Thanks, great post, and far better and more specific than mine. After looking a bit into the issue, and pending and pending seeing arguments or evidence to the contrary, I think wild fish slaughter is the single [non-longtermism-motivated, object level] cause most deserving of marginal resources.
If there was a charity (or subset of HSA) working on this, It’d be my default go-to for individual giving.
A few things bits from my research I think complement this post well
[1] I estimate that wild fish slaughter accounts for 68 million years of extreme fish suffering (given that fish are sentient) per year. Further, using neuron count as a proxy for capacity to suffer, I estimate this is the moral equivalent of 680,000 years of human torture …
[2] n 2019, OpenPhil did make a grant (~$570k at the time of conversion) to the Humane Slaughter Foundation to work on this very issue...
[3]A whole additional set of interventions are those that reduce the number of wild fish killed without causing enough other suffering to offset this effect [such as] subsidizing humane farmed fishing (with humane slaughter, which I believe is easier in aquaculture settings), which would then (I assume?) reduce the number of wild fish killed.
Thank you very much. It is nice to see someone else thinking almost the same things, it’s like seeing someone murmuring the same song you also play in your head.
Thanks for the complements as well.
[1] Fish suffering (wild fish in particular) looks so big that it makes me question if we are missing something. One thing I am trying to find out is the duration of asphyxia in small wild fish. The only “sources” I can find is some videos on YouTube.
[2] Yeah, I saw that one too. I assume that the main bottleneck in the past was the lack of effective stunning technology. I think this is still an issue, since there are so few stunner manufacturers.
[3] Very interesting idea. Substituting wild-fish fish feed with plant-based fish feed would also decrease the demand for wild-fish catch. The difficulty is that, since most wild-fish fishing is not driven by demand, but rather constrained by the supply of fish in the seas and the fishing quotas, one has to dramatically decrease the fish demand in order to create a situation where fishers would rather stay at the docks even if they have not filled their quotas and there are plenty of fish in the seas. That may be hard to achieve.
Thanks, great post, and far better and more specific than mine. After looking a bit into the issue, and pending and pending seeing arguments or evidence to the contrary, I think wild fish slaughter is the single [non-longtermism-motivated, object level] cause most deserving of marginal resources.
If there was a charity (or subset of HSA) working on this, It’d be my default go-to for individual giving.
A few things bits from my research I think complement this post well
Hi there!
Thank you very much. It is nice to see someone else thinking almost the same things, it’s like seeing someone murmuring the same song you also play in your head.
Thanks for the complements as well.
[1] Fish suffering (wild fish in particular) looks so big that it makes me question if we are missing something. One thing I am trying to find out is the duration of asphyxia in small wild fish. The only “sources” I can find is some videos on YouTube.
[2] Yeah, I saw that one too. I assume that the main bottleneck in the past was the lack of effective stunning technology. I think this is still an issue, since there are so few stunner manufacturers.
[3] Very interesting idea. Substituting wild-fish fish feed with plant-based fish feed would also decrease the demand for wild-fish catch. The difficulty is that, since most wild-fish fishing is not driven by demand, but rather constrained by the supply of fish in the seas and the fishing quotas, one has to dramatically decrease the fish demand in order to create a situation where fishers would rather stay at the docks even if they have not filled their quotas and there are plenty of fish in the seas. That may be hard to achieve.