EA - Animal Welfare - 6 Months in 6 Minutes by Zoe Williams

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: Animal Welfare - 6 Months in 6 Minutes, published by Zoe Williams on February 8, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.In August 2022, I started making summaries of the top EA and LW forum posts each week. This post collates together the key themes I’ve seen within top-rated animal welfare posts since then. (Note a lot of good work is happening outside what's posted on the forum too! This post doesn't try to cover that work.)If you’re interested in staying up to date on a more regular basis, consider subscribing to the Weekly EA & LW Forum Summaries, or to the Animal Advocacy Biweekly Digest. Forum announcements here and here.And for a great overview of the good the community is doing in this space, I highly recommend reading Big Wins for Farm Animals This Decade by Lewis Bollard.Key TakeawaysA multi-proxy method has been suggested as a better option than neuron counts for estimating the moral weights of different species, with a first stab completed by Rethink Priorities based on empirical and philosophical research.There is an increasing focus on small animal welfare eg. fish, crustaceans and insects. This is particularly relevant for interventions which may cause substitution effects (consumers moving from one form of animal product to another).Wild animal welfare is becoming a more established cause area, with recent launches including WildAnimalSuffering.org and the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program.Several major policy wins were achieved, including the first FDA approval of cultivated meat, and an EU announcement that it would put forward a proposal to end the systematic killing of male chicks.ThemesCross-Species ComparisonsMoving beyond neuron countsBig strides have been made in modeling cross-species welfare comparisons.Rethink Priorities published the Moral Weight Project Sequence (led by Bob Fischer), which tackles philosophical and empirical questions related to the relative welfare capacities of 11 different farmed animals. This included looking at the evidence for 90 different hedonic and cognitive proxies in those animals, discussing why we shouldn’t just use neuron counts, and publishing a model of relative differences in the possible intensities of these animals’ pleasure and pains (relative to humans). You can see the results below - they suggest using these as the best-available placeholders until further research can be completed, and noting the translation from intensity of experience (welfare range) into ‘moral weight’ is dependent on several philosophical assumptions:Other work in this area has included:The launching of the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, which will conduct and support foundational research about the nature and intrinsic value of nonhuman minds, including biological and artificial minds. There will be a special focus on invertebrates and AIs.The Shrimp Welfare Project (founded 2021) released research on using biological markers to measure the welfare of shrimp, and prioritize the practices causing the worst harms.MHR points out the issues with using neuron counts extend to the practical as well as the philosophical - the only publicly-available empirical reports of fish neuron counts sample exclusively from very small species (