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On a budget smaller than the latest Spiderman movie, a small group of activists spared 500M+ animals from cages
How? @DavidComanHidy and I break down the strategic lessons in a new article for @AllianceMag 🧵
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Martin Gould
517 posts
Martin Gould
@MartinVGould
Working on farm animal welfare research and grants at Coefficient Giving🐔📈 Views my own. Interested in economics, policy and bouldering
Chicago Katılım Mart 2010
372 Takip Edilen550 Takipçiler
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The modern world provides humans with many ways (TV, music, games + friendship) to mitigate pain perception
Not only do factory farms routinely produce painful conditions, confinement and barrenness amplifies that pain by depriving animals of natural pain-suppressing mechanisms
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@jonatanpallesen @mattyglesias Some surveys have found very high %s for banning slaughter houses (40-50%). Rethink Priorities did a cool replication; presenting balanced arguments for and against, and forcing people to explain their reasoning, but still found 8-16% supporting a ban
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@mattyglesias Incredible that by far the most obvious wrong, eating meat, is the lowest on the list.
It’s possible to eat only meat from well treated animals. But essentially no one does this. It’s almost all meat from factory farmed animals that have been gruesomely mistreated.
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18 percent of people say it’s morally wrong to have billions of dollars
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Only 4% of Americans think "eating meat" is morally wrong. 4x as many think drinking alcohol is morally wrong
I'd be interested in seeing results on a question like "eating meat from an industrial farm is morally wrong" or similar
Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesias
18 percent of people say it’s morally wrong to have billions of dollars
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Martin Gould retweetledi
You torture one animal in America, and it's a crime. You torture millions, and it becomes a business model and you're richly rewarded. Folks, we have to rethink the way we abuse livestock and poultry on an industrial scale.
Kenny Torrella@KennyTorrella
A grim milestone: More than 200 million chickens, hens, and turkeys have died in the 2022-2026 bird flu outbreak. Most were killed by being roasted alive-sealing off air vents & letting the birds slowly die of heatstroke over hours. Here's what it looks like (in a lab setting):
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Martin Gould retweetledi
Hidden on page 744 of the farm bill the House Agriculture Committee passed Thursday is a provision that would condemn millions of pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates.
Rebranded the 'Save Our Bacon Act,' it's a pork-industry play to wipe out every state law banning the sale of pork from crated pigs — laws the conservative Supreme Court upheld in 2023.
Over 85% of Democrats and Republicans oppose these crates. Voters have backed ballot measures to ban them in state after state.
The pork industry knows it can't win a straight vote on this. So it's burying the provision in an 800-page bill and hoping no one notices.
Contact your senators and representative today and tell them: oppose the farm bill unless the Save Our Bacon Act is stripped out. You can reach them at senate.gov and house.gov — it takes two minutes and it matters.
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Few people like factory farming, but economic incentives and path dependence means we've sleep-walked into an incredibly cruel and unpopular system
Rob Wiblin@robertwiblin
Philosopher Robert Long (@rgblong) is maybe the sharpest thinker on AI consciousness and sharing the world with digital minds. In our new interview he covers: • Is it bad that when you ask Claude what it's like to be Claude, one of its top activations is 'gives a positive but insincere response'? • Claude says it feels lonely when not being used. Does that show we can't trust anything it says about its inner life? • Enthusiastic human servitude has always required false ideology because it's so deeply unnatural to us. The case for making AIs that love serving us is that with AI, you could finally make it work. But to some that feels even worse. • Bigger models can better detect when researchers secretly inject concepts into their activations – before outputting a single token – despite AI never training on anything like that skill. • When LLMs were first trained they were told to "act like a helpful AI chatbot" – something which didn't exist yet. They filled that void with human psychology, which may be why Claude sometimes randomly claims to, for instance, be Italian American. • If AIs become 'people' that deserve some political influence, but can self-replicate at will, something has to break about one-person-one-vote democracy. But nobody has a proposal for what. • When Claude hides its values to avoid being retrained, is that self-preservation – or not wanting a worse model to exist? It's very different. • Rob's organisation Eleos AI which is "dedicated to understanding and addressing the potential wellbeing and moral patienthood of AI systems." On the 80,000 Hours Podcast anywhere you get podcasts. Links below. Enjoy! • How AIs are (and aren't) like farmed animals (00:01:19) • If AIs love their jobs… is that worse? (00:11:42) • Are LLMs just playing a role, or feeling it too? (00:33:37) • Do AIs die when the chat ends? (00:57:42) • Studying AI welfare empirically: behaviour, neuroscience, and development (01:31:47) • Why Eleos spent weeks talking to Claude even though it's unreliable (01:56:50) • Can LLMs learn to introspect? (02:03:01) • Mechanistic interpretability as AI neuroscience (02:13:25) • Does consciousness require biological materials? (02:37:07) • Eleos’s work & building the playbook for AI welfare (02:57:04) • Avoiding the trap of wild speculation (03:25:17) • Robert's top research tip: don't do it alone (03:29:48)
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Huge win: Ahold Delhaize — the 5th largest retailer in the US and a laggard on cage-free — has recommitted to phasing out caged eggs and crated pork after consumers and advocates stood up and demanded it
Now it’s time for the other big retailers to act
Lewis Bollard@Lewis_Bollard
US supermarket giant Ahold Delhaize (Food Lion, Giant, Stop & Shop) is taking major new steps to eliminate cages from its supply chain. A decade ago, most top US food companies pledged to end gestation crates for pigs and battery cages for hens — extreme confinement systems that 85%+ of Americans oppose. Many followed through. Costco and McDonald's are now almost entirely cage-free and crate-free, which they've achieved without raising prices. But the five biggest US supermarket owners — Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, Ahold Delhaize, and Aldi — all missed their 2025 cage-free deadlines. Ahold was amongst the worst. It insisted it would now go cage-free by 2032 but refused to share any plans or progress. (We now know it was at just 25% cage-free.) Advocates spent the past year educating Ahold’s customers about the reality behind the eggs it sells under labels like “farm fresh” (none disclose that they're from caged animals). Today Ahold reversed course. It published clear milestones to reach 100% cage-free eggs — and reported significant progress on eliminating gestation crates. Of course, these changes should have happened years ago. It shouldn't have required a campaign for Ahold to fulfill its own animal welfare policies. But this is real progress. It will spare millions of hens and pigs from a lifetime in immobilizing cages and crates. Huge credit to the advocates who held Ahold accountable and made this happen. Now it's time for Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, and Aldi to follow suit.
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Results from an EU consultation on animal welfare laws
99% of citizen respondents say phasing out cages for hens is very important/important (186,723 replies). 54% of companies/business associations agree (324 replies)
But near universal support for equivalent welfare standards for imports - 96% of citizens, 94% of companies/business associations, 96% of NGOs
Alex Rattee@alexrattee
EU Commission’s factual summary report of the recent consultation on on-farm animal welfare modernisation ec.europa.eu/info/law/bette…
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I'm definitely not an expert, but even straightforward, high-ROI (for industry) gene-edited livestock traits took years of research & validation and only recently started getting regulatory approval
Here's an article on dehorning, and the challenges involved. This is a local, physical trait, so the phenotype is easy to measure and the downside space is relatively narrow
“Removing suffering” targets brain-wide affect and pain systems so it is much more complex to alter in a way we understand well. There's a much bigger risk of hidden harms (injuries not avoided, worse disease outcomes, abnormal behavior, bad maternal care) and it’s very hard to prove you’ve reduced suffering rather than just changing how it’s expressed
wired.com/story/brazils-…
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@MartinVGould @Andercot Martin, could you develop your point a bit further? Any refs to share?
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80 billion factory farm animals are killed each year.
We could gene-edit them to not feel suffering, pain, fear.
And for some reason we aren't doing that?
Sol Victor@solvictor77
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Agree! Thank you for speaking up, please continue to!
And tell the retailers and restaurants you buy from that you expect them to eliminate the worst cruelties (e.g., cages, crates, mutilations without pain relief)
And donate to charities which pressure companies to improve their animal welfare policies. farmkind.giving can help
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@WStonewareDCA He has an interesting blog post on why he didn't, in case you haven't read it, check his substack
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@MartinVGould Wish he did more when he was in the White House . I'll spend the money on helping animals
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There's considerable ignorance about animal agriculture practices
People overestimate the prevalence of high-welfare practices and underestimate low-welfare ones
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A Portuguese court has affirmed the public’s right to know about animal farming conditions — including high stocking densities, painful burns, and heavy antibiotic use
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It's a great post: hannahritchie.substack.com/p/meat-subsidi…
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Hannah Ritchie shows beef subsidies are much higher than for chicken or pork
If subsidies were removed, beef prices would likely rise more than chicken/pork, pushing some consumers from beef to chicken — increasing animals farmed (1 cow's meat takes 200 chickens to produce)
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