Great to see. 
The animal party in the Netherlands did something even more bold back in mid 2024

“Thanks to a proposal put forward by the Party for the Animals and approved by the House of Representatives, the Dutch government will be pushing for a European import ban on shrimps whose eyes have been cut off without the use of an anaesthetic. The Minister of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality will also be calling on Dutch supermarkets to stop selling these mistreated shrimps.”

https://www.partyfortheanimals.com/pt/a-successful-achievement-the-dutch-house-of-representatives-aims-to-end-eyestalk-ablation-in-shrimp

I was pretty positively surprised to read "In Brazil, where large-scale cage-free production didn’t exist a decade ago, about 15% of hens are now cage-free." So I hope I'm wrong about the point below.

To me the article cited seems to instead say just that Mantiqueira, the largest egg producer in Brazil, has almost 15% cage-free production (and will reach 20% with the additional of 3 new cage-free units discussed in the article), not that total Brazilian production is 15% cage-free. (A Bloomberg article suggests the company has 5% organic and 15% "happyEggs" for a total of 20% cage-free production.)

Other sources seem to suggest the total Brazilian hen population is closer to 5% cage-free (e.g., the Latin American Egg Institute says 95% caged referencing 2023 production). Luiz Mazzon, president of the Certified Humane Brasil Institute in an article in May 2024 said “In Brazil, 5% of egg production comes from cage-free or free-range farms",  and this 2023 paper says the same thing (95% in conventional cages). Though this is where it was in 2019 (see this 2019 government-associated report) so maybe they're all referencing old data, not that the share of cage-free production hasn't increased at all (though also consistent with cage-free production increasing, just not as much as non-cage free production increased)

It's still great that the largest egg producer reached the 2.5M cage-free hen goal a year and a half ahead of schedule, and doesn't take much away from the genuine progress in cage-free. I assume these statistics above are old data and don't capture some of the progress that's happening and the projected increase in cage-free from the 35 cage-free commitments that have been fulfilled & 56 reporting (according to ChickenWatch). If you (or anyone in Brazil) have another source on the 15% that'd be really encouraging to read. 

 

Thanks Emre, 

In practical terms, each grant manager gives a score +5 to -5, with +5 being the strongest possible endorsement of positive impact, and -5 being a grant with an anti-endorsement that’s actively harmful to a significant degree. We then average across scores, approving those at the very top, and dismissing those at the bottom, largely discussing only those grants that are around the threshold of 2.5 unless anyone wanted to actively make the case for or against something outside of these bounds (the size and scope of other grants, particularly the large grants we approve, is also discussed). So the “bar for funding” is when the average of fund manager’s votes is ~2.5 (though we now also have an additional mechanism for comparing applications just above or below the bar).  And the votes take into account not just the welfare improvement from an intervention, but other factors like where it fits into broader theories of change, scalability, the value of funding (analyzing counterfactuals and long-term sustainability). For a list of our criteria, refer to a question in our FAQ: “How Does the EA Animal Welfare Fund Make Grant Decisions?”. 

However, if you mean what’s the bar in terms of impact per $, we’re currently trialing a few different approaches for how we estimate that (see our answers about use of welfare capacity, SADS, and benchmarks), and would like to arrive at a common unit and threshold (or range) that would be constant across species & interventions.  But again, this would just be one input and arguably the estimates shouldn’t be taken literally, but more as providing intuition pumps. 

Regarding how many animals or animal-years should be affected per dollar for the listed welfare improvements, this will very much depend on how those reforms were achieved (corporate campaigns, producer outreach, policy advocacy, strategic litigation, etc.). Unfortunately, at this time we can’t share a cost-effectiveness estimate for these common interventions from averaging the estimates across all relevant grant applications.  There are some publicly shared estimates that we refer to as potential benchmarks (see below). 

On cage-free and broiler welfare: Corporate welfare campaigns over 13 years (2005-2018) to commit corporations to sell only cage-free eggs and higher welfare chicken meat were estimated to impact 10 to 280 animals per dollar spent (9.5 to 120 animal years) (Šimčikas 2019). The author of the report, Saulius Šimčikas, made a comment on the Forum in 2021 about unpublished estimates of chicken welfare reforms, suggesting cost-effectiveness was two to three times lower in 2019-2020 than in 2016-2018 (“According to this new estimate, in 2019-2020 chicken welfare reforms affected 65 years of chicken life per dollar spent.)”. Similar sentiments about the lower cost-effectiveness of such campaigns today are discussed here and here. There’s also the separate cost-effectiveness for various ballot initiatives, including cage-free ones (Duffy 2023) and speculative broiler ballot initiatives (Khimasia 2023), and the various cost-effectiveness analyses from Vasco Grilo. Furthermore, in a comment in 2023, Emily Oehlsen, Managing Director of Open Philanthropy, a major funder of these chicken corporate campaigns, reported that since 2016, “we’ve covered many of the strongest opportunities in this space, and we think that current marginal opportunities are considerably weaker,” and that “We think that the marginal FAW funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis” referencing Šimčikas (2019).
So it seems fair to believe many cage-free and broiler welfare corporate campaigns being funded today are less cost-effective than the 2019-2020 estimate Saulius provided. Sagar Shah also created some prospective fish pre-slaughter stunning corporate campaign estimates suggesting such campaigns in Europe might only affect a few hours of life per dollar spent- though there are many caveats and assumptions in that estimate, including the very important consideration of how one weights excruciating pains. 

Thanks for another great question.
Similar to the answer about pain intensities, we’re trialing this in our cost-effectiveness models (though we are using the full range of the RP welfare capacity placeholder estimates, not just the median). ( I, Neil, also an employee in the RP animal welfare department, want to be cautious of any bias before the RP moral weights become a permanent feature). I also think the broader point about the RP placeholder welfare capacity ranges still holds- it is non-welfare capacity range factors that will often be more decisive. Based on the evidence assembled so far, using that methodology, the welfare capacity ranges between species are likely not many orders of magnitude different and so it mostly matters when you're comparing animal populations of similar sizes which just doesn't seem to be the comparison we’re making very often - in most cases, it still comes down to raw number of animals affected or years of suffering, cost to achieve the impact, and probability of success.

Thanks for the question!

 

I’d refer you to an answer we gave in a previous post about how the fund has historically relied on a range of factors to judge marginal cost-effectiveness for the majority of grants and it’s less often the case we have the evidence and the grant size merits a formal cost-effectiveness model. Having said that, we are currently trialing different approaches to cost-effectiveness modeling as that becomes a more standard feature of our deep evaluations (see more in our FAQs on our grantmaking process) and making explicit BOTECs a required part of evaluations. Among these, models we’re investigating include how a range of different pain category intensities weightings (as described in Grilo 2024, Ryba 2024, Schuck et al. 2024) could affect our cost-effectiveness estimates. 
There are reasonable grounds to put some credence in the most severe harms causing farmed animals at least as much disutility as the longest-lasting harms they experience (McAuliffe and Shriver 2023, also see Parra 2024, Ryba 2023).We make sure to note in the evaluation if the overall assessment would hinge on such a consideration (or other more philosophical/ fundamental questions where people have reasonable disagreements) to guard against being systematically biased towards one perspective. However, in practice, this may only be a crux for a handful of grant applications (e.g., those focused on pre-slaughter stunning)
Often to make a grant decision we don’t need to get a precise estimate down to the exact total hours of intensity-adjusted pain, just what would one need to believe for this grant to be at least competitive with other opportunities and does that seem like a reasonable belief to hold. 
 

Thanks for this!
Two small comments and I may come back with more substantive questions later

1. Downloadable version in pdf doesn't work for me (just redirects to a page saying forbidden). The PDF download link on the Animal Ask website works though

2. Perhaps I missed it, but do you intend to make a shareable version of this framework that allows users to plug in their own values (like a spreadsheet template with your toy example)? 

Thanks!
So, directionally if not literally, are you suggesting that in policy BOTECs, rather than assuming a policy will happen eventually and have indefinite impacts, so we only need add in how many extra years of impact occurred by the intervention succeeding now rather than later - we should be including a metric “how many years will this have impact for” and assigning ~100 years. And then take your data suggesting 80% of policies that barely passed were still in place 100 years later, but 40% of those that barely failed are. So should we be doing something like: That 100 year value (Probability of passing * 80%) - That 100 year value (probability of failing * 40%)

Based on the choice of words from the EU Commission President in her "state of the union" speech today, it seems as though the EU is indeed shelving the planned transition to cage-free hens supposed to be proposed this month, as part of a general change in strategic direction from it's top-down "Farm-to-Fork" strategy to some more bottom-up "strategic dialogue" approach.

If true, pretty big defeat for the EU animal movement. 

Probably a lot to do with current food inflation, prices, Ukraine war etc and pressure from industry and farmers

There's still some chance that they pick up some AW revisions as stand-alone items, set apart from the broader "Green Deal", or somehow civil society create enough pressure to rescue the Green Deal/Farm-to-Fork package as a whole. The President simply failed to mention animal welfare reform and instead focused on entering "the next phase of the European Green Deal" and in a letter of intent referring to launching "a strategic dialogue with the farming community". "While there'll be something on animal welfare (the Commission is obliged to reply to an ECI on it)" (Gerardo Fortuna, Agrifood Editor at EURACTIV) and Members of the European Parliament are directly asking her about why AW wasn't mentioned and that she should prioritise that. But there had been a lot of activity in the past week to pressure the President to include animal welfare revision in the State of the Union (suggesting they thought it was important) and part of the Theory of Victory/Change of the EU animal movement had been to tie animal welfare to the Green Deal & "Farm-to-Fork" and hope it got carried along the way. 

Here's some good coverage of the state of the union and what it might mean

https://twitter.com/gerardofortuna/status/1701878230448263251
https://www.ciwf.eu/news/eu-shelves-promised-ban-on-caged-farming/

Good sign.
Still has to go through a lot of negotiations and industry will obviously seek to water it down by claiming it's not economically feasible to do at all, or at least anytime soon. Also see the secondary Metaculus question- conditional on the European Union agreeing to ban cages, when will the phase out for cages end?

 

I think this is a really positive indication that builds on the many other positive indications we've had from the Commission that they will try push for an ambitious animal welfare reform, but I wouldn't want to overplay the EFSA opinion. It's harder to imagine a path to a cage-free transition in a world where EFSA came out against cage-free or was more muted in its support, but the fact that many EFSA opinions are ignored and watered down show that it is low down on the list of necessary but not sufficient factors.

The two Metaculus questions I set up on the cage-free reform have been pretty steady for a while now (and less optimistic than my median forecast), and I would be slightly surprised if they massively updated based on the EFSA opinion

Will the current European Commission make a proposal before the end of its term in November 2024 to phase out remaining hen cages? 

If the EU bans caged-housing for egg-laying hens, what date will be set as the phase out deadline?.

Just copy-pasting general comments I made on EFSA opinions from my long report on the EU farmed animal revision:

>"Most of the existing EU farmed animal welfare directives have been preceded by a report from an EU scientific committee (which proposes recommendations based on animal welfare considerations and often includes socio-economic impact assessments). There are certainly many cases of scientific reports that have not led to legislation (see the final section in the case studies), so although they may be necessary, they are not sufficient. My rough estimate is that four to six of the 22 to 59 reports since the 1980s on farmed animals that plausibly had species-specific welfare recommendations were used as the basis for legislation (depending on what you count as a relevant recommendation).  On average, when a report was produced and a law proposed by the Commission, then such a proposal came 32 months after the scientific report was completed, but this gap has been as quick as 2 months and as long as 63 months in past animal welfare directives. A baseline might be to expect that with the submission of a scientific report there is a 4%-27% chance it becomes a proposal in the short-term (within 5 years)."

There have been many instances where EFSA recommendations were ignored or severely  watered down. A relevant example being in March 2000, the EU scientific committee produced a report, “The Welfare of Chickens Kept for Meat Production (Broilers)”, and noted problems when densities exceeded 30kg/m2 [. . .] The Commission’s original May 2005 proposal hewed to the 2000 scientific report setting a maximum of 30kg/m2, with exceptional circumstances allowing a limit of 3kg/m2 if the cumulative daily mortality rate was  1%+ 0.06% *" . But the eventual  2007 compromise reached was 33kg/m2-39kg/m2 with a bonus up to 42kg/m2  if certain conditions were met. 

This is why I put a lot of attention of shaping the political landscape of the reform to increase the odds that any positive EFSA opinion turns into real results for animals.