“How Can We Solve Animal Welfare’s Evidence Problem? (Post 1)” by Tom Billington, Henning Peters

<p> TL;DR: <br> The movement has an evidence problem. To solve it, for each intervention we need to know:</p><ul> <li> What types of evidence that intervention needs</li><li> What types of evidence different sources can give us</li></ul><p> In this post, we outline a framework for evidencing an intervention through five stages:</p><p> Figure 1: The five stages of the evidence pipeline.</p><p> Each stage poses a different question, needing different types of evidence, and thus different methods (and potentially different organisations and experts). A follow-up post will cover practical next steps.</p><p> Many thanks to those who reviewed our drafts. All mistakes are our own.</p><p><strong> <br> 1. Introduction</strong></p><p> Four months ago, Matthes argued that animal welfare has an evidence problem. Discussion mostly focused on the specific examples she gave. Her wider claim received less attention: that the movement lacks enough well-evidenced interventions, and that we need to take ownership of the entire evidence pipeline to change that.</p><p> Discussion so far has centred on interventions that are highly invested in, and whether their evidence is strong or weak (the top left of Figure 2). However, Most interventions are neither invested in nor well-evidenced. We want to add a second discussion point: how do we get [...]</p></br></strong></p></br></p> <p>---</p><p><strong>Outline:</strong></p><p>(00:31) 1. Introduction</p><p>(02:08) 2. What Do You Mean We Have An Evidence Problem?</p><p>(05:21) 3. The Evidence Pipeline</p><p>(06:48) Matthes' Examples &amp; Cross-Dependencies</p><p>(07:42) 5. Some Ramifications</p><p>(10:08) 6. Caveats with Our Pipeline</p><p>(11:41) 7. Conclusion</p><p>(12:30) Note on the Authors</p> <p><i>The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.</i> </p><p>---</p>

<p><b>First published:</b><br/>

October 10th, 2026 </p>

<p><b>Source:</b><br/>

<a href="https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/imT7cJrxsEnwjGEz7/how-can-we-solve-animal-welfare-s-evidence-problem-post-1?utm_source=TYPE_III_AUDIO&utm_medium=Podcast&utm_content=Source+URL+in+episode+description&utm_campaign=ai_narration" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/imT7cJrxsEnwjGEz7/how-can-we-solve-animal-welfare-s-evidence-problem-post-1</a> </p>

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<p>Narrated by <a href="https://type3.audio/?utm_source=TYPE_III_AUDIO&utm_medium=Podcast&utm_content=Narrated+by+TYPE+III+AUDIO&ut