This seems like an interesting and important point, thanks for writing.

I might nitpick the way you're characterizing the terrestrial animal case though. Layers and broilers may technically be the same species, but I think they're different enough that a lot of the same considerations apply from the fish case. For example, you mention cage-free as the paradigm scalable intervention, but actually they only apply to layers, which I'm guessing constitute less than 5% of global terrestrial animals (most are broilers). Applying a similar intervention to broilers (BCC) has been less successful than for layers.

Speaking just about the US, I would say there are actually four groups of poultry worth considering. The following are their population sizes and days spent on form from this population per year (US):

1. Broilers - 9.3b individuals, 437b days on farm / year
2. Layers - 311m individuals, 113b days on farm / year
3. Breeders - 77m individuals, 28b days on farm / year
4. Turkeys - 200m individuals, 27b days on farm / year

This is much more homogenous than aquatic animals, but it's not quite as homogenous as you made it seem!

Academic studies are definitely slow, but 3-5 years strikes me as extremely slow, even for academia. 

I'm generally on board with what you're describing but I wonder whether there's also opportunities to work better with academia? Like if you're the one providing the funding, you might be able to negotiate with them and keep them accountable to timelines. There's probably also lots of variability between academics so you can identify the ones that are capable of executing well and quickly, and then work with them. 

I've seen AI-based animal communication technologies starting to be involved in some EA events / discussions (e.g. https://www.earthspecies.org/ ). I'm worried these initiatives may be actively negative, and I'm wondering if anyone has / will articulate a stronger defense of why they're good?

The high-level argument I've heard is that communicating with animals will make humans be more empathetic towards them. But I don't see why this would be the most likely outcome:

1. Humans are already fairly empathetic to animals, especially around things that we'd consider important welfare issues. We don't need a hen to articulately describe why she'd prefer not to have her beak cut off or be kept in a cage, I think it would be fairly obvious to most people.
2. Animals might become less sympathetic if we knew what they were saying. It seems possible that most of their thoughts and words are about food, sex, and ingroup / outgroup dynamics. 

A similar argument is that communication would allow us to see that animals are actually intelligent, but again I don't see why this is necessarily the case. If their thoughts are things people would generally consider crude, it's possible people would become more confident in their lack of intelligence (despite still deserving moral consideration).

More importantly, a large effect of being able to communicate with animals is that they'll become more useful to humans. If animals had political power or legal rights, this might open the door to mutually beneficial trade. But in reality, they don't have these things, so it seems more likely that this would allow humans to exploit these species more easily. They reason chickens, cows, and pigs are in such a bad state is because they're very useful to humans, and I'm worried animal communication technologies will subject more species to similar fates.

It doesn't seem to me like AI could radically change the economics of higher welfare products / alternative proteins without other broader transformative effects, or at least if it does, it seems like it would be for a pretty brief period of time before things get very weird. So I think "past X years" ( to use the framework of your comments) there should be heavy discounting and I wouldn't recommend a save and invest strategy. So to address your four types of interventions:

• Short-term, large payoff interventions are going to look good under any model of the world, I'd go further and suggest short-term, small/medium payoff interventions may start to look better.
• Interventions actively seeking to navigate and benefit animals through an AI transition - I'm skeptical of tractability here, but I'm supportive of the general idea
• Interventions that robustly invest in movement capacity - I would think that short timelines actually push us against capacity building on the margin, curious what you meant here
• Interventions that seem unlikely to change through an AI transition - again skeptical of the tractability, but I support the general idea

Organisations using Rethink Priorities’ mainline welfare ranges should consider effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails.

I appreciate you championing this view Vasco, despite all the pushback. I found your reasoning pretty convincing, and it seems to me like if it's wrong, it will be because of more general philosophical problems with utilitarianism or expected value reasoning. 

I agree with this, although I'm not an expert on cattle rearing. It seems to me like cows on grazeland generally have net positive lives, and cows on feedlots have arguably net negative lives (although it still seems way less bad than a pig or chicken CAFO). The longer a cow spends on pasture the more likely they had a net positive life, e.g. 100% grass-fed cows in the US might have pretty decent lives. 

I agree that the elections results were disappointing for animals, and particularly that the EATS act seems significantly more likely to pass in a republican-controlled government.

However, I think you're a little too pessimistic on what this means for animal-focused policy work in general. The ballot initiatives that failed this cycle were mostly abolitionist / vegany in vibe, which I think is significantly less popular than initiatives that are welfarist in vibe like Prop 12.

The EATS Act is primarily pushed by industry lobbyists, and doesn't necessarily reflect that these sorts of laws are getting less popular. 

I think you're spot on, and I appreciate you writing this post. However, I think you've maybe missed the most important reason that you're correct, which is that the focus on ending factory farming makes the movement significantly less accessible to the broader public than it otherwise could be.

Most people are broadly on board with welfare changes that animal activists push for (e.g. moving away from battery cages or gestation crates), but less on board with "ending factory farming." And they're even less on board if it's made explicit that what most activists mean by ending factory farming is achieving a world with no or significantly less meat than there is now. 

A lot of the paths to greater impact for the movement go through harnessing broad public support, or building broad coalitions. This is significantly harder to do when the center of gravity of the movement is around something so radical in relation to public opinion. More so when the focus on ending farming pushes the movement towards theories of change that are also unpopular, such as veganism and cultivated meat.

One might counter this by saying that social movements need a radical flank, and I think there's merit to this argument. However, the current animal groups pretty much all use messaging around ending factory farming, even the ones perceived to be more "moderate." I would argue that the movement right now lacks a moderate flank.

Another reason the framing is bad that you don't mention is that it makes the industry significantly more skeptical of activists. All businesses look skeptically on external activists to an extent, but I think this is especially so in animal agriculture. Producers know that when activists advocate for e.g. cage-free reforms, their actual goals are to get people to eat fewer eggs, and eventually to get people to stop eating (factory-farmed) eggs all together. Some activists say this explicitly in public. For producers, this makes the activism a battle over the future existence of their industry, not a debate over current practices on the margin, making progress significantly more challenging. 

Animal welfare is more important and more neglected, although tractability is less clear.