A lot of animal welfare charities are focused (among other things) on âethical killingâ of animals. For example, one of the things the Shrimp Welfare Project tries to achieve is stunning shrimp before killing them.
Can you help me understand why this is worth investing into? Even if we accept QALYs of all animals as completely equal, killing an animal in a more âhumaneâ way only affects the quality of the past few seconds, or at most minutes of itâs life. Why does that matter? Isnât that extremely small impact? Youâd need to improve the killing of millions of animals for it to add up to one full QALY, and even then, it seems like a very simplistic viewâcan you even âmakeâ a full QALY from extremely tiny time fragments like that?
I get the point in improving general living conditions of animals, because that affects their entire life, or at least a significant portion of it. But why spend money to improve the last 30 seconds of their life?
Hey fx,
even though I definitely cannot speak on behalf of EA as a whole, I would like to add my 2 cents to this discussion. In my opinion, this sort of question is difficult because it aims at comparing different donation outcomes, that are very hard to compare. (That is a very common problem in EA and I believe that any answer given will be somewhat controversial because of this.) How many years of school attendance generated are equally good to one death prevented? How many times would you have to stub your toe such that the combined pain is more than keeping your hand in boiling water for a second? In a lot of cases, comparing different interventions in Animal Welfare combines mutiple of these âcontroversial comparison stepsâ. For example, when comparing the open wing alliance (OWA) and the shrimp welfare project, we need to decide
how much we care about shrimp in comparison to chicken and
how many minutes of living in a battery cage instead of the conditions the OWA managed to achieve are equal to one minute o f slowly suffocating to death as a shrimp.
Rethink Priorities worked a lot on the first problem.
Unfortunately shrimp do not die in a matter of seconds. Their death lasts an average of 20 minutes. Crunching these numbers, MHR comes to the conclusion, that these different interventions are surprisingly close in their effectiveness. Considering just how controversial each intermediate step was to come to this conclusion, I find it quite reasonable that people with slightly different assumptions think, that the shrimp welfare project is much more cost-effective.
I also wanted to use the opportunity to link this post from Benthams Bulldog, which I found quite nice, even though it doesnât exactly match your question.