Of 273 predictions cultured meat predictions found, 84 have resolved - nine resolving correctly, and 75 resolving incorrectly. Additionally, another 40 predictions should resolve at the end of the year and look to be resolving incorrectly. Overall, the state of these predictions suggest very systematic overconfidence. Cultured meat seems to have been perpetually just a few years away since as early as 2010 and this track record plausibly should make us skeptical of future claims from producers that cultured meat is just a few years away.

The European Commission is planning to revise and expand the scope of European Union animal protection policies with new legislative proposals in late 2023, likely followed by another ~12-24 months of negotiations before being passed into law. The effective animal advocacy movement should attempt to have the most impact during the policy formation stage and to prioritise which countries need to be targeted to ensure proposals are not significantly weakened before passing into law. I’ve recently written two reports to contribute to strategic discussions, here and here. The two reports total more than 57,000 words. Below is an overview of the project, the main recommendations, and a summary of the main arguments.

Rethink Priorities conducted a survey to see how live shackle slaughter resonates with consumers to engender support for reforming this practice. We also tested whether controlled atmosphere systems are a popular alternative. We found that clear majorities of Americans (including among those who eat chicken) agree that live-shackle slaughter is inhumane and would switch brands to avoid live-shackle slaughter or pay more for meat produced using controlled atmosphere systems instead.

The European Union may be an arena where there are promising opportunities to improve farmed animal welfare through legislation due to historic legal precedents, high public concern for farmed animals, a professional animal protection movement, and new momentum for legislation. Pushing for higher minimum farmed animal welfare standards in law has brought many victories in Europe, but laws are only as good as their implementation. As the animal welfare movement continues to push for higher legal standards for a wider range of farmed animals, one should also pay attention to whether these standards are being practiced in reality. In this report by Rethink Priorities, we focus on the European Union as an example of legislative protection of farmed animal welfare and detail the mechanisms by which compliance is sought.

As part of Rethink Priorities' research into European Union farmed animal welfare policy, here we sketch out some points we think are important to consider when assessing whether EU law is an important arena to work on for improving the lives of farmed animals. This is an entry in a series by Rethink Priorities that will examine how EU animal welfare laws are made and enforced, the type of laws that are most successful, and the impact of EU standards abroad via trade policies. This work may help inform the funding strategies of those concerned with EU level animal welfare legislation, the lobbying and advocacy activity of groups directly involved in the EU, and policy makers interested in designing EU laws most likely to be complied with.

In this article, I list all the estimates I could find for numbers of vertebrates that are farmed or kept in captivity for various purposes. I also describe some groups of captive vertebrates for which I found no estimates. For some bigger groups of animals that are less well-known amongst animal activists, I also describe trends and main welfare concerns.

In a 60 month long food demand survey of a representative sample of the U.S. done by Oklahoma State University, very liberal participants were most likely to report being veg*n (vegetarian/vegan) at 15%, roughly 10% higher than the remaining participants. Data shows a gap in veg*n rates between liberals (9.9%) and conservatives (3.8%), and between Democrats (7.4%) and Republicans (4.8%). However, annual trends show that veg*n rates among conservatives/Republicans are rising as quickly or quicker than liberals/Democrats. Roughly 60% of self-reported veg*ns also selected a meat option from nine total food options, two of which were veg*n. Annual trends for veg*n rates largely decrease after filtering out “meat-purchasing veg*ns” suggesting that people are growing more likely to report being veg*n while continuing to select meat products.

Some strategic decisions in animal advocacy are informed by the numbers of animals in various countries. The most widely used statistics about the numbers of farmed animals come from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) website FAOSTAT. In this article, I provide some examples of inconsistencies in FAOSTAT animal data, and further reasons to think that the data may sometimes be inaccurate. The main point of this article is that it’s probably worth trying to verify FAO numbers before using them to make important decisions. In the appendix, I also explain some minor caveats that should be understood when interpreting FAO numbers.

This article contains a list of research organizations, newsletters, research libraries, personal blogs, conferences, podcasts, funds, notable written works and other links associated with Effective Animal Advocacy (EAA) movement. The list is biased because I only included resources that I know of.

This post introduces a spreadsheet which visualizes numbers of corporate cage-free and broiler commitments made in different years, regions, and industries. The data for the spreadsheet is taken from chickenwatch.org.

In this article, I estimate how many chickens will be affected by corporate cage-free and broiler welfare commitments won by all charities, in all countries, during all the years between 2005 and the end of 2018. According to my estimate, for every dollar spent, 9 to 120 years of chicken life will be affected. However, the estimate doesn't take into account indirect effects which could be more important.

Fish stocking is the practice of raising fish in hatcheries and releasing them into rivers, lakes, or the ocean. 35-150 billion finfish are stocked every year. Fish are stocked to: increase the catch in commercial fisheries (probably tens of billions of stocked fish annually), increase the catch in recreational/sport fisheries (billions of stocked fish annually), and restore a population of threatened or endangered species (the number of stocked fish seems to be lower).

There are between 4.2 million and 7.8 million pet snakes in the world. 160 million to 2.1 billion vertebrates are killed for pet snake food every year. Most of the vertebrates seem to be farmed mice. Feeder mice are killed when they are anywhere between 48 hours and more than 9 months old. Most seem to be slaughtered when they are less 3–4 weeks old. Farming of feeder animals seems to involve considerable suffering because they are often living in cramped and possibly unsanitary conditions, which don’t have shelters to hide in, lack daylight and activities. I haven’t figured out what possible interventions in this space could be particularly promising. It’s possible that the problem is not very tractable. In this article, I first estimate the number of animals raised for pet snake food in the world. Then I discuss some welfare concerns of these feeder rodents by comparing the conditions in which they are raised to the ones recommended for pet mice. Finally, I brainstorm about possible interventions.

Multiple animal organisations are now focusing on securing corporate commitments to improve animal welfare. And they have been very successful: Chicken Watch lists 1672 such commitments, 1007 of which are set to be fulfilled between 2020 and 2026. However, there is some reason to worry that some of these commitments may be broken. Based on this, I suggest that it would be valuable to put more effort in ensuring that companies keep their promises, and I list some ways in which it could be done.

Animal Equality and Faunalytics put together a field study testing individual video outreach on belief and diet change. They found statistically significant results on both. Together with a Reducetarian Foundation study, we now think there is sufficient evidence to establish that individual outreach may work to produce positive change for nonhuman animals. However, evidence in this study points to an estimate of $310 per pig year saved (90% interval: $46 to $1100), which is worse than human-focused interventions even from a species neutral perspective. More analysis would be needed to see how individual outreach compares to other interventions in animal advocacy or in other cause areas.

Factory farming in the United States and other developed countries is no doubt terrible. And while other developing countries are catching up in their sophistication, it is not clear yet what factory farming is like in the least developed parts of the developing world where most aid is focused. Instead, most rural livestock in the developing world is kept in a pastoral farming system that is relatively “free range”.

However, little information is publicly available on the internet about what this is like or how much animal suffering is involved relative to the developed country horror of factory farming. We visited three animal farms in Zambia.