Vetted Causes' 2025 Charity Recommendations

Thank you to Vetted Causes for this thoughtful review of Shrimp Welfare Project's work. I appreciate both the recognition of our cost-effectiveness and the constructive feedback on areas where we can improve.

I wanted to address a few points raised in the review:

• Regarding monitoring stunner usage: It's worth noting that our current monitoring approach is consistent with standard practice across the animal welfare movement, such as cage-free campaigns. Like these initiatives, we rely on retailers and producers facing potential public backlash if they fail to honor commitments made to their stakeholders. While this approach has driven significant progress in animal welfare to date, we're excited to go further. We're actually piloting the first version of a direct monitoring system in the next few months, with plans to iterate and improve as we learn.
• On public information: This presents an interesting challenge for us. Our website must primarily serve industry stakeholders, whose communication expectations differ significantly from those in the EA community. Detailed numerical analyses and assumptions that would be appreciated by EA readers can sometimes be off-putting to corporate audiences. We're actively trying to navigate this balance between different audience needs while maintaining our effective engagement with industry partners.
• That said, we're committed to transparency: We have prioritised our MEL (Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning) initiatives by transitioning our MEL Officer from a part-time to full-time role. She is currently upskilling through the AIM Research Program and will finish at the end of June, meaning Shrimp Welfare Project will have much stronger MEL capacity from the second half of 2025.

We're grateful to be part of a community that values both impact and transparency, and we look forward to continuing to improve our work to help billions of shrimps.

I think it's fair to see ALDF playing an important part in the animal protection ecosystem (I agree with this!) but I would not feel comfortable recommending a charity based on the amount of information available. I don't have time to respond in detail, but here are some questions that I would need answered:

• How do they prioritize their cases or work more broadly? I question this because of their companion animal work, like paying for this puppy's leg surgery. Is their lack of transparency acceptable for a recommended charity? 
• ~60% of the litigation work on farmed animal issues is a piece of information, but what does that mean? # of cases? hours of litigation staff time? What is the avg number of affected animals for each case, both directly and EV for precedent set? I've learned that relying on a single number can be misleading if the inputs and context aren't clear.  
• How much staff time is litigation vs. other programs?

Again, I am glad they exist and appreciate their place in building and providing credibility to the animal law sector. Many of their wins are significant! They also appeal to a more right-leaning audience which is helpful in keeping animal issues bipartisan. I just don't feel certain that enough of their 16M annual budge goes towards effective animal work.


 

Thanks for sharing!

The Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) is one of my top recommendations too. Do you have any thoughts on my estimate that the cost-effectiveness of Fish Welfare Initiative’s (FWI’s) farm program from January to September 2024 was only 0.0111 % of SWP's past cost-effectiveness? I guess FWI will become more cost-effective in the future, but I do not see how they would come close to SWP.

I am surprised you are recommending the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) without doing any cost-effectiveness analysis of their work. Here is a quick illustration of why I think they are much less cost-effective than SWP:

• SWP has helped 1.50 k shrimp/year/$.
• You say that, "since 2021, ALDF has had average annual expenditures of $16,189,282". So they would have to have helped 24.3 billion animals per year (= 1.50*10^3*16.2*10^6) to have helped as many animals per year per $ as SWP.
• 9.91 billion land animals were slaughtered for meat in the United States (US) in 2023. So ALDF would have to have helped 2.45 (= 24.3*10^9/(9.91*10^9)) times as many animals per year as those slaughtered for meat in the US in 2023 to have helped as many animals per year per $ as SWP. This seems way too much to be feasible considering their interventions do not target aquatic animals, or land invertebrates.
• I understand impact is not directly proportional to the number of animals helped, but I believe the impact per animal helped may well be larger for SWP than ALDF. I estimate SWP averts the equivalent of 0.0426 DALYs per shrimp helped, which I think is as good as preventing the existence of 0.463 broilers (= 0.0426/(0.754*0.122)) in a conventional scenario.