This post summarizes research into the Chinese mantis, focusing on the genes associated with nociception (the ability to perceive noxious stimuli). This type of research may help to improve the conditions on farms to better meet the needs of insects.

Researcher Sagar Shah estimated how cost effective farmed fish slaughter commitments from retailers might be in Europe. His research focused on France, Italy, and Spain because of the large scale of consumption of farmed fish species that don’t benefit from stunning in these countries.

This is the third report in Rethink Priorities’ Shrimp Welfare Sequence, a series that addresses whether and how to best protect the welfare of shrimp. After outlining the welfare threats farmed shrimp may face, this report investigates the effect of these welfare threats on pre-slaughter mortality.

This post is a short summary of research on farmed cricket welfare considerations funded by Rethink Priorities as part of our research agenda on understanding the welfare of insects on farms. The paper includes recommendations.

In their review of corporate campaigns for cage-free eggs, our researchers found that, on average, a one-commitment increase leads to a 0.035 (95% CI: 0.01 - 0.06) percentage point rise in the share of cage-free hen housing. Given the large number of hens in the industry, the impact of a few new commitments per year is substantial.

This is the second report in Rethink Priorities’ Shrimp Welfare Sequence. The first report estimated the scale of shrimp farming. This report examines the welfare threats that these individuals face.

This report builds a strategy based on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the animal advocacy movement in the European Union (EU) farmed fish policy space.

Rethink Priorities hosted the “Dimensions of Pain” workshop in April 2023 with experts in pain research. The goal was to identify empirical methods to test whether brief but severe pains (e.g. botched slaughter) or milder but longer pains (e.g. lameness) have a greater overall negative impact on farmed animals' welfare. This report summarizes the results and our researchers' updated conclusions.

Much of the optimism around plant-based meats derives from the hypothesis that matching animal-based meats in price, taste, and convenience (PTC) will shift consumption. However, Jacob Peacock’s review of the available evidence suggests that PTC are not the primary determinants of food choice. Even if plant-based meats were price, taste, and convenience competitive, many consumers would still primarily choose animal-based meats.

While decreasing the prices of plant-based substitutes is a prominent animal welfare strategy, it's possible this approach could increase animal consumption. In a review of 19 studies, Samara Mendez et al. observed wide variation in the relationship between butter and margarine prices and demand.

Senior Researcher Sagar Shah and Senior Research Manager Jacob Peacock conducted a preregistered reanalysis of data from a series of hypothetical discrete choice experiments from Brachem et al. (2019). They explored how meat-free meal selection correlated with the number of meat-free options and the availability of options containing fish/poultry meat or meat-analogues.

Approximately 200-300 billion black soldier flies are farmed annually. In a new post, academic collaborator Meghan Barrett (Ph.D. Entomology) summarizes and provides additional context related to her and her colleagues’ academic article on “Welfare considerations for farming black soldier flies, Hermetia illucens (Diptera: Stratiomyidae): a model for the insects as food and feed industry.”

Voluntary certification schemes (VCS) specify production standards and auditing processes. International VCSs are one of the few current governance tools to improve the welfare of farmed fishes and shrimps. Knowing to what degree farmers register with certification schemes and what influences their decisions may inform future uses of this animal welfare advocacy strategy. This shallow literature review addresses the determinants considered by exporting farmers in China and Thailand.

Understanding the US public’s levels of support for radical actions such as banning slaughterhouses helps to inform animal advocates’ proposals and messaging. In contrast to previous surveys conducted by others, this report presents preregistered studies that cast doubt on the extent to which the public actually supports radical action against factory farming. The researchers suggest that polling responses to broad questions may not be reliable indicators of actual support for specific policies or messages. Instead, they recommend testing people's responses to more detailed messages and policy proposals, paying special attention to how radical messages compare to counterfactual moderate messages.

This report is a postscript to "The relative Importance of the severity and duration of pain,” and addresses whether the order of negative and positive experiences matter. For example, is pain worse if it occurs at the end of an individual’s life?

How should effective altruists decide whether to prioritize interventions that alleviate severe but relatively brief suffering or instead those that alleviate longer-lasting but less severe suffering? When one pain is longer-lasting but less intense than a second pain, the most straightforward way to compare how much disutility they cause is to multiply how much longer by how much less severe the first pain is than the second pain. This report investigates whether this mathematical approach is sufficient for making cause prioritization decisions, requires some amendments, or is fundamentally flawed.

Billions of black soldier flies (BSFs) are farmed annually. This post summarizes research into the brain cell counts of BSFs, which may help us to assess the likelihood that they are sentient. The research described in this post was the first to use the isotropic fractionation technique to count an insect’s brain cells across developmental stages and the first to describe the nervous system of a popular, farmed invertebrate.

Is it worth the effective altruism (EA) community trying to accelerate the growth of cultured meat production? Should EA just let market forces move it forward? Should EA invest directly in cultured meat R&D or identify high-leverage ways to increase funding? Or should EA just not invest in it because it is insufficiently promising?

Several societal issues could be mitigated by reducing global consumption of meat and animal products (MAP). In three randomized, controlled experiments (n=217 to 574), we evaluated the effects of a documentary that presents health, environmental, and animal welfare motivations for reducing MAP consumption. Study 1 assessed the documentary’s effectiveness at reducing reported MAP consumption after 12 days. This study used methodological innovations to minimize social desirability bias, a widespread limitation of past research. Study 2 investigated discrepancies between the results of Study 1 and those of previous studies by further examining the role of social desirability bias. Study 3 assessed the documentary’s effectiveness in a new population anticipated to be more responsive and upon enhancing the intervention content. We found that the documentary did not decrease reported MAP consumption when potential social desirability bias was minimized (Studies 1 and 3). The documentary also did not affect consumption among participants whose demographics suggested they might be more receptive (Study 3). However, the documentary did substantially increase intentions to reduce consumption, consistent with past studies (Studies 2 and 3). Overall, we conclude that some past studies of similar interventions may have overestimated effects due to methodological biases. Novel intervention strategies to reduce MAP consumption may be needed.

The story of how cultured meat becomes widespread involves overcoming many technical challenges. We review techno-ecomonic analyses (TEAs) of cultured meat, and evaluate their disagreements. The main cruxes of disagreement across the TEAs are: approach to the research question, investor payback timelines, food grade versus pharmaceutical grade bioreactors, the costs of media (growth factors and amino acids) at scale, and the limits of cell-engineering needed to reduce media consumption needs.