A reductio ad absurdum of this view would be to (on the margin) advocate for the re-introduction of whaling, but this would be blocked by optics concerns and moral uncertainty (if we value something like sapience and culture of animals).
If factory farming can’t be easily replaced with clean meat in the forseeable future, one might want to look for animals that are least unethicl to farm, mostly by them fulfilling the following conditions:
Small brain & low number of neurons
Easy to breed & fast reproduction cycle
Low behavioral complexity
Large body, high-calorie meat
Palatable to consumers
Stopped evolving early (if sentience evolved late in evolutionary history)
In conversation with various LLMs[1], three animals were suggested as performing well on those trade-offs. My best guess is that current factory farming can’t be beat with these animals in effectiveness.
Ostriches
Advantages: Already farmed, very small brain for large body mass
Disadvantages: Fairly late in evolutionary history
Arapaima
Advantages: Very large for small brain size (up to 3m in length), fast-growing, simple neurology, already farmed, can be raised herbivorously, lineage is ~200 mio. years old bony fishes
Disadvantages: Tricky to breed
Tilapia
Advantages: Very easy to breed, familiarity to consumers, small neuron count
Disadvantages: Fairly small, not as ancient as the arapaima
Depending on the relationship between brain size and moral weight, different animals may be more or less ethical to farm.
A common assumption in effective altruism is that moral weight is marginally decreasing in number of neurons (i.e. small brains matter more per neuron). This implies that we’d want to avoid putting many small animals into factory farms, and prefer few big ones, especially if smaller animals have faster subjective experience.
A reductio ad absurdum of this view would be to (on the margin) advocate for the re-introduction of whaling, but this would be blocked by optics concerns and moral uncertainty (if we value something like sapience and culture of animals).
If factory farming can’t be easily replaced with clean meat in the forseeable future, one might want to look for animals that are least unethicl to farm, mostly by them fulfilling the following conditions:
Small brain & low number of neurons
Easy to breed & fast reproduction cycle
Low behavioral complexity
Large body, high-calorie meat
Palatable to consumers
Stopped evolving early (if sentience evolved late in evolutionary history)
In conversation with various LLMs[1], three animals were suggested as performing well on those trade-offs. My best guess is that current factory farming can’t be beat with these animals in effectiveness.
Ostriches
Advantages: Already farmed, very small brain for large body mass
Disadvantages: Fairly late in evolutionary history
Arapaima
Advantages: Very large for small brain size (up to 3m in length), fast-growing, simple neurology, already farmed, can be raised herbivorously, lineage is ~200 mio. years old bony fishes
Disadvantages: Tricky to breed
Tilapia
Advantages: Very easy to breed, familiarity to consumers, small neuron count
Disadvantages: Fairly small, not as ancient as the arapaima
Primarily Claude 3.7 Sonnet