> How cost-effective could they be compared to other animal welfare interventions?
This is a hard one, but I’ll take a (crude) stab at it. Currently the best charity working on fish welfare is Albert Schweitzer (ace top charity). This 2016 guesstimate model of Albert Schweitzer shows a figure of 57 animals spared per dollar, but ~75% of these are chicks being spared from debeaking, which I think is too easy of a policy to implement compared to the oxygen/food problems that arise with fish welfare. The other 25% are cage-free hens which is probably closer to what we’re dealing with here, so I’ll assume it’s 14 animals per $. Albert Schweitzer chiefly works in Germany, where 34 million laying hens are killed annually, of which ~1 million were spared, or 3%. Before factoring in for the 10% welfare increase, this is 11 million hens annually that are cage-free because of them.
According to this graph, german fish production totals 313,000 metric tons per year, or about ~400 million Alaskan pollocks (most popular fish). With all the same variables as the hen campaign, that’s 4e8*.33*.1*5.5 (years of impact) = 7.3e7 or 73 million Pollocks spared over the course of 5 years. Assuming a a fish has the same worth of a chicken (less neurons but they also endure suffering for much longer on farms), that’s 73⁄11 = 6.6*14 = 92 fish spared per $. This pretty much blows every other animal charity out of the water (heh).
I don’t quite understand this estimation. It seems you are comparing Albert Schweitzer Foundation’s work with an intervention that improves welfare for farmed food fish (rather than stocked fish)? It seems that the graph includes wild-caught fish. According to a fishcount estimate, in 2015 Germany slaughtered 8-66 million farmed fish. In general, my intuition is that those variables would not be similar to the ones in chicken campaigns.
Good catch, I also don’t think the welfare improvement would be anywhere near a cage-free campaign, especially after reading that economic incentives part of your post. Unless you think the slaughter is really really bad, this probably isn’t a worthy cause area.
> How cost-effective could they be compared to other animal welfare interventions?
This is a hard one, but I’ll take a (crude) stab at it. Currently the best charity working on fish welfare is Albert Schweitzer (ace top charity). This 2016 guesstimate model of Albert Schweitzer shows a figure of 57 animals spared per dollar, but ~75% of these are chicks being spared from debeaking, which I think is too easy of a policy to implement compared to the oxygen/food problems that arise with fish welfare. The other 25% are cage-free hens which is probably closer to what we’re dealing with here, so I’ll assume it’s 14 animals per $. Albert Schweitzer chiefly works in Germany, where 34 million laying hens are killed annually, of which ~1 million were spared, or 3%. Before factoring in for the 10% welfare increase, this is 11 million hens annually that are cage-free because of them.
According to this graph, german fish production totals 313,000 metric tons per year, or about ~400 million Alaskan pollocks (most popular fish). With all the same variables as the hen campaign, that’s 4e8*.33*.1*5.5 (years of impact) = 7.3e7 or 73 million Pollocks spared over the course of 5 years. Assuming a a fish has the same worth of a chicken (less neurons but they also endure suffering for much longer on farms), that’s 73⁄11 = 6.6*14 = 92 fish spared per $. This pretty much blows every other animal charity out of the water (heh).
I don’t quite understand this estimation. It seems you are comparing Albert Schweitzer Foundation’s work with an intervention that improves welfare for farmed food fish (rather than stocked fish)? It seems that the graph includes wild-caught fish. According to a fishcount estimate, in 2015 Germany slaughtered 8-66 million farmed fish. In general, my intuition is that those variables would not be similar to the ones in chicken campaigns.
Good catch, I also don’t think the welfare improvement would be anywhere near a cage-free campaign, especially after reading that economic incentives part of your post. Unless you think the slaughter is really really bad, this probably isn’t a worthy cause area.
These fish are not slaughtered, they are released into natural waters. But I wouldn’t jump to conclusions that quickly :)