No. I think it’s near impossible to slow the growth of a major industry like aquaculture. You could slow its growth in particular countries but, so long as demand remains constant, production will just expand elsewhere. That’s especially true given the vast majority of aquaculture is in countries where we have no hope of slowing its growth. 

You could try to reduce demand for farmed fish, but we’ve never succeeded in reducing demand for such a popular food in the past. (And even if you did, people would probably just switch to wild-caught fish. This might just boost demand for farmed fish, since wild-caught fish are supply constrained, and most people view wild-caught and farmed fish as interchangeable, so most marginal fish demand is satisfied with farmed fish.)

We’re about a quarter of global farmed animal welfare advocacy spend, based on a broad definition of such advocacy, i.e. including alt protein work, vegan advocacy, etc. We’re a larger share of what I’d consider evidence-based or EA-aligned advocacy. Depending on what you include in that category, we’re about half to two thirds of funding for such work.

It would be very valuable to have additional major funders! For example, I’m excited to see the Navigation Fund coming online shortly. In addition to enlarging the pie of total farmed animal welfare funding, new funders could add a greater diversity of perspectives and provide more stability for groups. (We’ve seen that groups majority funded by us are often wary of investing in long term growth because they’re nervous about being so reliant on one funder.)

I spend a chunk of my time trying to bring new major funders into the space. We’re also funding work with Farmed Animal Funders and Focus Philanthropy toward the same goal. I welcome ideas on how we could do better at this!

I’m not sure there’s one neat article. I’d love someone to write such an overview. In the meantime, your best bet might be Our World in Data’s cool new section on animal welfare. For a wrap up on progress over the last decade, you could also read my 2022 year-end newsletter. 

This is a cool idea! As you note, we’re wary of telling grantees how to run their organizations. We’ve generally preferred to fund groups that can work with grantees to help them implement best practices that work for them. For example, Scarlet Spark, Mission Realization Partners, and (previously) Sharpen Strategy. But we’ll think about whether we could prepare an anonymized write up like you suggest. 

Alien invasion.

My views are pretty aligned with most EA-minded animal advocates. But in the interests of finding disagreement, here are a few possibilities:

• Work to achieve legal personhood for animals is unlikely to help farmed animals.
• Cultivated meat is unlikely to significantly displace factory farmed meat in our lifetimes.
• Huel is tastier than Soylent.

Sorry to not be more disagreeable ;) 

OP currently uses the welfare ranges that Luke Muehlhauser produced as part of his 2018 moral patienthood report. He lists species’ ranges here, though we use point estimates he produced internally. Luke’s numbers are steeper / more hierarchical than Rethink’s.

We sometimes test the sensitivity of species-specific grants to using Luke or Rethink’s welfare ranges. So far this hasn’t often been action-guiding, since we’re already primarily funding work focused on the most numerous farmed vertebrates (chicken and fish) and our funding on invertebrate welfare is more limited by other factors.

Yeah that's a great point. I think you're right that these issues were ideologically polarized historically, and that now the parties reflect that polarization, it may mean that most social reforms will be politically polarized too.

Thanks, this is a good point. I agree that it's not obvious we should choose A) over B).

My evidence for A) is that it seems to be the approach that worked in every case where farm animal welfare laws have passed so far. Whereas I've seen a lot of attempts at B), but never seen it succeed. I also think A) really limits your opportunities, since you can only pass reforms when liberals hold all key levers of power (e.g. in the US, you need Democrats to control the House, Senate, and Presidency) and they agree to prioritize your issue.

My sense is that most historic social reforms also followed path A), e.g. women's suffrage, child labor, civil rights. In the UK, cross-party support was also critical to abolishing slavery, while in the US, where abolition was more politicized, it took a Civil War.

That said, the farm animal welfare successes of A) mostly occurred in past decades when politics was less polarized and I think some modern movements like climate change suggest A) may be the only plausible path today. I also wonder if we might be able to do some of A) and B). E.g. try to make being pro-factory farming an unpalatable opinion for anyone on the left or moderate right to hold -- leaving just the most conservative rural representatives championing it.

Thanks for flagging that. I agree that most of the funds donated by animal ag employees were not to oppose animal protection, or likely any specific policies. I should have clarified that. I also generally don't think of people working in agriculture as evil. I think they're mostly just doing the rationale thing given the goal of profit maximization, and the lack of constraints we've imposed on how to pursue that.