“animal welfare has an evidence problem” by matthes

June 6

26 mins

View Transcript

Episode Description

Why I stopped donating to animal welfare charities but feel more motivated than ever to redirect money and talent to the cause.

I have wanted to write this post for a while. It is an uncomfortable thing to bring up. Many people in the animal welfare space are working really hard, and this post might leave some feeling defeated. But I think this is one of the most important things to talk about in animal welfare right now. My intention is not to be a downer or create infighting. Instead, I hope this post inspires lots of people to tackle this major neglected problem.

key takeaways

Even some of the most prominent animal welfare interventions have surprisingly weak evidence behind them. In some cases, the available evidence even suggests that the intervention may be causing harm.
Specifically
- We have very limited data on electrical shrimp stunning that doesn't support a confident conclusion as to whether it's good or bad.
- We have mixed evidence on whether transitioning egg producers to cage-free improves welfare overall.
- We have evidence that the substitution effect of alternative proteins is weak, at best.
Significant additional funding and talent should be allocated to raise [...]

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Outline:

(00:44) key takeaways

(01:45) introduction

(02:29) three salient animal welfare interventions and their evidence bases

(03:17) shrimp stunning and slaughter

(11:01) cage-free

(20:29) alternative proteins

(21:47) this is a field-wide problem

(22:18) my recommendations to funders

(22:22) animal welfare should not be de-funded

(23:36) we should be taking ownership of the entire evidence pipeline