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 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.

Given the number of wild animals that exist, interventions to improve their welfare could have greater expected value than interventions on behalf of other groups. Yet, wild animals receive only a small share of resources earmarked for animal welfare causes. This report explores how different risk aversion frameworks might help increase advocates’ reasoning transparency.

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.

This is a linkpost for a preprint paper submitted for peer review. The report explains how vaccine baits can be used to reduce the costs of dog vaccination campaigns, which are the key to controlling rabies amongst humans.

This post is the third installment in the Rodenticide Reduction sequence. This report describes and ranks interventions to reduce rodenticide use in the U.S. according to their expected impact, neglectedness, and tractability.

This post is the second installment in the Rodenticide Reduction sequence. This report explores the reasons why rodenticides are used, under what circumstances they could be replaced, and whether they are replaceable with currently available alternatives.

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.