GiveWell evaluates charities to a high standard. To date I have not seen any such research regarding animal welfare charities, the best of which probably alleviate much more suffering than the best human charities.

Alan Dawrst wrote on the cost-effectiveness of Vegan Outreach, but his methods do not come close to GiveWell's level of rigor. (One of the founders of GiveWell critiqued Dawrst's methods on this thread). Since GiveWell has indicated that they are unlikely to evaluate any animal welfare charities in the near future, what can we do?

One option is to promote GiveWell-certified human charities that work in India, since Indian culture affords much greater respect to animals, and charities that work in India indirectly increase its influence on global opinion. But how big of an effect is this? And just how much respect toward animals do most Indians feel?

It's a good question, MTG. I think the first best thing to do to with this problem is to put it to Giving What We Can. When GWWC have been asked about animal welfare charities in the past, they have always said they have no such plans 'yet'. It would be very interesting to talk to Giving What We Can, and propose to them that their charity evaluation weekend be extended in order to include the evaluation of animal welfare charities. It would be interesting to know whether this kind of project could be incorporated into their plans, and whether they would accept funding for this specific purpose.

Thanks for the thread! You might remember an older one with a similar-sounding name: "Evaluating animal-welfare charities' effectiveness," although its focus was slightly different.

In addition to the Vegan Outreach piece that you cited, you might enjoy this one about veg ads as well. However, I agree that the numbers are pretty back-of-the-envelope and not nearly as rigorous as what GiveWell does.

Part of the problem is that there are orders of magnitude less money being spent and less research being done on veg outreach. International health can occupy entire departments at universities, while I don't know a single academic studying veg conversion by outreach groups. (It would be great to find one!)

You might enjoy the web page of Simon Knutsson, who used to work at GiveWell and who has posted some informal interviews with animal organizations on his site. Here is one with Nick Cooney. In general, Nick is really interested in evaluation research for veg outreach, so he might be fun to contact (ncooney [put the at symbol here] farmsanctuary [put the dot here] org). He also has a book relating psychology research to social change, although it doesn't analyze cost-effectiveness for particular charities as far as I know.

In the veg-outreach world, there's only a handful of groups that focus on this work (The Humane League, Mercy for Animals, Vegan Outreach, VegFund, Compassion over Killing, and a few others), so to some extent, the analysis problem here isn't so much which charity to pick but which methods can the charities use for best results. As an example, when I learned of the effectiveness of Facebook veg ads, I asked Vegan Outreach to fund some this year (which they've never done before), and they agreed to do it. Veg-outreach groups are small enough that you can help steer their directions, rather than just picking among them.

As far as human charities in India, my guess is that the effect of health interventions toward promoting vegetarianism by raising India's global status is rather small. It seems intuitively much more effective to promote veg outreach directly. That said, if you are going to donate to human charities, India might not be a bad place to focus because the poor meat-eater problem is presumably less severe there.

BTW, I came across nice data in a Guardian article showing meat consumption per person in each country over time. From 1961 to 2002, China increases from 3.8 to 52.4 kg/person, but India increases from 3.7 to only 5.2. One thing to keep in mind is that Indians are probably more likely to eat chicken than beef, which means 1 kg of meat in India may mean more suffering than 1 kg of meat in other countries. However, based on other data I found breaking down types of meat by country, it doesn't seem as though India eats disproportionately more chicken (see the bottom table). Fish consumption isn't shown, but according to the top table in that same source, India is second in the world in fish production (though way behind China).

P.S., according to the Guardian article, "Surprisingly, it is not the US with the largest consumption (124.8), but Denmark with a shocking 145.9kg per person in 2002."