Hey Everyone,  Posting this to share some notes from CattleCon 2025. The notes cover the talks from the event on sustainability, healthy diets and key policy issues for the industry. Hopefully they should be interesting to anyone working on those areas. Some Context: CattleCon is the annual meeting of National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), the event includes presentations from NCBA staff, educational talks, a trade show and meetings of Beef Checkoff committees.  The NCBA is a marketing organisation and trade association founded in 1898. Its mission is: “To serve the cattle and beef industry by improving the business climate, growing beef demand, and increasing the world’s access to U.S. beef.”  According to 990s the NCBA's annual budget is around $55 million with the majority of its revenue coming from the Beef Checkoff. The notes are here: https://drive.proton.me/urls/8ENZ5T6KZ4#2onjMymrt6jN  If you have any questions about the report please get in touch. 

We're so excited to share the expansion of our partnership with Sodexo USA—extending their plant-based patient meals program to all U.S. hospitals under their management. On top of the 131 Sodexo hospital accounts already serving plant-forward patient menus, 200 more are set to transition this year, with 400 adopting the program by 2026. This collaboration builds on the remarkable success of Greener by Default and Sodexo’s program with NYC Health + Hospitals, which launched in 2022 and resulted in half of all eligible patients opting for plant-based menu items—cutting the health system’s carbon emissions by over one-third in just its first year.  Preliminary data from a participating hospital indicates the promising potential impact of the expansion: if just 10% of the 290,000 meals Sodexo serves to patients per day shift from meat-based to plant-based, the company could transition over 10 million meals per year. “The continued success of patient menus that position plant-based options as the default demonstrates how small, cost-effective shifts can have an outsized impact, while still preserving freedom of choice for diners and ensuring their access to nutritious, sustainable foods that don’t compromise on taste,” said Katie Cantrell, CEO and Co-Founder of Greener by Default. “We look forward to our ongoing work with Sodexo, and to building more partnerships with forward-thinking healthcare institutions that want to make a difference for their patients and the planet.” 🌱 Read the full release: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250407391456/en/Greener-by-Default-Announces-Expanded-Partnership-With-Sodexo-to-Offer-Plant-Based-Meals-at-400-U.S.-Hospitals 

Hello FAST!  I am glad to inform that the cruise line company Viking Line has decided to adopt the European Chicken Commitment (ECC). This decision follows a long dialogue with Project 1882 and encompasses all of the company's operations in Sweden, Finland, and Estonia. This makes Viking Line the latest cruise line company to commit to the ECC following discussions with Project 1882. They join Finnlines, Stena Line, and Destination Gotland in this initiative. Project 1882 is now focusing on the remaining ferry companies in the Baltic Sea, such as Tallink Silja and TT-Line. Approximately 6 million people travel with Viking Line each year.  Read more here: Viking Line says no to Frankenchickens | Project 1882

"Part one of our challenge is to solve the technical alignment problem, and that’s what everybody focuses on, but part two is: to whose values do you align the system once you’re capable of doing that, and that may turn out to be an even harder problem", Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO (Link).  In this post, I argue that: 1. "To whose values do you align the system" is a critically neglected space I termed “Moral Alignment.” Only a few organizations work for non-humans in this field, with a total budget of 4-5 million USD (not accounting for academic work). The scale of this space couldn’t be any bigger - the intersection between the most revolutionary technology ever and all sentient beings. While tractability remains uncertain, there is some promising positive evidence (See “The Tractability Open Question” section). 2. Given the first point, our movement must attract more resources, talent, and funding to address it. The goal is to value align AI with caring about all sentient beings: humans, animals, and potential future digital minds. In other words, I argue we should invest much more in promoting a sentient-centric AI. The problem What is Moral Alignment? AI alignment focuses on ensuring AI systems act according to human intentions, emphasizing controllability and corrigibility (adaptability to changing human preferences). However, traditional alignment often ignores the ethical implications for all sentient beings. Moral Alignment, as part of the broader AI alignment and AI safety spaces, is a field focused on the values we aim to instill in AI. I argue that our goal should be to ensure AI is a positive force for all sentient beings. Currently, as far as I know, no overarching organization, terms, or community unifies Moral Alignment (MA) as a field with a clear umbrella identity. While specific groups focus individually on animals, humans, or digital minds, such as AI for Animals, which does excellent community-building work around AI and animal welfare while

Our Mission: To build a multidisciplinary field around using technology—especially AI—to improve the lives of nonhumans now and in the future.  Overview Background This hybrid conference had nearly 550 participants and took place March 1-2, 2025 at UC Berkeley. It was organized by AI for Animals for $74k by volunteer core organizers Constance Li, Sankalpa Ghose, and Santeri Tani.  This conference has evolved since 2023: * The 1st conference mainly consisted of philosophers and was a single track lecture/panel. * The 2nd conference put all lectures on one day and followed it with 2 days of interactive unconference sessions happening in parallel and a week of in-person co-working. * This 3rd conference had a week of related satellite events, free shared accommodations for 50+ attendees, 2 days of parallel lectures/panels/unconferences, 80 unique sessions, of which 32 are available on Youtube, Swapcard to enable 1:1 connections, and a Slack community to continue conversations year round. We have been quickly expanding this conference in order to prepare those that are working toward the reduction of nonhuman suffering to adapt to the drastic and rapid changes that AI will bring.  Luckily, it seems like it has been working!  This year, many animal advocacy organizations attended (mostly smaller and younger ones) as well as newly formed groups focused on digital minds and funders who spanned both of these spaces. We also had more diversity of speakers and attendees which included economists, AI researchers, investors, tech companies, journalists, animal welfare researchers, and more. This was done through strategic targeted outreach and a bigger team of volunteers.  Outcomes On our feedback survey, which had 85 total responses (mainly from in-person attendees), people reported an average of 7 new connections (defined as someone they would feel comfortable reaching out to for a favor like reviewing a blog post) and of those new connections, an average of 3

More information:  https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/04/dolfinarium-is-making-clownsof-animals-in-shows-agency-claims/ More (in dutch): https://www.dolfinariumvrij.nl/maar-liefst-20-overtredingen-van-de-vergunning/  At 20 points the Dolphinarium in Harderwijk is in breach of the law. They have to stop or change their shows under pressure from paying fines.  We, dutch animal rights organisation Bite BAck, got a lot of media attention today.  All the big media and newspapers had an article about. We got a lot of interviews too.  A lot of companies already stopped with offering discount tickets for the Dolphinarium. We think this news will add more companies to the list.  www.biteback.nl https://www.biteback.nl