Humans comprise just 0.01% of Earth’s biomass, and an even smaller percentage of all living individual animals. More farmed animals are slaughtered for food each year than the number of humans who have ever lived in all of history and most of them will live their entire lives in factory farm conditions. And at any given time, more than 99.9% of the animals alive are invertebrates, which face complex and varied harms in the wild.

Questions to consider

• What are the comparative moral weights of different species?
• How should we prioritize the welfare of farmed animals, wild animals, and animals in the far future?
• What tactics are effective at improving animal welfare?

Resources

Why should we care about nonhuman animals?

• Basic
  • We will look back on this age of cruelty to animals in horror (Ezra Klein, 2021) (article)
  • Research on Animal welfare by Rethink Priorities
• Moral weights
  • How to Measure Capacity for Welfare and Moral Status (Rethink Priorities / Jason Schukraft) (post - 42 mins)
  • Suffering in Animals vs. Humans (Brian Tomasik / Essays On Reducing Suffering, 2012-2017) (post - 8 mins)
• Moral circle
  • Expanding the moral circle (Kelly Witwicki, 2017) (talk)

Foundational considerations in animal work

• Summary of Evidence for Foundational Questions in Effective Animal Advocacy (Sentience Institute, 2017-2020) (Article, 53 mins)
• Animal rights vs animal welfare (Animal Advocacy Careers, 2021-2023) (post - 7 mins)

Priority areas within effective animal advocacy

• Farmed animals
  • Why Farmed Animals? (Animal Charity Evaluators, 2016) (article - 3 mins / video)
• Wild animal welfare
  • Introduction to the problem:
    • The wild frontier of animal welfare (Dylan Matthews / Vox, 2021) (article - 17 mins)
    • Wild animal suffering: an introduction (Animal Ethics) (post - 9 mins / narration - 10 mins)
  • Introduction to a solution: Wild animal welfare research priorities (Wild Animal Initiative) (article - 17 mins)
• Neglected areas
  • Animals: long list of ideas (Charity Entrepreneurship, Spreadsheet)
  • Geography
    • Why the future of animal welfare lies beyond the West (Marc Gunther / Vox, 2021) (article, 17 mins)
  • Invertebrates
    • The scale of direct human impact on invertebrates (Abraham Rowe, 2020) (post - 16 mins)
    • On the torment of insect minds and our moral duty not to farm them (Jeff Sebo, 2021) (article - 14 mins)
  • Vertebrates
    • Estimates of global captive vertebrate numbers (Saulius Šimčikas, 2020) (posts - 74 mins)
    • The next frontier for animal welfare: Fish (Kenny Torrella, 2021) (article - 15 mins)
• Future animals
  • Wild animal welfare in the far future (Saulius Šimčikas, 2022) (post - 31 mins)
  • Moral Circle Expansion: Animal advocacy and the long-term future (Jimmie Harris / Sentience Institute, 2020) (talk - 1 hour 32 mins)
  • Should Longtermists Mostly Think About Animals? (Abraham Rowe, 2020) (post - 25 mins)