Hide table of contents

Hello, I'm struggling to find the most effective animal charity to donate to. I care about DALY's averted and I value some species over others based on their capacity to feel pain. 

I've tried looking at ACE recommended charities but there are so many to pick from and the rating are void of any quantifiable metric beside "high" and "very high" impact. Maybe I'm wrong but I got sick of searching.

Which charity or fund is the best to prevent DALYs? Have any DALY calculations been done on this charity?

24

0
0

Reactions

0
0
New Answer
New Comment

1 Answers sorted by

In case it's helpful, I figured I'd share a few reasons why these quantifiable metrics are so tricky to find. 

  1. It's not obvious how to calculate a given metric (such as DALYs). DALYs are calculated as the sum of YLLs YLDs. Implicitly, this assumes YLLs averted would be a good thing. However, if you believe broiler chickens living in battery cages are living a net-negative life (not an unpopular opinion in EA), then this is pretty obviously not the case. Therefore, YLLs would actually have a positive effect on welfare because YLLs imply the suffering has ended? Of course this rests on the idea the chicken is not going to be replaced by another chicken, which it almost certainly will be. This would imply YLLs don't matter at all for at least some farm animals. However, maybe the killing of the animal matters too? Again, not a crazy opinion to have (at least in the animal movement more broadly). Then YLLs would be affected by this, but probably not in a way aligning with what you intuitively think matters.
  2. There is not common agreement about which metrics matter. In the GHD space, some people care more about QALYs, others DALYs, and others lives saved. However, in reality, everyone cares about all three and all the metrics are pretty closely related to each other. This is not the case in the animal space. Many in the animal space care about the abolition of the factory farming system while others put more value on reducing suffering in the short term. These interventions CAN be somewhat different (and there's plenty of debate about how symbiotic these frameworks are or can be). Others will care about whether animals have rights. This is an entirely different framing which may not overlap with other frameworks at all for some interventions. In GHD, it's pretty generally agreed upon that women and people in poverty should have rights and also that having rights is a component of their quality of life. With animals, many people disagree on some of these basic concepts.
  3. Interaction effects between different interventions play such a large role in the effectiveness of an intervention. When one organization gets a company to sign a cage-free commitment, most reasonable metrics would give them credit for the welfare benefits of the commitment. However, sometimes a more radical animal rights group has been protesting their activity for years and this made it much easier for the more moderate organization to succeed. However, how would we attribute this contribution to the more radical group? It's not obvious at all. My guess is you won't reach reasonable agreement on this no matter how you quantify it. This type of thinking about change in the animal space is the reason why plurality in the movement is so valued my many (including myself) and, again, virtually any metric of cost-effectiveness of a given charity would miss this critical component of impact/social change.
  4. The funding in the animal space is so much lower than in the GHD space. The GHD space has many billions of dollars to allocate to support a few billion people. The farmed animal space has about $200 million to allocate to support trillions of animals. This difference implies there is much less benefit to developing precise cost-effectiveness analyses for every intervention in every context. Rather, we put more resources into implementation and try to get a reasonable idea of the effectiveness of different interventions.
  5. There are far fewer (human) stakeholders in some areas of the animal space and even fewer who are friendly. Working in MEL in the animal space, I've been able to adapt a lot of the standard practices in the GHD space. However, the biggest difference I see (other than the funding environment) is how GHD charities generally have many thousands of people in their target group and will target a few thousand each year while many animal charities have a few hundred people in their target group and they will likely target a few dozen per year (some target far fewer). This is particularly true when it comes to corporate pressure campaigns. Additionally, when you target corporations with a pressure campaign, your target group generally hates you. These differences mean methods pretty common in the GHD space, such as widescale surveying, oftentimes do not work at all in the animal space. For pressure campaigns, you're lucky if you can conduct some in-depth interviews with members of your target group, but this is often not possible because of the hostile nature of your relationship with them.

All of these point together generally support a much more qualitative type of evaluation in the animal space. While qualitative information may be much less precise, it has the possibility of being much more accurate. Meanwhile quantitative metrics are likely to be more precise, but are also very prone to being inaccurate given the budget and sample size constraints.

Thank you for your comment, it makes sense why quantitatively measuring a charity as a whole is extremely difficult and not as meaningful as I would think.

Comments9
Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

Maybe 

Other scattered remarks

A couple things to add to this very good comment:

In general, the landscape of charity evaluation for animal charities is less mature and quite a bit more uncertain than the landscape for global health and development charities. Any cost-effectiveness estimates are going to be coarse and debatable. 

ACE has a partially qualitative cost-effectiveness scoring system. Their ratings (higher = better) for their recommended charities are:

  • Faunalytics: 5.7
  • New Roots Institute: 4.9
  • The Humane League: 4.7
  • Wild Animal Initiative: 4.5
  • Çiftlik Hayvanlarını Koruma Derneği: 4.3
  • Shrimp Welfare Project: 4.3
  • Fish Welfare Initiative: 4.3
  • Sinergia Animal: 4.1
  • Good Food Institute: 3.8
  • Dansk Vegetarisk Forening: 3.7
  • Legal Impact for Chickens: 3.7

@Laura Duffy wrote a report at Rethink Priorities in which she estimated that corporate hen welfare campaigns avert 1.13 DALYs/$ and shrimp stunning interventions avert 0.038 DAYLYs/$. Both of these estimates were quite uncertain and depended on a lot of debatable assumptions (including possibly underrating the potential for shrimp stunning interventions to catalyze industry-wide changes), but I think this is one of the best estimates currently out there. 

My personal advice would be that I think the EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund is probably the expected value maximizing option, while The Humane League is probably the best option if you're somewhat risk-averse.  

Thanks for the context, MHR.

Their ratings (higher = better) for their recommended charities are

Is there a single page with all the scores, or did you check the cost-effectiveness sheet of each recommended charity?

My personal advice would be that I think the EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund is probably the expected value maximizing option, while The Humane League is probably the best option if you're somewhat risk-averse.

I used to prefer the Animal Welfare Fund (AWF) too, but now think THL may well be the best option. It looks like AWF pays to little attention to cost-effectiveness. From Giving What We Can's evaluation of AWF (emphasis mine):

Fourth, we saw some references to the numbers of animals that could be affected if an intervention went well, but we didn’t see any attempt at back-of-the-envelope calculations to get a rough sense of the cost-effectiveness of a grant, nor any direct comparison across grants to calibrate scoring. We appreciate it won’t be possible to come up with useful quantitative estimates and comparisons in all or even most cases, especially given the limited time fund managers have to review applications, but we think there were cases among the grants we reviewed where this was possible (both quantifying and comparing to a benchmark) — including one case in which the applicant provided a cost-effectiveness analysis themselves, but this wasn’t then considered by the PI in their main reasoning for the grant.

Thanks Vasco! 

I checked the pages for each charity to get the scores.

I agree that AWF doesn't directly evaluate cost-effectiveness, but I still think there's a good chance they're likely to be the EV maximizing option over THL. THL estimates that it costs them $2.63 to move a hen from a conventional to a cage-free system, or about 0.57 yr/$ given a 1.5-year lifespan. Last year, Emily Oehlsen from Open Phil said "We think that the marginal [farmed animal welfare] funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis." Saulius's 2019 analysis estimated that corporate campaigns pre-2019 impacted 41 chicken-years per dollar, so at a 5x reduction that's 8.2 yr/$. I don't want to take Emily's numbers too literally, but that implies a >10x gap between the cost effectiveness values of OP's marginal funding opportunity and THL. Since I'd expect AWF's opportunities to look somewhat similar to OP's, that leads me to guess that they're likely to be on net more cost-effective than THL. This directionally agrees with some of the comments by insiders such as @James Özden on the GWWC evaluations thread as well. But I'd be very curious to hear more from folks who are more plugged in, this is just an outsider's guess. 

For what it's worth, I do actually give to both AWF and THL, but give much more to AWF.

Interesting! Open Philanthropy (OP) granted 8.3 M$ to THL in 2023, and Animal Charity Evaluators' 2023 review of THL mentioned a funding gap for 2024 and 2025 of 10.5 M$. So I assume OP's last $ going to THL each year is either at or above OP's cost-effectiveness bar (it could be above because OP may not want to provide more than a certain fraction of the total funding of THL). However, in this case, I do not understand why the cost-effectiveness implied by Emily's statement differs from THL's estimate. @Martin Gould or @EmmaTheresa may have thoughts on this.

I clicked on the link over "just $2.63 to spare a hen" on the page from THL you linked, but it is broken[1].

  1. ^

    I sent an email to info@thehumaneleague.org informing THL about it, and asking them if they could share how they obtained their cost-effectiveness estimate.

Please don't treat cost-effectiveness estimates as such an exact science. There are so many subjective choices you make in them. For example, you could say that cage-free campaigns speed up changes by 5 years, or 50 years. Both choices are defensible but the result will be 10 times different just based on this choice alone. 

It's impossible to tell without seeing the THL's estimate, but they probably were conservative when estimating their cost-effectiveness. It's what I would do if I was doing such estimate for THL. $2.63 per hen impacted is already high enough for most people to want to donate. Maybe it's even better because it's more believable. And if they make it less conservative, someone might criticize them. In any case, THL took down the $2.63 estimate, so that's a strong reason not to treat it seriously.

Yeah this is a really good point, I have no idea how to square the numbers with big grants from OP to THL

You're awesome thank you

Hey, thanks for the question! I'm Max, a researcher at ACE. To provide some additional context to the other helpful comments:

  • For our 2023 Evaluations we used a weighted factor model to calculate a cost-effectiveness score (rather than DALYs averted) for the charities that we evaluated. You can read more about this process, and the rationale for it, on the 'Criterion 2' tab of this page (with some additional context in this Forum comment).
  • For our 2024 Evaluations, we're making a few updates to our criteria, including moving to more bespoke Cost-Effectiveness Analyses of each charity's key programs. This will be more in line with the DALYs-type metrics you mention (though of course will still be subject to plenty of caveats, uncertainties, and wide confidence estimates).
  • Generally we think the best bet for ACE donors is our Recommended Charity Fund, as this allows us to allocate funds to the charities that we determine need it most at the time of disbursement. 
  • In case you've not already seen it, you might also find Rethink Priorities' Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model helpful.
  • Here’s my Calendly if you want to chat in more depth about ACE’s Evaluations process any time :-)
Curated and popular this week
Relevant opportunities