It’s good to see an animal welfare organisation using serious analysis to guide their interventions, although I’m not entirely clear why the assessment is being done on the basis of deaths rather than the integral of welfare over time?
Looking at the numbers, it appears that producing a kilogram of carp involves significantly more time in factory farms than for a kilogram of salmon (both fish spend around 3 years in a farm but carp weigh half as much and there are more premature deaths). Additionally, given the far higher mortality rates, it seems likely that carp welfare is significantly worse than salmon welfare. If both these factors are true, this intervention is only backfiring under specific (and potentially resolvable) assumptions on the badness of slaughtering wild fish , the welfare of a wild fishes, and the elasticity of wild fish populations with respect to farmed salmon demand.
It’s good to see an animal welfare organisation using serious analysis to guide their interventions, although I’m not entirely clear why the assessment is being done on the basis of deaths rather than the integral of welfare over time?
Looking at the numbers, it appears that producing a kilogram of carp involves significantly more time in factory farms than for a kilogram of salmon (both fish spend around 3 years in a farm but carp weigh half as much and there are more premature deaths). Additionally, given the far higher mortality rates, it seems likely that carp welfare is significantly worse than salmon welfare. If both these factors are true, this intervention is only backfiring under specific (and potentially resolvable) assumptions on the badness of slaughtering wild fish , the welfare of a wild fishes, and the elasticity of wild fish populations with respect to farmed salmon demand.
Agreed. The “KPI” here should be welfare, not deaths.
This is more or less irrelevant if those deaths cause no suffering.
Still, very interesting analysis. Thanks for sharing OP.