Thanks this is an interesting and quite horrible thought.
I’ve always wonder how big a factor the dying/killing process is for animals compared to the rest of their lives. Here in Uganda animals around me that are reared by families in the village seem to be fairly happy, but their deaths on the other hand seem traumatic.
I see the big question here as whether the life of wild fish is net positive or negative, and obviously this is an important data point to consider there. When considering whether life of a wild fish/land animal is net positive or negative, how do researches weight the significance of the dying processcompared to the rest of the life? Is it like 1% or 10%? There must be resources about this...
The ideal would be to use something like Welfare Footprint Project’s framework, and actually estimate the time spent suffering or enjoying at various intensities for the average animal over their entire life, weighing and adding it all up. The framework was originally designed to consider only pain/suffering, but it can be adapted to include positive welfare, too, and there’s been some work on that recently here by WFP and here by Ren Ryba of Animal Ask.
There’s some discussion of an example of Atlantic cod by Horta, 2010, revisited by Browning & Veit, 2023 (talk). The example is excerpted from the talk and discussed here on the EA Forum.
FWIW, fertility and mortality rates in crustaceans and fish are often (almost always?) extremely high compared to mammals, and the vast majority die very young. I pulled out some statistics here (footnote 8). Some more in the tables of Butler et al., 1993 and Table 11.1fromBauer, 2023. Kawaguhi (2016) reports estimates from other studies of 7,200, 7,500 and 12,343 eggs produced per female Antarctic krill on average per year (I don’t know what share are actually fertilized and born).
Thanks this is an interesting and quite horrible thought.
I’ve always wonder how big a factor the dying/killing process is for animals compared to the rest of their lives. Here in Uganda animals around me that are reared by families in the village seem to be fairly happy, but their deaths on the other hand seem traumatic.
I see the big question here as whether the life of wild fish is net positive or negative, and obviously this is an important data point to consider there. When considering whether life of a wild fish/land animal is net positive or negative, how do researches weight the significance of the dying processcompared to the rest of the life? Is it like 1% or 10%? There must be resources about this...
The ideal would be to use something like Welfare Footprint Project’s framework, and actually estimate the time spent suffering or enjoying at various intensities for the average animal over their entire life, weighing and adding it all up. The framework was originally designed to consider only pain/suffering, but it can be adapted to include positive welfare, too, and there’s been some work on that recently here by WFP and here by Ren Ryba of Animal Ask.
There’s some discussion of an example of Atlantic cod by Horta, 2010, revisited by Browning & Veit, 2023 (talk). The example is excerpted from the talk and discussed here on the EA Forum.
FWIW, fertility and mortality rates in crustaceans and fish are often (almost always?) extremely high compared to mammals, and the vast majority die very young. I pulled out some statistics here (footnote 8). Some more in the tables of Butler et al., 1993 and Table 11.1 from Bauer, 2023. Kawaguhi (2016) reports estimates from other studies of 7,200, 7,500 and 12,343 eggs produced per female Antarctic krill on average per year (I don’t know what share are actually fertilized and born).
Thanks that’s helpful!
Just to be clear a high percentage of them being eaten alive is an update towards their lives being better, not worse.
Why?
because it’s worse to starve to death
I’m not sure about that. What makes you so sure?
I’m not sure either I don’t mean to sound confident. Read the comment below this one about suffering hours