Animal Welfare
There are quadrillions of animals farmed for food, or used and killed for other products by humans. And, there are countless wild animals that face disease, starvation, and predation daily in wild spaces. For many of these animals, we don’t know the fundamental facts about what their lives are like, and what we can do to improve them.
Our research in animal welfare includes studying the industries that use animals, studying the basic facts of life for wild animals, trying to understand difficult questions in interspecies comparisons of value, and working to understand public views about animals and animal welfare. We focus our work on farmed animals, wild animals, and moral weight and animal sentience.
Farmed animals
Over the last 70 years, animals have become increasingly farmed using Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, also known as CAFOs, or factory farms. The industrialization of these industries has raised new animal welfare issues. The animal welfare movement has increasingly worked to reduce the harm of animal farming or eliminate factory farming. In recent years, this work has focused on campaigns to improve the welfare of laying hens and chickens raised for meat. In the future, new welfare issues might arise due to the mass rearing of insects.
Rethink Priorities supports to work of animal advocacy organizations and grant makers in the space by studying things like the cost-effectiveness of animal welfare campaigns, new opportunities for animal welfare interventions, and by polling public opinion on these issues. We also study the opportunity of plant-based meat alternatives to replace an animal based-food system, reducing animal suffering.
Wild animals
While wild animal advocacy has historically been seen through the lens of conservation and species conservation, little attention is paid in academic environments to the welfare of individual wild animals. But, core to many wild animals’ lives is a survival strategy that inherently involves immense suffering — hundreds or thousands of offspring might be born and die for each individual that makes it to adulthood. The inherent dynamic of these animals’ lives means that there is potentially immense suffering in the natural world. And, as a matter of research, there is little evidence about their lives. Simultaneously to these experiences independent of humans, humans impact wild animals on a massive scale, like the trillions of wild fish that are killed every year for food.
Our work in the space includes studying these evolutionary dynamics, looking into human-animal interactions in the wild, and analyzing proposed interventions to improve the lives of wild animals, like reducing the number of outdoor cats.
Moral weight and animal sentience
When studying animal welfare, often questions arise that are difficult on both empirical and philosophical grounds — what are the experiences of animals like? How should we compare actions that impact animals across different species? Our moral weight and animal sentience research explores which animals we should care about, the evidence for invertebrate sentience, how animal experiences differ from our own, and how we should compare the experiences of different animals.
Animal welfare research
