Metaculus's $3,400 Animal Futures Tournament Is Posing the Questions Animal Advocates Can't Afford to Ignore

The Animal Futures Forecasting Tournament, launched on Metaculus in partnership with The Unjournal and Sentient Futures, is a structured effort to bring better data to strategic decisions in animal advocacy. Led by Aditya.B, the tournament crowdsourced questions from people in key positions across the advocacy community, filtering them by a single criterion: could a forecast on this question actually change a key decision? The result is a set of 16 initial questions (with more to come) spanning corporate welfare commitments, alternative protein regulation, emerging frontiers like octopus farming, and the intersection of animal welfare with frontier AI systems. The tournament offers a $3,400 prize pool to attract forecasters.

By providing a public, well-calibrated forecast base, the tournament aims to fill a gap where research and evidence are sparse, helping organizations decide which campaigns to fund, which issues to prioritize, and where to focus advocacy efforts. The questions are designed to be actionable—not just academic curiosities. As ChristianWilliams from Metaculus noted, several questions are especially interesting and could benefit from more forecasts. The tournament reflects a growing recognition that forecasting methodology can be applied to animal ethics and wild animal welfare, areas often overlooked in traditional prediction markets.