You make a great point about the parallel to the meat-eater problem, and I agree that, for similar reasons, it's probably still a good idea to advocate for chicken welfare reforms.

However, I don't think reductio ad absurdum is a compelling argument in this case.

This post's argument seems absurd not because it leads to some kind of internal contradiction, but rather because it argues for something that's way outside the things people normally think are good ideas. I don't think "seems absurd to most people" is a reliable indicator of "is not ethically sound," because I think many people believe things and act in ways that are not morally sound (e.g., factory farming). What I love about EA is that it's a social space that encourages questioning of conventional ideas.

Thanks so much for this thoughtful post, Vasco! It is so heartening to see people taking arthropod welfare seriously.

While I agree that chicken welfare reforms could plausibly harm arthropods more than they help chickens, I don't think that means we shouldn't support chicken welfare reforms. For the same reason I reject the meat-eater problem, the logic of the larder, and the logic of the logger, I think that to get to a society that maximizes utility over the long term, we will probably need to take some steps that decrease utility in the short term.

That is, I don't know exactly what global-scale arthropod welfare programs would look like, but I think we're more likely to get there if more people live in material abundance, so I think economic development is worthwhile even if it increases factory farming in the short term. I think reforming, regulating, and banning factory farming are also very likely to be helpful (and possibly necessary) for human society to normalize and institutionalize concern for non-human animals, and to invest substantial resources in helping them.

I realize this is a suspiciously convenient conclusion to come to, and I can't rule out the possibility that my position is driven by motivated reasoning. But I think it's a good sign that my claim ("Chicken welfare reforms might be good overall, even if they hurt arthropods in the short term") uses a similar logic to yours ("Chicken welfare reforms might be bad overall, even if they help chickens directly"). Both are examples of finding a different conclusion as a result of changing the scope of the analysis: Should our calculations include just chickens directly affected, or also arthropods indirectly affected, or also farmed and wild animals very-indirectly affected? 

Of course one could agree with me that we should include the very-indirectly-affected animals, but disagree with my guesses about what would be best for them. One of the biggest weaknesses of my approach is that it's much harder to judge what kinds of are worthwhile, or to compare effectiveness across efforts. It also takes things further from ecology and more into social movement theory, which is annoying because I enjoy the former a lot more than the latter. 

But that doesn't mean we should abandon empiricism and settle for hand-waviness in everything. Analyses like yours can be very useful; I just think we should interpret their results in the context of explicit theories of change about long-term effects.

My understanding is that TNF hasn't posted a list because at least one of the charities felt it would be a PR risk for them to be named in association with this commitment. But one could roughly deduce it by looking at which 2023 OP grantees (a) received recurring grants from the OP Farmed Animal Welfare Program and (b) weren't working on farmed vertebrates.

Wild animals and weirdness

Section 4 ("The weirdest stuff will put people off the moderate stuff") argues that perceptions of the weirdness of a given cause or intervention "create blocks to uptake and prevents people from supporting the more moderate parts of the same movement." 

Insofar as this is true, it's important to know the degrees of perceived weirdness. To my pleasant surprise, I've found that wild animal welfare seems much less weird to most people than it does to most EAs. This is based on my experience working at Wild Animal Initiative for the last five years, hearing my colleagues' reports of their conversations with people (primarily scientists), and generally talking about it at every chance I get (both with EAs and non-EAs).

Apologies for the forthcoming generalizations about EAs. I'm trying to describe general patterns; I'm not trying to flatten everyone into one caricature.

How the idea is introduced

In my experience, EAs often explain wild animal welfare along these lines: "Nature is really brutal. The animals with the worst lives are the most numerous. We should destroy habitat or eliminate predators." 

In contrast, my colleagues and I have settled on an approach that's closer to this: "You seem like you care about animals. So do we. People talk a lot about human harms to animals, but there's so much we don't know about naturally occurring harms. We think it would be good to protect wild animals from things like disease or starvation if we could. But ecosystems are really complicated, so that's why we're focused on doing research first."

It turns out most people respond really well to that. In fact, our biggest communication challenge is not people thinking we're too weird, but rather people not thinking we're weird enough. That is, "reducing wild animal suffering" sounds a lot like "protecting endangered species." They get the overlap quickly; it's the differences that take longer to explain.

What things are discussed

In my experience, most EA discussions of wild animal welfare focus on extreme thought experiments, extreme interventions, and core philosophical principles. My hypothesis is that that's largely because of a temperamental inclination toward abstraction and consistency, which is why many of us (including me) like to steer conversations toward areas of deepest disagreement or highest uncertainty. 

Turns out there's no rule that says you have to single out whatever someone loves most and declare it must be wiped from this earth. The thought experiments and zany interventions are also of only limited usefulness, because they're almost completely untethered from the considerations that will guide the next steps of research and movement-building.

So we and other researchers in the field mostly discuss things that are both more palatable and more achievable in the near term (or at least representative of how we might do things in the near term, which "feeding lions cultivated meat via drones" is not): vaccination against diseases, contraception to prevent starvation, promoting habitats/land uses that host populations with higher total welfare than the alternatives, reducing sources of stress, etc.

Baseline attitudes toward nature

I think most people in the industrialized West like wildlife. It seems like the default is people seeing themselves on the same side as animals (e.g., happy to see them at all, sad to see them suffer), and exceptions come when people come into direct conflict with animals (urban pest species, predators of livestock, etc.). Crucially, these attitudes seem to be not just about preferences ("I like animals"), but also tied into identity at a very basic, nonpartisan level: "I'm the kind of person who appreciates wildlife," "Nice people are nice to animals," etc. I've singled out "animals" here, but in reality these preferences and identities tend to bundle animals and nature into one, and "nature" is what's mentioned more often: "Nature is beautiful," "I'm the kind of person who respects nature," etc.

Before I got involved in EA, I had only ever met a handful of people who disliked nature. (They were all kids -- I was also a kid -- who grew up in densely urban areas, and their main issue seemed to be with bugs, particularly mosquitoes.) Now that I'm deep in the EA bubble and talking about nature a lot, I've met tons of EAs who say they've always disliked nature: they thought it was obviously cruel, harsh, unwelcoming, gross, etc. (I even met one person who said they didn't even understand why anyone thought natural vistas looked beautiful until a psychedelic experience gave them that experience for the first time.) Either I grew up super sheltered (likely true), or EA has a way of attracting weirdos (definitely true -- again, I offer myself as evidence).

Another thing that causes many EAs to underestimate how willing -- how excited -- most people are to help wildlife is their experiences advocating for farmed animals. Most people have very different attitudes toward farmed animals than wild animals, and they have a vested interest in not changing what they eat or how our economy works. As Henry points out, mocking vegans is a cultural norm, and sometimes even part of people's identities. Fortunately, when asked to help wild animals, people don't interpret that as an attack on their integrity or their lifestyle, so they don't have the same defensive reaction.

Conclusion

That was wordier than I expected. All I really wanted to say is I know we can make "mass vaccination eco-engineering projects to limit unnecessary wild animal suffering from disease" sound pretty weird, but most people think "protecting wildlife from diseases" sounds like a pretty good idea. There are still lots of challenges to people fully understanding, accepting, and improving wild animal welfare, but we shouldn't make those challenges out to be worse than they are.

Would you mind expanding on your comment? I don't know what exactly you mean by it.

A few thoughts related to wild animals

• General: Thanks so much for mentioning wild animals! They make up such a large majority of animals that I think it's a really good practice to allude to that part of the picture even when you don't want to cover it in depth.
• Dodging the question: There are many interventions that would only be beneficial if you knew whether animals in the affected population(s) had net-positive or net-negative lives on average. But I've had so many conversations with people who seem to think we can't do anything until we answer that question. In fact, there are lots of things we can do. Anything that reduces suffering without changing population levels is worthwhile, because between two lives not worth living, I'd still prefer the one that has less pain.
• Evolution: Here's a great talk by my colleague that goes in depth into depth on fitness and happiness in the context of wild animal welfare. It's totally consistent with the arguments you make on the subject. https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/blog/what-is-fitness
• Contraception: You're right that wildlife contraception could be a great tool for humanely reducing populations, and that that would be in animals' interest if those animals were living net-negative lives. I want to add that one of the reasons contraception has so much potential is you can also use it to reduce suffering even if animals are living net-positive lives. Here are two strategies you could use to improve net welfare without knowing the net value of animals' experiences.
  • Strategy 1: Same population, less suffering. You could use contraception as an alternative to painful lethal methods of population control. For example, cities, farms, factories, etc. often manage rat populations with anticoagulant poisons that cause the animals to bleed out over hours or days. You could eliminate the need for that by using contraception (it's not quite clear whether the tech is there yet, but it's close -- this is one of the things we [@Wild_Animal_Initiative] would like more funding to research). People would probably want to bring the population down as much as possible, but they might decide to keep it at the same level as it was when they were using poison, and you would still expect a net benefit to welfare.
  • Strategy 2: Optimal population density (see this white paper with neat charts). Assuming you think more good lives is a good thing, all else equal, in reality not all else is equal when a population grows. Many wild animal populations are constrained by resource (e.g. food) availability: the population grows and competition intensifies until deaths from competition (e.g. starvation) increase the total mortality rate to the point where it equals the birth rate. So by the time the population stabilizes, resource competition is intense, and quality of life is likely affected. Even if these animals were having good lives, it might be better for there to be slightly fewer of them if that meant they'd be having much better lives. And if it turns out the animals were having net-negative lives, then reducing their population would be good for the usual reasons.

You might be interested in this talk on what exactly fitness means in an evolutionary context and why we shouldn't expect it to reliably select for traits that give wild animals happy lives: https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/blog/what-is-fitness

I agree! I erred on the side of dryness in the post because I'm really worried that "good news" will be misinterpreted as "okay everything is fine now." 

But that doesn't mean this isn't worth celebrating! It's freakin' awesome!! Easily a contender for the biggest karmic harvest any philanthropist has reaped this year. 

It's especially impressive given that the Navigation Fund is so new, yet they were willing and able to make a big fast pivot. I don't know what exactly it entailed for them, but I can say I've learned from Wild Animal Initiative's Grants Program that both setting up grant-making systems and administering grants are way more administratively complicated and time-consuming than I ever thought it would be. So I'm guessing it was no small undertaking for a small team in its first year of grant-making. Thank you TNF!

Faunalytics published the results of their benchmarking research (I haven’t read them yet): https://faunalytics.org/compensation-in-farmed-animal-advocacy/

The EA movement is quite unusual in the salaries it pays

This is plausible, because EA is weird in a lot of ways ( <3 ). But I think we should have a lot of uncertainty in claims like these. My experience researching salaries (at GFI in ~2019 and at WAI over the last couple years) is that it's really hard to do well, because (a) it's really hard to know when you're comparing apples to apples and (b) there's strong reporting bias in the freely available datasets (I talked with a firm who said they had better methods, but didn't end up paying the minimum $10k they required to access their database).

Faunalytics will soon be publishing the results of their project benchmarking compensation in the farmed animal protection movement (details in their OSF registration, subscribe to their newsletter for updates, report will probably be posted here), which will at least be helpful in understanding the animal advocacy side of the equation (if not the other side, which is the other areas we compete with for talent).