VettedCauses
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I don’t think THL UK’s view of the case is as unreasonable as implied.
THL claimed "we believe that last week's ruling on Franken chickens marks 'the beginning of the end of this type of this type of outdated farming'"[1] and has a collaborative post on their Instagram page that states that this ruling marked "a significant victory for animal welfare."[2][3]
The Court dismissed THL's case, and provided an unfavorable interpretation of the animal welfare law in question.[4] All trial courts in the UK (except for those in Northern Ireland and Scotland) are now required to use this unfavorable interpretation of the animal welfare law in question.
Is this a significant victory for animal welfare?
The Humane League (THL) filed a lawsuit against the UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (the Defra Secretary) alleging that the Defra Secretary’s policy of permitting farmers to farm fast-growing chickens unlawfully violated paragraph 29 of Schedule 1 to the Welfare of Farmed Animals (England) Regulations 2007.
Paragraph 29 of Schedule 1 to the Welfare of Farmed Animals (England) Regulations 2007 states the following:
- “Animals may only be kept for farming purposes if it can reasonably be expected, on the basis of their genotype or phenotype, that they can be kept without any detrimental effect on their health or welfare.” [1]
THL’s case was dismissed.
THL appealed the dismissal, and again THL’s case was dismissed (this most recent dismissal is what THL’s post is about).
In this most recent dismissal, the Court clarified the meaning of Paragraph 29 as follows:
- “Paragraph 29 was not concerned with the environmental conditions in which animals were kept; it was concerned with the characteristics of the breed, and with detriment which could not be mitigated by improving the animal’s environment”
- “Accordingly, paragraph 29 was a prohibition on the keeping of farmed animals whose genotype and phenotype meant that, regardless of the conditions in which they were kept, they could not be kept without detriment to their health or welfare” [2]
Essentially, the Court ruled that Paragraph 29 is only violated if an animal is bred such that it cannot avoid genetically caused health/welfare problems even under perfect environmental conditions (i.e. giving the animal the best possible food/diet, a perfect living environment, and world class medical treatment). This allows farmers to continue to farm animals so long as their genetic issues can theoretically be mitigated by improving conditions, even if those conditions are unlikely to be implemented in practice.
For example, let’s say there is a genetically selected breed of chicken that under normal factory farming conditions grows so fast that their legs snap under their weight by the time they are a month old. Under the Court’s ruling, this would not violate Paragraph 29, so long as this problem (and other genetically caused problems) could theoretically be mitigated with better environmental conditions (i.e. giving the chicken the best possible food/diet, a perfect living environment, and world class medical treatment).
Since the Court offered this interpretation of Paragraph 29, all trial courts in the UK (except for those in Northern Ireland and Scotland) are now required to use this interpretation of Paragraph 29 when making rulings.
From our understanding, this is not a favorable interpretation of Paragraph 29, as it makes it extremely difficult to prove that a violation of Paragraph 29 has occurred. Under this ruling, the only way to prove that a Paragraph 29 violation has occurred is by proving the health/welfare problems encountered by an animal are completely unavoidable, even with absolutely perfect environmental conditions/treatment.
Because of this ruling, anyone who ever tries to claim a Paragraph 29 violation has occurred will have to meet this extremely high standard of evidence that the Court has laid out.
Hi,
Thank you for taking the time to read our review and for responding to each of our points. We really appreciate ACE’s willingness to engage with feedback and acknowledge problems.
Regarding your clarifications related to the calculation of Normalized Achievement Scores:
‘Charities can have 1,000,000 times the impact at the exact same price, and their Normalized Achievement Scores and Cost-Effectiveness Score can remain the same.’
- This isn’t the case, but we didn’t publish the full details about our method for assessing the impact of books, podcasts, and other interventions, so we see why this wasn’t clear. Essentially for each intervention in our Menu of Interventions we identified proxies for its likely impact. For books, we had intended to include sales/views as well as a rating of the overall audience response/reviews. In practice, this wasn’t possible for various reasons given the wide variation in types of publication (e.g., some publications had not been released yet, or had been provided directly to the audience with no feedback collected), so we had to factor in such considerations on a more case-by-case basis in our Recommendations Decisions discussions.
We are glad to hear that ACE was accounting for these factors behind the scenes.
‘Charities can increase their Normalized Achievement Scores and Cost-Effectiveness Score by breaking down actions into smaller steps, even if the overall results remain unchanged.’
- This actually isn’t the case (sorry if this wasn’t clear). Breaking down an achievement into smaller steps would drive up the ‘Achievement quantity’ score, but would be offset by lower ‘Achievement quality’ scores for each achievement. However, there was still a risk of this introducing inconsistency into the model, which is another reason why we updated our methods this year.
Thank you for clarifying this. From the publicly available rubrics for calculating Achievement Quality Scores, it did not seem like breaking down an achievement into smaller steps would decrease the Achievement Quality Score at all. However, given that ACE was accounting for factors outside of the publicly available rubrics, it makes sense that this decrease could occur.
That being said, we believe it is important for ACE to fully disclose its methodology to the public and avoid relying on hidden evaluation criteria. This transparency would allow people from outside the organization to understand how ACE's charity evaluation metrics (i.e. Normalized Achievement Scores) were calculated.
We might also reach out to you via email in the coming weeks as we go through retrospectives and plan for next year’s evaluation. Because of the complexity of the animal welfare cause area, the many uncertainties and knowledge gaps in the field of charity evaluation, and the urgency and scope of suffering, we embrace productive collaboration.
We appreciate your openness to collaboration. Feel free to reach out to us at any time at hello@vettedcauses.com
I don't find that evidence particularly compelling on its own, no. Lots of projects cost more than 1M or take more than a few years to have success. I don't see why those things would be cause to dismiss a project out of hand.
The question I asked was: "You don't find these facts particularly compelling evidence that LIC is not historically cost-effective?"
The question was not about whether these facts are compelling evidence that LIC won't be successful in the future, or if the project should be dismissed.
Note: this reply addresses everything Abraham claims we did not provide evidence for.
“ACE's poor evaluation process leads to ineffective charities receiving recommendations”
Our review covered how under ACE’s evaluation process:
- Charities can receive a worse Cost-Effectiveness Score by spending less money to achieve the exact same results.
- Charities can have 1,000,000 times the impact at the exact same price, and their Cost-Effectiveness Score can remain the same.
- The most important factor in determining the impact of an intervention is decided before the intervention even begins.
This is clear evidence that ACE uses a poor evaluation process. Is the fact that ACE’s evaluation process rewards inefficiency, and punishes efficiency, “no evidence” for ACE recommending ineffective charities?
If you’d like me to get even more specific, let’s look at Problem 1 of our review:
We go on to detail how if LIC had spent less than $2,000 on the lawsuit (saving over $200,000) and achieved the exact same outcome, ACE would have assigned LIC a Cost-Effectiveness Score of 1.8. The lowest Cost-Effectiveness Score ACE assigned to any charity in 2023 was 3.3. This means if LIC had spent less than $2,000 on the lawsuit, LIC's Cost-Effectiveness Score would have been significantly worse than any charity ACE evaluated in 2023.
Instead, LIC spent over $200,000 on the lawsuit, and LIC rewarded them for this inefficiency by giving them a Cost-Effectiveness Score of 3.7, and deeming LIC a top 11 animal charity.
As we noted in our review, these Cost-Effectiveness Scores are defined by ACE as “how cost effective we think the charity has been”. LIC achieved no favorable legal outcomes despite receiving over a million dollars in funding. As we also noted in our review, every lawsuit LIC filed was dismissed for failing to state a valid legal claim.
If I provided evidence that a Law Firm Rating Organization rewards law firms for losing lawsuits and wasting money, and punishes law firms for winning lawsuits and saving money, would this be no evidence that the Law Firm Rating Organization is recommending ineffective law firms?
ACE's poor evaluation process leads to ineffective charities receiving recommendations, and many animals are suffering as a result.
Our review details how ACE’s recommendations direct the flow of millions of dollars. Are you asking for evidence that directing millions of dollars toward ineffective animal charities, rather than effective ones, leads to animal suffering?
we have reviewed 5 of ACE's "Top 11 Animal Charities to Donate to in 2024" and only one of them (Shrimp Welfare Project) appears to be an effective charity for helping animals.
Imagine a film critic watches 5 of the 11 films that received a 'Best Films' award and writes, “Of the five films I’ve seen, only one appears to deserve the award. I plan to release my reviews of the films shortly.” Does this statement by the film critic require evidence?
Thank you for clarifying this. We agree that our comment above implied a greater degree of unreasonableness on behalf of THL than was warranted.
That being said, we still believe the law is likely in a worse place for animals compared to before the filing of the initial case. The interpretation offered by the Court appears to be quite strict, and we suspect it will be difficult for subsequent litigants to meet the evidentiary standard established by this case. Hopefully we are wrong about this.
We also still believe that THL’s communication surrounding this case was quite poor, and misleading. Notably, THL did not even disclose the name of the court case in this post, or in the post on their website.