EA - Introducing the Animal Advocacy Bi-Weekly Digest (Nov 4 - Nov 18) by James Ozden

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Introducing the Animal Advocacy Bi-Weekly Digest (Nov 4 - Nov 18), published by James Ozden on November 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.We are launching the Animal Advocacy Digest, a project aimed at collating and distributing the best research, news, and updates in animal advocacy on a bi-weekly cadence. Our goal with the project is to help people in the animal advocacy community quickly keep up with the most important information in the space even if they don’t browse the EA Forum or other sources daily. We’ll post the digest as an EA Forum post, as well as distribute it on this public email distribution - so you should sign up if you're interested! To start with, we'll only compile content posted on the EA Forum. This project will run as an experiment for 3 months, at which point we’ll evaluate how useful it is to users.Without further ado, here are the following posts summarised in this digest:Does the US public support radical action against factory farming in the name of animal welfare? by Neil Dullaghan (Rethink Priorities)Subsidies: Which reforms can help animals? by Ren Springlea (Animal Ask)The Welfare Range Table by Bob Fischer (Rethink Priorities)Theories of Welfare and Welfare Range Estimates by Bob Fischer (Rethink Priorities)What matters to shrimps? Factors affecting shrimp suffering in aquaculture by Lucas Lewit-Mendes & Aaron Boddy (Shrimp Welfare Project)Local Action for Animals as a Stepping Stone to State Protections by Precious Hose (original author, Faunalytics)(Bonus extra summary of interesting research) Low-cost climate-change informational intervention reduces meat consumption among students for years - Jalil et. al (2022)Does the US public support radical action against factory farming in the name of animal welfare? By Neil Dullaghan (Rethink Priorities)A pre-registered and US nationally representative survey by Rethink Priorities found approximately ~20% of respondents supported a ban on slaughterhouses when presented with arguments for and against. This number dropped to ~8% when participants were asked to explain their reasoning. Previous surveys by the Sentience Institute in the US found ~40% supported banning slaughterhouses or said ‘don’t know / no opinion’ to questions, highlighting a large discrepancy.Rethink Priorities suggests that previous polls which determined attitudes in response to broad questions (e.g. “I support a ban on slaughterhouses”) may not be accurate indicators of support for certain policies. These findings are notable for animal advocates as previous findings had been cited as support for bold reforms.Neil also notes that for future research, it might be useful to test a radical ask (ban factory farming) and a moderate ask (labelling for cage-free eggs, say) each with a radical message ("meat is murder") versus a moderate one ("human/consumer welfare") somewhat similar to this paper.Subsidies: Which reforms can help animals? - Ren Springlea (Animal Ask)A report by Animal Ask examines different subsidies reforms and how impactful these could be as campaign options for animal advocacy organisations. The five options examined are:Promoting welfare-conditional subsidiesAbolishing or reducing subsidies for meat productionSubsidies for feed cropsPromoting subsidies for plant-based foodsAbolishing subsidies for fisheriesThe authors say that they believe promoting welfare-conditional subsidies is the most promising campaign for animal advocacy organisations. They also believe reducing subsidies for meat production could be promising, however they suggest additional research to ensure that this doesn’t lead to an increase in the number of chickens (and overall animals) killed. They also note that they don’t believe options 3-5 above are promising campaigns, and encourage organisations to stee...