Some reasons for not prioritising animal welfare very strongly

By Engin Arıkan @ 2024-10-11T19:43 (+102)

Disclaimer: I work at EA animal welfare organisations but this piece reflects my personal views, not the views of the organisations I am involved with.

I am pleasantly surprised by the amount of support for animal welfare in this debate. There were more than a hundred people who voted very strongly for animal welfare which makes about %25 of all votes (I voted in favour of animal welfare too!) . But I also think there are some strong reasons for being more cautious (this is why I voted for a more moderate position). I think it might be beneficial to be mindful of these.

There are not a lot of pro-GHD arguments in the debate too - so I hope this also adds some more balance to the debate:)

Scale and neglectedness of the problem might be irrelevant unless it is solvable: When comparing animal welfare and human welfare, and the scale of the problems, the number of animals dominates. Similarly, the amount of funding in the animal welfare cause area is much smaller than global health. These points are repeatedly mentioned in the debate. But these points are only relevant if animal advocacy organisations can make meaningful progress that improves animal welfare with available funds.

It doesn’t really matter how much animals suffer (trillions), what really matters is how many we can realistically help (in some cases, only thousands). It also doesn’t really matter how much funding is available (millions), it matters how much funding can be effectively spent on actually helping animals (again, in some cases only millions). So I don’t think we should immediately get excited or be intimidated by numbers.

Track record of animal advocacy (including effective animal advocacy) is mixed:

• It is safe to say that cage-free campaigns were a great success. But they are mostly limited to certain regions (Americas and Europe mostly). And it was the most modest reform with minimal cost to the industry. In addition, it is not certain that all corporations will implement their commitments, especially the global ones.
• Progress in broiler welfare has been much slower. Much fewer corporations committed due to higher costs and complexities.
• There have been important reforms for aquatic animals. But these either also benefited producers via efficiency reforms (better water quality) or partly financed by the organisations themselves, which suggest that progress may stall when additional reforms require real costs on the producers.
• Alternative protein space is also very uncertain. Major scientific breakthroughs are needed for cultured meat to be produced and consumed at scale. Plant-based alternatives also remain uncompetitive and thus need further development. It is also uncertain whether even price-, quality-, convenience competitive alternatives can substitute animal products due to social norms and habits. Current market pricing of alternative protein companies (and meat companies) also do not predict major change in the food system.
• Wild animal welfare field has grown but it is not still clear which interventions may really help wild animals. We still don’t have a clear example of a program actually improving wild animal welfare at scale.

So it can be argued that “clear wins for animals” in effective animal advocacy are not abundant, in contrast with very confident claims that more funding in animal advocacy easily converts into high impact.

Most of the “impact” claims are actually “expected value”, which expect that impact will occur under certain assumptions.

It is hard to make future predictions based on past performance: Most optimistic and “animal welfare friendly” cost-effectiveness estimates in the EA community refer to RP’s estimates . But as expressed in the report, these are based on past success of cage-free and broiler campaigns (perhaps a more nuanced title could be “corporate campaigns affected 9 to 12 years of chicken life per dollar spent”). This may be an exception, not the rule. It is possible that cage-free campaigns were successful in certain regions at a certain time by picking low hanging fruits. Maybe this will not repeat in other regions and for other campaigns. And there are reasons for this: there is a huge socioeconomic gap between countries and regions, which also include differences in corporate culture and institutional development. Cage-free may also be an exception due to its minimal costs. Broiler commitments are much less frequent than cage-free commitments - which is also mentioned in the report.  

It is hard to make broad cost effectiveness estimates, especially about marginal use of funds: It is very probable that “core” programs/departments of animal advocacy organisations differ significantly from “supporting” programs/departments in terms of cost effectiveness. For example, the first 1-2 staff working on corporate outreach or campaigning can be x100 times more impactful than the 3. volunteer coordinator working on university outreach. So the marginal utility of additional funding that will be typically used to hire another staff member in animal advocacy organisations can be much lower than additional funding for buying more bed nets that will be used in global health efforts.  

Monitoring and evaluation in animal advocacy is not very strong: We cannot assume that all efforts that claim to aim for impact and cost-effectiveness, really achieve impact and cost-effectiveness. Robust M&E is required to see what works and what does not. Unfortunately EAA is way behind GHD in terms of M&E. This is mostly due to the complexities of animal advocacy which makes simple M&E impossible. But excuses aside, many EA organisations and funds do not even have basic impact evaluations - at least in public. And there is not much accountability work done about this problem. So at least in some cases it is doubtful that the use of funds by individual organisations for individual projects is really cost-effective- which is the primary thing that a donor should consider, rather than animal headcounts (scale) or total funding available (neglectedness).

There are things that money cannot (easily) buy: Many organisations fail to achieve their goals not because they lack funding, but because they lack good leadership, competent team members, or simply because they face challenges too high to overcome (more on that below). Although money can be of some use to fix these problems, the function is not straightforward. In theory, organisations can buy leadership “training” or “consultancy” to improve leadership. But these don’t work smoothly all the time. Sometimes they are completely useless. In theory, if organisations can offer better wages they can attract better staff. But many people just do not consider animal advocacy as a career, regardless of its potential benefits. Or some people want to join regardless of the benefits.

So although money helps, one might need to discount its effect due to its limited power to really make an impact in animal advocacy.

The threshold for the “next level” might be too high: In GHD, one can make progress village by village, bed net by bed net (I am simplifying). The threshold for each next level is so low that almost each dollar (or each thousand dollar) can make an impact. In animal advocacy, the majority of impact is driven from large institutions or major research breakthroughs. These require lengthy and steady engagement (or pressure) which require much more than “each dollar”. And if advocates fail to achieve the threshold for success, the outcome is not proportionate - it is close to zero. And in many cases the threshold might be so high that even lots of funding (100 million dollars) may not reach it - and only deliver close to “zero” impact (R&D on cultured meat can be an example). This is widely different from aggregate estimates which propose extremely high outcomes like “years of suffering relieved per dollar”. So unless there are other donors who can join forces and coordinate to give much more (say 500 million), one can reasonably decide to give none or very little even if they would be willing to give if others would join. A cause can be too neglected.

Social conditions are not very favourable for animal advocacy at this point in time: Let’s leave the numerical estimates for a while and look at the state of the “movement”. It is rare to see continuous gatherings with waves of people advocating for animal welfare. Protests for farmed animals gather at best a hundred people or slightly more. Usually, there are only ten or so people - and some of them are the paid staff members of the organisations, and some of them are EA conference attendants. The social media following of major organisations does not grow exponentially - most seem to be staying at the same level. Although we typically use the term “movement”, there is not a high number of people who are very engaged with this cause. There has also not been an instance where a company went bankrupt or clearly lost value in real terms due to a boycott or disruption.

Although surveys tend to show optimistic signs about the potential public support for animal welfare (which is typically used by organisations to increase expectations and gather support), this might be an illusion. It is possible that animal advocacy organisations don’t have much power really and it might be a matter of time that corporations (the ones that focus on profits only - meaning the overwhelming majority of corporations) realise this. It may be that all we can achieve is either efficiency reforms that marginally benefit animals (and corporations), or extremely modest moral reforms such as cage-free in a number of countries where conditions are very favourable - but not much further.

The alternative protein field also needs more investment and financial support. But it may be that governments and investors have other priorities at this point in time. Many animal advocates are a bit alarmist: climate change is getting worse, antibiotic resistance is a major risk, the world cannot feed its population unless we adopt a plant-based diet, etc. But maybe governments can adopt and manage these problems without making significant changes in the food system, which might be more costly both financially and politically. And investors might also find this field less profitable after all.

Progress in animal advocacy may need to wait for further progress in human welfare or civilisation: Imagine that you time travel to the 19th century, would you still prioritise animal welfare? Probably not, because clearly social conditions wouldn’t be right. There needs to be more development in terms of human welfare and civilisation before animals are taken more seriously in the public agenda.

But what makes the 21th century “the right century”? Maybe our time is not the right century too. Maybe the 21st century is similar to the 19th century in terms of its possibilities for progress for animals.

By the way, this point does not necessarily support prioritisation of GHD (in LMICs) over animal welfare. Perhaps it supports the prioritisation of further socioeconomic development (or mitigating more risks) in developed countries in order to achieve suitable socioeconomic conditions for viable animal advocacy work in the future (25th century hopefully?:( ).

Hedonism and utilitarianism may be wrong: Animal advocates typically focus on sentience in order to base their moral claims. This similarity with humans can easily justify some form of similar (moral) treatment of animals and humans. And under the assumption that pain and pleasure are the sole things that have moral worth, extremely high numbers of sentient animals and their suffering has an overwhelming effect on moral considerations.

As a result, if one only considers the headcounts and the sufferings, the obvious conclusion is: total animal welfare >>> total human welfare.

But one needs to keep in mind that the immediate conclusion of the “unrestricted sentience approach” is not only that animal welfare >>> human welfare. It is rather:

 total invertebrate welfare >>>>>>>>>> total rest of the animal welfare >>> human welfare .

This is precisely because of the same reason: total invertebrate welfare is also overwhelming due to their astronomical numbers.

I don’t think most people realise this or really adjust their actions/positions accordingly. If your main starting point is exclusively sentience and hedonism, your vote in the debate should not be only “%100 agree with 100 million dollars spent on animal welfare”, it should also be “%99.99 agree with 100 million dollars spent on invertebrate welfare”.

One might reasonably think that this moral weight framework should be wrong. “Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table, you may also use the table to measure the ruler”.

There might be other goods that cannot be adequately reduced to pain and pleasure: like friendship, knowledge, play, reason, etc. And these may have even more moral weight than mere pleasure and pain. Humans might have much higher capacity to actualize these different goods and therefore have higher status due to their nature. Some animals can also actualize these goods in their own limited capacities which can also justify some form of moral hierarchy between mammals, birds and invertebrates. This can then justify more (at least some) attention to non-invertabrate welfare as well. This can then also justify more (or at least some) attention to human welfare, despite overwhelming numbers of animals.

Priority of different types of duties: Imagine that you have 100 million dollars and you are willing and committed to donate 100 million dollars to animal welfare. BUT you also have a pending debt (say 10 million). Let’s also assume that the person who you are indebted to will not use this money “effectively” and the risk of legal sanctions and other risks in case you don’t pay your debt are close to zero.

Would you still be okay donating 100 million dollars to animal charities and choose to ignore your debt?

I guess most people would pay their debts first and then give the remaining money as charitable donations.

This assumes that there is a difference between duties in strict justice and in charity.

One can also argue that we have such duties in strict justice to persons who happen to be extremely poor and have a duty to distribute what we possess to those persons (humans) in great need. It can be argued that we don’t necessarily “own” 100 million dollars wholly in the first place (perhaps only %90 at best?) since we happen to possess it (at least partially) due to arbitrary factors like being born in a wealthy country. The main claim here is that one can only pursue charitable acts legitimately only after completing duties in strict justice.

The strong version of this argument can also be constructed as not giving to animal welfare at all until there is no person living in extreme poverty or need. But this strong version also has to concede that since we are under such a heavy duty that is unlikely to be completed in a lifetime, we should not also spend on nonessential goods (for our own welfare) at all, as we should not donate to animal welfare at all, since duties in strict justice also have priority over any spending on nonessential goods too. This is similar to a situation where one has a huge debt one cannot realistically repay in a lifetime. The only legitimate expenses in that case would be the essentials.

To conclude, I still think that animal welfare deserves more attention and support, but there are also good reasons for moderation too.