Wow thanks so much, super valuable info! Too bad I can’t give it more than four karma haha
There is a lot of potential in fish welfare/stunning. In addition to what others have mentioned, IIRC from some reading a few years ago:
The greatest bottleneck in humane slaughter is research, e.g. determining parameters/designing machines for stunning each major species, as they differ so much. There just aren’t many experts in this field, and the leading researchers are mostly very busy (and pretty old), but perhaps financial incentives would persuade some people with the right sort of background to go into this area.
As well as electrical and percussive stunning, anaesthetising with clove oil/eugenol seems a promising and under-researched method of reducing the pain of slaughter. Because it may just involve adding a liquid/powder to a tank containing the fish, it may also require less tailoring to each species than than other methods (though it can affect the flavour if “too much” is used). I have some notes on this if anyone is interested.
Crustastun could be mass-produced and supplied cheaply/freely to places that would otherwise boil crustaceans alive. I seem to recall a French lawyer had invented another machine that was even better (or cheaper) but was too busy to promote it; maybe EAs could buy the patent or something?
One of the reasons it took so long for me to reply is that I kinda fell into a rabbit hole investigating whether buying the Crustastun patent+manufacturing it and giving away would be a good intervention. It all looked good until I finally thought to look into lobsters themselves, and it turns out that they have way fewer neurons - ~100,000 according to an OpenPhil report (lost the link) - which is 2 orders of magnitude lower than even very small fish and 10−5 as many as humans. And crabs are very similar. F
WIW, I was not at all expecting to find this, and had no idea crustaceans had extremely disproportionately small brains. May as well link this Google doc as what I had written before I met some inconvient statistics.
I know not everyone is convinced that linear neuron comparisons are ideal, but they intuitively seem unlikely to be too far off from what “matters”. Given this, I’m gonna conclude that Crustastun isn’t worth pursuing unless we get more, different info about lobster sentience.
Glad you found it useful. I am not qualified to comment on the role of neuron count in sentience; you may want to look at work by Jason Schukraft and others at Rethink Priorities on animal sentience and/or get in touch with them.
Wow thanks so much, super valuable info! Too bad I can’t give it more than four karma haha
One of the reasons it took so long for me to reply is that I kinda fell into a rabbit hole investigating whether buying the Crustastun patent+manufacturing it and giving away would be a good intervention. It all looked good until I finally thought to look into lobsters themselves, and it turns out that they have way fewer neurons - ~100,000 according to an OpenPhil report (lost the link) - which is 2 orders of magnitude lower than even very small fish and 10−5 as many as humans. And crabs are very similar. F
WIW, I was not at all expecting to find this, and had no idea crustaceans had extremely disproportionately small brains. May as well link this Google doc as what I had written before I met some inconvient statistics.
I know not everyone is convinced that linear neuron comparisons are ideal, but they intuitively seem unlikely to be too far off from what “matters”. Given this, I’m gonna conclude that Crustastun isn’t worth pursuing unless we get more, different info about lobster sentience.
On to the other bullet points!
Glad you found it useful. I am not qualified to comment on the role of neuron count in sentience; you may want to look at work by Jason Schukraft and others at Rethink Priorities on animal sentience and/or get in touch with them.
If you haven’t already, you may also want to review the 2018 Humane Slaughter Association report, which was the best I could find in early 2019. While looking for it, I also just came across one from Compassion in World Farming, which I don’t think I’ve read.