Oh ya, you would probably have been aware of fishes caught for feed, but a recent estimate for their numbers is surprisingly huge (to me), to the extent that fish farming’s welfare effects could pretty plausibly be dominated by the effects on wild fishes (and other wild aquatic animals). From the Aquatic Life Institute:
● Approximately 1.2 trillion aquatic animals are fed to other aquatic animals each year. This is approximately one-third to one-half of all animals fished.
● In order to produce the billions of fish that end up on the human plate, trillions of fish are processed, or fed live, as fish feed.
● Many of the fish we feed Salmon have similar welfare needs, thus creating a ‘welfare pyramid’ effect, as each farmed salmon must eat the biomass equivalent to 9 herring, or 120 anchovies, to be brought to harvest weight.
I think ALI is going ahead with recommending the replacement of fish feed, but this seems plausibly a bad thing to do (and more so the more weight you give to fishes than invertebrates), although I’m not sure either way.
That said, I tend to agree with Michael’s thought that the indirect wild-animal impacts of diet may be more significant than many of the kinds of interventions that WAI could pull off because WAI-type interventions may not be focused on reducing numbers of wild animals, and without reducing numbers of wild animals, it’s difficult for me to know if suffering is actually being reduced in light of cluelessness.
I do think WAI could come up with interventions that we could agree net reduce expected suffering while keeping populations roughly constant by reducing causes of suffering or death, paired with (more) humane population control (wildlife contraceptives, sterilization, or CRISPR to manage fertility rates, or more humane methods to cull or euthanize animals). However, these seem much harder to implement and scale to me, due to the costs, complexity and public disinterest or opposition. Humane insecticides in particular seem promising, though.
Oh ya, you would probably have been aware of fishes caught for feed, but a recent estimate for their numbers is surprisingly huge (to me), to the extent that fish farming’s welfare effects could pretty plausibly be dominated by the effects on wild fishes (and other wild aquatic animals). From the Aquatic Life Institute:
I think ALI is going ahead with recommending the replacement of fish feed, but this seems plausibly a bad thing to do (and more so the more weight you give to fishes than invertebrates), although I’m not sure either way.
I do think WAI could come up with interventions that we could agree net reduce expected suffering while keeping populations roughly constant by reducing causes of suffering or death, paired with (more) humane population control (wildlife contraceptives, sterilization, or CRISPR to manage fertility rates, or more humane methods to cull or euthanize animals). However, these seem much harder to implement and scale to me, due to the costs, complexity and public disinterest or opposition. Humane insecticides in particular seem promising, though.