Ask Us Anything: EA Animal Welfare Fund

By KarolinaSarek🔸, Neil_Dullaghan🔹 , Zoë Sigle @ 2024-12-18T16:21 (+68)

The EA Animal Welfare Fund (AWF) invites you to Ask Us Anything. You can ask questions from now until next Tuesday morning, December 24. We will stop responding at 2:00 PM CET on Tuesday.

About AWF
The AWF’s mission is to alleviate the suffering of non-human animals globally through effective grantmaking. Since its founding in 2017, AWF has distributed $23.3M across 347 grants. This year, we’ve distributed $3.7M across 51 grants. 
You can read about our 2024 year-in-review post and our request for more funding analysis to learn more about our recent work and future goals.

Why Now? 
We believe now is an especially good time for an AMA because:

We are open to questions from interested donors, applicants, past grantees, people interested in jobs at AWF, and others interested in animal welfare. 

Our team answering questions is:

  1. Karolina Sarek, Chair
  2. Neil Dullaghan, Fund Manager
  3. Zoë Sigle, Fund Manager
     

We look forward to hearing your questions!

emre kaplan🔸 @ 2024-12-19T17:39 (+20)

What is your bar for funding for some of the most common welfare interventions? On the margin, how many animals or animal-years should be affected per dollar for the following welfare improvements:

a. Cage-free transition for egg-laying hens

b. Stunning before slaughter for farmed sea bass and sea bream

c. Transition to ECC/BCC standards

Peter Lofgren @ 2024-12-19T19:10 (+17)

What do you do when direct utilitarian computations give unintuitive results, for example if direct utilitarian math said that you should give 80% of the fund to just shrimp welfare?  Is your methodology basically just to rank grant opportunities by utilitarian effectiveness (using best guesses) or do you have minimum percentages per species, or have allocation percentages for measurable interventions vs new/experimental interventions, or other ways of allocating?

I love the EA Animal Welfare Fund, thanks for your work!

Rick Holland @ 2024-12-19T13:19 (+9)

Hi Karolina, Neil, and Zoë,

First of all, thanks so much for your work, and for hosting an AMA. I've been continually impressed at the array of initiatives funded by the Animal Welfare Fund, as well as its team's dedication.

My question is this (now that we are in the midst of the Giving Season time of year): when do you recommend donating to the AWF, and when to individual charities?

Rick

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-12-19T16:12 (+8)

Do you estimate cost-effectiveness based on guesses for the intensity of the 4 categories of pain defined by the Welfare Footprint Project (WFP), as I do, and Ambitious Impact (AIM) does? If so, which values are you using?

I think AIM's values greatly underestimate the intensity of severe pain. Feel free to ask Vicky Cox for the doc with my suggestions for improvement.

Aidan Alexander @ 2024-12-20T03:27 (+4)

I don’t think they’re doing explicit cost-effectiveness analyses at this level of detail for the grants they’re assessing. They don’t have the time (consider how many hours they have per grant vetted), and the evidence to make those analyses anything more than multiplying a bunch of guesses together just won’t exist for many applications. Instead, they’ll be looking at other forms of evidence, like the strength of the theory of change, the strength of the team, the quality of thinking displayed in the team’s plan and their track record

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-12-20T08:52 (+4)

Thanks, Aidan. You may well be right about what they are doing, but I think a basic version would take very little time, and still be helpful. They would only need to make one estimation of the DALYs averted per animal-year improved or animal helped for each type of welfare improvement, not one estimation per grant. They could make copies of my sheets for broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns, and for improving shrimp slaughter, although I am sure they could do similar sheets in no time. Then they could have these welfare improvements in mind while making guesses for others for which there is no data on the time in pain.

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-12-19T15:58 (+8)

How do you handle welfare comparisons across species? Do you basically use Rethink Priorities' median welfare ranges as I do, assuming that 1 year of a practically maximally happy life in animals of a given species is as good as N years of a practically maximally happy life in humans, where N is the welfare range?

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-12-19T17:52 (+6)

If you had to choose between the best candidate for AWF's fund manager open position, and the 2nd best plus X $/year in donations to AWF, and both these candidates had the same impact if they did not join AWF, and were only available for full-time work, how large would X have to be for you to be indifferent between the 2 options?

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-12-19T15:37 (+6)

What are your best guess for the expected impact of donating 100 k$ to AWF as a fraction of the expected impact of donating 100 k$ to GiveWell's top charities? It would be great if you could give a quantitative answer, and explain how you got it. I would also be curious to know about disagreements you may have with my estimates that:

What are your best guesses for the cost-effectiveness of the 3 interventions above? Why?

How do your answers to my questions above change if you assume expected total hedonistic utilitarianism?

Charlotte Darnell @ 2024-12-18T18:20 (+5)

I don't have a question top of mind, but wanted to say thanks for doing an AMA, seems like it could be really useful for some people deciding where to give.

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-12-19T16:43 (+2)

Do you have ideas for cost-effectively moving funding from the best interventions helping humans to the best ones helping animals? Relatedly, do you think the following increase, even if not cost-effectively, the funding going to the best interventions to help animals?

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-12-19T16:34 (+2)

Would you fund interventions decreasing the number of factory-farmed animals with positive lives? I would not, as they would decrease welfare. For context:

MichaelStJules @ 2024-12-19T17:51 (+4)

Are you effectively assuming that when they are awake and not experiencing hurtful pain or worse, that they are experiencing pleasure as intense as hurtful pain? I would probably assume only pleasure that intense for eating, dustbathing and playing, at most. Foraging might be annoying or hurtful intensity.

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-12-19T18:15 (+4)

Thanks for the question, Michael! Yes, roughly so. With the caveat that pleasure and hurtful pain can be experienced simulataneously, in which case the positive experiences may be less intense (holding the total welfare from positive experiences costant) than hurtful pain (because they could be experienced for longer).

I set the welfare from pleasure to the product between:

  • The lifetime minus 8 h/d of null welfare minus the sum of the time in hurtful, disabling and excruciating pain.
  • The intensity of hurtful pain.

This is based on my guess that the pleasure during the non-neutral time outside that in hurtful, disabling or excruciating pain is as intense as a practically maximally happy life, which I assume to be as intense as hurtful pain.

Ideally, the Welfare Footprint Project would measure the cumulative time in each of their 4 categories of pleasure, and then one could determine the welfare from pleasure by guessing their intensity as a fraction of that of a practically maximally happy life (as I did for pain in my post).

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-12-19T15:22 (+2)

Thanks for doing this! As I asked a few weeks ago, do you have any thoughts on whether it is better to donate to the AWF or the Shrimp Welfare Project? I estimate this is 412 and 173 times as cost-effective as broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns.

John Salter @ 2024-12-19T10:02 (+2)

With respect to other causes areas:

  1. Animal advocates seem to spend a lot of energy engaging in mutually destructive conflict with one and other.

  2. Even accounting for the above, mental health seems unusually poor and willingness to use existing services is low

How open are you to funding related interventions?

Zoë Sigle @ 2024-12-19T21:11 (+7)

Hi John, 

Anecdotally and from my perspective, infighting within the animal protection movement has decreased notably over the last decade, but this doesn’t mean it’s gone. Additionally, as you know (but sharing for those reading), infighting is not the only contributor to mental health challenges in our space.

The EA Animal Welfare Fund historically has not funded advocate mental health work directly. Given our limited funds and our niche within the wider funder communities for both the animal protection and effective altruism movements, the EA Animal Welfare Fund is not currently prioritizing funding direct mental health assistance for advocates. However, we are not fundamentally opposed to funding this kind of work if we were to review a strong application demonstrating (amongst other criteria) movement need, an excellent track record, cost-effectiveness (in terms of expected indirect animal impact), and inability to secure sufficient funding from other sources.

With that said, we have funded capacity-building organizations, like Scarlet Spark, where part of their services include improvements to team wellbeing. 

Additionally, the EA Animal Welfare Fund considers interpersonal dynamics and organizational cultures when conducting grant evaluations, whether this means conflicts between individuals within an organization or conflicts between organizations. The community health team at the Centre for Effective Altruism has supported our fund managers in investigating conflict allegations regarding applicants and navigating funding recommendation options (including exit grants and full rejections). We have declined to fund several applications when we see organizations not engaging as respectful team players within the wider movement space. We have also phased out funding for at least one organization where we observed organizational cultural issues that were detrimental to employee well-being and mental health and, in our estimation, the long-term sustainability of the organization’s impact on animals. 

Thank you for caring about the mental health of our animal advocate community. I know your organization, Overcome, coaches at least some animal advocates through mental health challenges, and I have heard (anecdotal) positive testimonials from advocates receiving coaching. To your point of “willingness to use existing services is low,” I encourage animal advocates reading this, who might be in need of mental health support, to reach out to Overcome to assess fit for support.

Engin Arıkan @ 2024-12-21T10:11 (+1)

How often grantees pivot to more modest goals or different tactics after they realise that their initial goals are very hard to reach or their initial idea does not deliver results- after they receive their grants for certain high goals and specific plans in their application? How do you balance holding grantees accountable vs. providing them flexibility?