Welcome 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 outside of EA - numbers and thoughts on UFAW 2024, published by ARM on July 21, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Last week I attended the UFAW International Animal Welfare Conference 2024 in Porto. Here are some facts about the conference and its content as well as some personal impressions. I hope this gives some insights into animal welfare work outside of EA. Of course, this is just one conference, though.

I am not affiliated with UFAW and did not present any work at the conference.

TLDR

The UFAW International Animal Welfare Conference 2024 was an academic two-day event with talks and posters

most content was on farmed animals and lab animals

there was some representation of wild animals, especially among the talks, including the keynote

companion animals, working animals and animals in zoos/sanctuaries/rehabilitation centres together also made up a large part of the programme, mostly in the form of posters

my personal impressions include

most people attending were not vegetarian or vegan

general enthusiasm about helping animals seemed low

wild animal welfare is fringe, especially when considering non-anthropogenic harms

about UFAW and the conference

The Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW) is an animal welfare charity that focuses on supporting the science of animal welfare. They organise academic events, run the journal "Animal Welfare" and give grants and awards to researchers in the field.

The UFAW International Animal Welfare Conference 2024 was a two-day conference with programme scheduled from 9 am until 6 pm both days (10/11 July 2024). There were two types of content: talks and posters.

representation of different animal groups in the conference content

overview

I made pie charts to see how farmed, lab, wild, companion and other animals were represented in the programme.

Here is the pie chart for talks:

And here is the same for posters:

For the data behind these plots, including notes on potentially controversial classifications, see this GitHub repo.

wild animals

I was firstly pleasantly surprised by the fact that there were a number of talks on wild animals in the programme. They made up 15% of talks. Wild animal welfare was even the topic of the keynote at the very start of the conference ("What is wild animal welfare like and why should we care about it?" by Clare Palmer).

There were two talks on fertility control. One was a theoretical one on explicitly optimising total welfare by reducing population size, presented by Simon Eckerström Liedholm from the Wild Animal Initiative. The other one was by researchers from the Animal and Plant Health Agency in York and focused on using fertility control to replace rodenticide.

There was one talk on feral animals, presented by Peter Sandøe. In the talk Peter explicitly considers feral animals to be separate from wild animals, but I included them in this statistic.

Another talk was about "striking a balance between Iberian Lynx conservation efforts and animal welfare". The talk considers the welfare of the lynxes during captivity and reintroduction and the welfare of the rabbits used for food in captivity. However, it did not touch on the welfare of released lynxes or the welfare of any prey that the lynxes may hunt after release into the wild. Although the latter was pointed out by someone in the audience during questions after the talk.

Finally, Michael Beaulieu from the Wild Animal Initiative gave a talk on using biologgers to study wild animal welfare.

farmed animals

30% of talks and 37% of posters were on farmed animals. Topics included

measuring welfare (corticosterone, vocalisations...)

improving welfare (enrichments, outdoor access...)

attitudes of producers

attitudes of the public

policy/law

There was a small number of talks and posters that mentioned shrimp.

lab animal...