Quick takes

I have been disappointed by the support some EAs have expressed for recent activist actions at Ridglan Farms. I share others’ outrage at the outcome of the state animal cruelty investigation, which found serious animal cruelty law violations but led to a settlement that still permits Ridglan to sell beagles through July and to continue in-house experimentation. But I personally think the tactics used in the recent open rescues, including property damage and forced entry to remove animals, violate reasonable moral bounds on what actions are permissible in response to the belief that a serious harm is occurring. My views here stem from contractualist views of democratic legitimacy and from concerns about the non-universalizability of principles that justify lawbreaking, though I think a purely act utilitarian calculus also supports them. Regarding universalizability, in a society where many people believe that different forms of irreparable harm are occurring (e.g. viewing abortion as murder, climate change as destroying the sacredness of the natural world, immigration as ending western civilization), I worry that moral principles that allow for significant lawbreaking when one believes that irreparable harm is occurring could easily lead to great damage if broadly followed (consider for example what it would be like to live in a country where hundreds of activists were regularly smashing their way into abortion clinics, energy companies, and refugee assistance nonprofits with sledgehammers and crowbars). Regarding the legitimacy of the law, I think reasonable contractualist views can give us obligations to follow the law when the processes by which the law is determined are legitimate, and that democracies with universal suffrage qualify as such (even granting that certain groups such as animals and future generations are impossible to enfranchise).[1] Therefore, I think that if we are trying to make decisions under moral uncertainty and give meaningful credences to

The UK is set to pass a law that bans the sale of tobacco to anyone born after 2008. Once the king signs it into law, the UK will become the second country in the world to introduce a generational smoking ban, after the Maldives did so last November. (New Zealand also considered such a ban a few years ago, but did not go through with it.) 

I went to jail yesterday in Wisconsin. I helped rescue 23 beagles in a large mass open rescue against a factory farm, Ridglan Farms, near Madison. We were trying to push the police to act on documented animal cruelty at Ridglan. Instead they arrested me and 26 other activists. I wrote a blog post about why I did it.. Excerpt: More info and stories from Wayne Hsiung: https://blog.simpleheart.org/p/im-in-jail-for-rescuing-dogs-its If you're in the DC area, I'll be sharing more about my experience at Revolutionists' Night, an animal welfare meetup, this Thursday. Reach out for an invite. [Edited to add:] I believe there is a lawful basis for this action and I intend to fight any attempted prosecution in court! I'm not advocating any illegal activity, of course.

More good news! Norwegian meat industry announced that they will stop using fast-growing chicken breeds by the end of 2027. These breeds are source of immense suffering due to the toll such rapid growth takes on animal's body. This will be the first country to stop using them. More here: https://animainternational.org/blog/norway-ends-fast-growing-chickens

EA Animal Welfare Fund almost as big as Coefficient Giving FAW now? This job ad says they raised >$10M in 2025 and are targeting $20M in 2026. CG's public Farmed Animal Welfare 2025 grants are ~$35M.   Is this right? Cool to see the fund grow so much either way.

One happy news for the world - Poland just banned fur farming. The legislative battle is over, the president of the country signed the bill, which is the last chapter of the process.

Coal and nuclear electricity generation kill a significant number of fish through water intake systems. This matters for evaluating the impact of any new electricity load. Most thermal power plants (coal, nuclear, and to a lesser extent gas) draw large volumes of water from rivers and lakes for cooling. This causes two underappreciated harms to fish: Impingement — fish get trapped against water intake filters and die. Entrainment — eggs, larvae, and small fish are pulled through pumps and heat exchangers, killing them. A single coal plant in Ohio (Bay Shore coal plant) killed roughly 46 million fish and 2.2 billion fish eggs and larvae in 2005–06. Some thermal plants use evaporative cooling while others return the water to the source warmer than it was drawn. This thermal pollution stresses aquatic life in two compounding ways: elevated temperatures reduce dissolved oxygen levels while simultaneously increasing organisms' metabolic oxygen demand. Even small temperature increases can cause declines in bottom-dwelling species, and organisms in already-warm environments are especially vulnerable. Impingement and entrainment don’t affect fish population levels because many of them would have died young anyway, other things like pollution have a much greater effect, and “only” ~10% of the wild population died due to the coal plant in the above case of the Ohio Bay Shore coal plant and Maumee River. It's also unclear what the net effect on wild-animal suffering is when comparing death in a water intake to death by natural causes. And as electricity generation shifts from thermal plants toward renewables, these specific harms should diminish. From an EA perspective, this seems worth flagging for anyone working on wild animal welfare or assessing the environmental footprint of new electricity load like compute scaling. The fish mortality numbers are large in absolute terms even if they seem unlikely to cause population-loss, and this externality rarely features in dis

There are two UK government consultations closing March 9th, for: (1) banning cages for 7 million hens, and (2) reducing the pain that castration and tail docking practices for lambs cause, such as requiring pain relief. In the UK are 7 million hens (21%) still in cages, and roughly 17 million lambs that go through these painful procedures every year.  You can use these guides to make your response, to make these changes more likely to happen:  Hens: https://tinyurl.com/cage-consultation  Lambs: https://tinyurl.com/lamb-consultation  If you prefer, you can sign up for this online event on Sunday 5pm-6pm UTC, where we'll be writing and submitting our responses together.