specific corporate and legislative players. Corporate executives and politicians have the most power to stop farm animal cruelty. But they can easily ignore the issue when the media lets them. So I’d like to see more articles asking why specific corporations are underperforming on animal welfare relative to their competitors, or why specific politicians are opposing popular reforms. 

I see lots! Here are the ones that first come to mind:

• Analysis paralysis. I've seen a bunch of philanthropists spend years trying to learn and perfect their strategy before giving any money. I think they'd learn more, and do more good, by viewing giving as an iterative process, where they can give, learn, and strategize simultaneously.
• Wanting to solve every problem at once. I often see philanthropists deride alt proteins because they're still "ultra-processed" or welfare reforms because they don't "change the system." Unfortunately my experience has been that when philanthropists seek solutions that solve every problem at once, they normally end up solving none of them.
• Following future stories, over past track records. I see some philanthropists fall for ideal stories of the future (e.g. "this campaign will end factory farming by X date"). I'd encourage these philanthropists to review whether the group's past track record suggests they have any hope of achieving their story's ending.
• Too must trust in our future selves. I've seen philanthropists who say they're saving to give in future or just that they'll step up their giving when they retire, get richer, or whatever. I've also seen this often not work out. I think this is especially a risk with people who are earning to give, and may get trapped in more expensive lifestyles than they expected to.
• Too much concern about things that don't affect impact. I see some philanthropists fixate on CEO pay, revenue growth, or other factors that places like Charity Navigator think are important. They're really not.

• I’ve become more excited about the prospects of investor advocacy to secure corporate animal welfare progress, thanks mostly to the work of The Accountability Board.
• I’ve become more optimistic about the prospects of climate funders supporting alt protein advocacy and research, thanks to the recent entry of several major climate funders into the space.
• I’ve become more pessimistic about legislative reform, after seeing industry successfully defeat or stall popular farm animal welfare reforms in the EU and the UK.
• I’ve become more pessimistic about the likely future market share of plant-based meats, in light of the fall in sales over the last few years. 
• I’ve become more optimistic about cooperative industry outreach in industries that haven’t yet tackled animal welfare, after seeing the openness of some portions of the aquaculture and insect farming industries to addressing animal welfare proactively.

Thanks for the question. I agree that cultural change is important, both for farmed and wild animals. I'm actually thinking about writing a future newsletter on the topic.

Our challenge funding in this area has been identifying funding opportunities that seem likely to influence cultural change on a large scale. As you allude to, it's not clear that a lot of our movement's past efforts at education and awareness-raising have been effective in this goal. And I'm not clear that past movements have achieved this absent a huge organic grassroots movement (civil rights) or huge funding (anti-tobacco) or both (climate change).

What sorts of interventions do you have in mind? And do you see any examples of past success at cultural change in our movement? It's obviously much easier to scale up successful approaches than to hope for the success of untested ones.

I see a few major challenges:

• Weak demand for plant-based meat. We’re funding advocacy to significantly increase public funding of alt protein R&D, to produce better and cheaper products, which we hope will boost demand.
• Corporations delaying implementing their animal welfare policies. We’re funding additional advocacy to hold companies accountable for their commitments, including through shareholder advocacy.
• The European Commission shelving its proposed farm animal welfare legislative revision. We’re funding advocates across Europe to represent the interests of the majority of Europeans who support these reforms.
• A lack of new successful advocacy approaches. We still have a pretty limited number of advocacy approaches with a track record of significantly reducing animal suffering. We’re funding groups trying new approaches, like Innovate Animal Ag and the Shrimp Welfare Project, and are happy to see others doing so too.
• Insufficient funding and over-reliance on one big funder. Our space has far less funding than comparable areas like climate change or human rights. We’re funding Farmed Animal Funders and Focus Philanthropy to work on this, and we're open to trying other approaches as well.
   

This is a challenging question, since new interventions in our space typically lack any good data on cost-effectiveness. But in general I’d set a much lower bar than ~10X cage-free campaigns. Instead I think a promising intervention is worth trying if it has an expected value at least as good as cage-free campaigns. E.g. If we think there’s a 50% chance a new intervention will fail and a 50% chance it will be 2X cage-free campaigns, I think it’s worth a shot.

Whoops, I put this answer under the wrong question. Here it is here. I think Emily’s Forum comment from six months ago remains most relevant here. In particular:

To date, we haven’t focused on making direct comparisons between GHW and FAW. Instead, we’ve focused on trying to equalize marginal returns within each area and do something more like worldview diversification to determine allocations across GHW, FAW, and Open Philanthropy’s other grantmaking. In other words, each of GHW and FAW has its own rough “bar” that an opportunity must clear to be funded. While our frameworks allow for direct comparisons, we have not stress-tested consistency for that use case. We’re also unsure conceptually whether we should be trying to equalize marginal returns between FAW and GHW or whether we should continue with our current approach. We’re planning to think more about this question next year. 

On your specific question, the raising of OP’s GHW cost-effectiveness bar did not affect animal welfare interventions.

I'm excited to see governments spending more on alternative protein research and farm animal welfare improvements. I agree that accelerating this work is a priority.

On alternative proteins, I wrote a little while back about public support for alt protein R&D and how we can accelerate it. We're supporting groups like the Good Food Institute, Food Frontier, and Danish Vegetarian Foundation to do so.

On animal welfare, I'm excited to see the EU and some European governments (e.g. Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, UK) considering funding farmers to adopt higher welfare practices. Grantees working on this include Compassion in World Farming and the Albert Schweitzer Foundation.

Interesting question! I think my relationships with grantees has become more formal / professional over the years, and less informal / friendly. I think a few factors drove this:

• Concern about conflicts of interest, or the perception of them, from being too friendly with any group (I now recuse myself from grant renewal consideration for groups where I'm friends with the leaders).
• Relatedly, not wanting to be perceived as having personal favorites, especially given it's easier for US advocates to become friends with me than advocates in other countries.
• Not having the time to maintain a lot of friendships in the community, mostly because we now have many more grantees than we used to.

I'm not sure if this has made me more or less effective as a grantmaking. On the plus side, it's probably reduced my bias a bit and freed up some time. On the downside, I think I learn less gossip than I used to when I had more informal friendships with grantees, and sometimes this gossip matters to impact. I also miss being friends with such an incredible group of people!

I hope so one day, but I think it's a long way away because there's still so much scope in cage-free and BCC work. In particular, I view the corporate campaign priorities as:

• Completing the EU and US transition to cage-free. They're at ~60% and ~40% cage-free respectively, so there's a lot of work to do to ensure that companies follow through on their cage-free pledges, most of which come due in 2025-26.
• Increasing implementation of existing BCC and ECC commitments. Companies have been slow to implement their broiler welfare policies, especially on breed. 
• Securing new BCC and ECC commitments. Most European and American retailers haven't yet committed to these critical broiler welfare reforms.
• Implementing global and regional cage-free pledges. Cage-free is just starting in key Asian and Latin American markets, so there's a lot of scope to increase percentages there with existing policies.
• Securing new global and regional cage-free policies. I think most of the world's biggest food companies now have global cage-free pledges, but a lot don't, nor do a lot of regional food giants in Asia, LatAm, the Middle East, and Africa.

I think there's a lot of potential in regulatory reform, though I'm probably more optimistic about its prospects outside the US. E.g. I think DEFRA in the UK or the European Commission are more likely to make meaningful regulatory changes than the USDA.

My top priority US regulatory reform would be to get the USDA to interpret the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act to apply to birds too. Courts have held that its within the USDA's discretion to decide this, but decades of on-and-off advocacy by HSUS and AWI have failed to get them to do so. I do think it's worth trying again if we get a more sympathetic USDA secretary (I'm confident Vilsack wouldn't do this).

I think the options under the other laws are more limited. My understanding is that few animals are transported for more than 28 hours anymore, so the 28 Hour Law's protections aren't that helpful. And I don't think the Animal Welfare Act or Horse Protection Act could be extended to apply to farm animals (though better enforcement of the AWA could help a lot of lab animals).

Finally, we looked into the potential to move APHIS on the inhumane methods use to kill animals during disease outbreaks. Unfortunately it seemed pretty intractable at the present time.

Interesting question! I think we've learned a lot over the years, though this is still far from a science. I think the key factors that we now weigh more heavily than we used to are:

• Organizational and intervention track record. We've always cared about this, but have come to care even more so as we've seen how often past performance predicts future success.
• The presence of feedback loops, or our ability to create them. We've been surprised how how hard it can be to tell if a grant is actually achieving anything, especially if it has a long-term theory of change. As a result, we're more excited about grants with clear feedback loops to measure if things are on track.
• The clarity and realism of the grant goals. We've found that a lack of clear and realistic goals is often a sign of internal confusion within the grantee about what they're trying to achieve. By contrast, groups with clear and achievable goals generally achieve more.
• The presence of effective organizational governance. I traditionally ignored this one because we care about impact, not organizational form or practices. But we've seen how good governance -- especially a good board -- can help keep an organization on track and manage crises that could derail a group. 
• Good answers to specific questions, especially on track records and plans. The best groups are normally able to provide compelling answers to very specific questions about what they claim to have achieved and their plans to achieve more. 

I'm most excited about reforms that can affect the largest numbers of animals, which normally means focusing on political reforms in the largest nations and states where such reforms are feasible. I think the following reforms are currently most feasible:

• Advocating for the next European Commission revives its stalled farm animal welfare legislative revision proposal, and then ensuring its passed by the European Parliament and Council.
• Advocating for key European nations, especially France, Germany, and the UK, to follow through on promised major farm animal welfare reforms.
• Advocating for governments globally with large public R&D budgets to devote some of that funding to alternative protein research.
• Advocating for sympathetic governments, mostly in Europe, to subsidize the transition to higher welfare animal agriculture.
• Potentially advocating for more US states to adopt popular farm animal welfare reforms, whether through ballot measures or legislatures.

Our farm animal welfare grantmaking is, by total spend, 37% in Europe, 29% in the US, 24% in Asia, and 9% everywhere else. This represents a tradeoff between scale and tractability. In general we have a much lower bar for funding work outside Europe and the US, especially in the largest Asian countries, because we think their scale justifies long-term investments. But because those countries are currently much harder to achieve change in, that work actually looks less cost-effective than our EU and US funding, which has proven much more tractable. We’re still committed to funding a lot of work internationally, and my hope is that our early investments in these countries can in time help generate more cost-effective opportunities to fund.

Hi DanteTheAbstract,

You may want to check Open Philanthropy's grants to support farmed animal welfare in Asia.

I think the most likely causes of the decline in plant-based meat sales are:

• A failure to meet consumers' expectations on taste and perceived healthiness. There was a high trial rate with a lot repeat purchase rate.
• A significant turn in the media and popular discussion on plant-based meat from overwhelmingly positive (and high volume) to largely negative (and low volume).
• A reduced willingness to pay the price premium for plant-based meat in a period with higher inflation / a perceived cost-of-living crisis.

I think some good strategies to build career capital in the animal welfare spare are:

• Read about current and past interventions in the space, e.g. through books like Ethics into Action and research like Rethink Priorities reports.
• Attend movement events, like the Animal and Vegan Advocacy Summit, and volunteer with groups, e.g. with The Humane League.
• Develop skills most in need in the animal welfare space, which I think include corporate outreach, campaigning, fundraising, people management, and operations.

We haven’t funded much work around this because we haven’t yet found many interventions that we’re confident are tractable at scale. Traditionally, groups like The Humane League and Mercy for Animals did this (both the videos and the A/B testing), but I think they’ve largely dropped it.

My best bet for a group doing this today would be One Step for Animals. I appreciate their narrow focus on online videos to build concern for chickens, and their thoughtfulness with A/B testing and strategic placements. (One Step is not an OP grantee, but I personally donate to them.)

I agree with Michael that a ban on all fishing, or even just industrial fishing, seems politically infeasible. I think it's possible that an island nation heavily dependent on tourism might do this, but that would probably just increase the catch of unregulated fishing ships outside of their territorial waters. I don't see any path to the world doing this.

The other complication is that a ban on wild-caught fishing might just increase the spread of aquaculture, which is worse for each fish involved. Most wild-caught and farmed fish demand is interchangeable -- people are just looking to buy fish. If the wild-caught fish becomes unavailable, I'd expect most of that demand to switch to farmed fish, which would fuel an even bigger boom in aquaculture. Sadly I expect that would be even worse for the fish involved :(

We are though funding work to reduce the suffering caused by current fishing methods. I think work to make the experience of capture and slaughter less horrific is really important.

FWIW, it seems reasonably likely that fishing has increased fish populations on the whole, by disproportionately reducing the populations of more predatory species and increasing the populations of their prey. See Christensen et al., 2014 (only considers fish, not invertebrates) and Bell et al., 2018 (very limited in regional representation).

In general, the effects of fishing on welfare seem quite morally ambiguous, when you consider the effects on population sizes across species, tradeoffs between species, uncertainty about whether their lives are overall bad or overall good: The moral ambiguity of fishing on wild aquatic animal populations.

I also suspect efforts to make fishing more sustainable actually just increase fishing, while outright bans seem politically infeasible; see my other recent post Sustainable fishing policy increases fishing, and demand reductions might, too.

Thanks Rachel. I think there are people trying the kind of holistic systems-change approach you're describing. 

I'm personally skeptical that we have anywhere near the resources to globally destabilize the existing factory farming system. (And I think destabilizing it on a more local basis would have little global impact.) I think the primary drivers of factory farming -- especially the demand for cheap meat -- are so deep-rooted and widespread that they would take immense resources to change.

Instead our focus has mostly been on reducing the suffering caused by factory farming, by trying to both reduce the suffering of each animal and reduce the number of animals factory farmed. I think some of the interventions to do so, like developing alt proteins, probably overlap with some of the things you're thinking of.