Episode Details

Most published animal welfare research is carried out by universities in labs.

I kind of assumed that this was a necessity in some way. Either stuff can't get published if you're not affiliated with a university, or universities just have the necessary rigour to get things done. I just assumed there's a whole host of reasons why this had to be the case, but I think those are mistaken.

And as a result, I think that when you start to look at universities, it starts to look strangely expensive to get things done. Things have a much longer time scale than is useful. And the facilities that they have to set up are often not good indicators of what reality looks like outside of the lab.

I think that high-quality welfare work can be done outside of universities and in fact, I think a huge amount of welfare work is done outside universities on farms but just isn't actually published and available in the literature. It just needs to be brought to the surface.

I want to see if it's possible for the animal welfare movement to rethink the model of research work and actively turn farms into welfare [...]

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Outline:

(01:27) How do we actually get data from farms?

(02:46) Can we turn them into Welfare Labs?

(04:02) Why this makes sense

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First published:
February 12th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yRQgZN7aiM6mAKgzq/turning-farms-into-welfare-labs

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.