Hey, fair point. To add to it, I expect we’re only reaching <1% of India’s fishes currently, and even those still have many other causes of suffering than those our program addresses.
However, we are still mostly expecting to scope other countries, as opposed to other regions in India or China. This is because our I expect our country teams will be somewhat self-contained, and I thus expansion in one to be limited by factors other than cross-org things like finances or leadership staff. For instance, right now we could have expanded much more in India, but have been holding off doing so as we refine our program and develop new ones.
Overall, I expect we will give each country’s team the mandate to expand as much as they can (which will itself involve scoping new regions within a country). If we start to hit org-wide bottlenecks on that, we may need to reconsider our strategy.
haven
Fish Welfare Initiative is Considering International Expansion (and an invitation to apply!)
Fish Welfare Initiative Updates
Farm program RCT results: We recently completed a randomized controlled trial with 53 farms to understand to what extent our farm program, the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture, is actually improving water quality on fish farms. The primary result is that our program appears to be having a strong positive effect.
“Chill kill” project update: We posted an update on our chill kill project, which aims to develop a less inhumane way of slaughtering fishes.
Pause of our policy work in India: We recently made the hard decision to pause our policy work in India. This is primarily to allow us to better focus on our farm work.
FWI staff Chaitanya, Dinesh, Mani, and Subrata preparing a chill kill trial during a live “harvest” in Andhra Pradesh, India.
Fish Welfare Initiative Updates
Satellite-based water quality monitoring: After two years of extensive effort, we have failed to develop sufficiently accurate technology, and are thus pausing development on this intervention for now.
Water quality ranges updates: We recently conducted a literature review of the ideal water quality ranges for Indian major carps, and made slight changes to our standards.
Hiring: We are likely going to be hiring for an entry-level operations associate shortly. We think an EA-minded recent graduate could be a good fit for this role. We are favoring applicants in Asia, but wherever you are based if you think you could be a good fit we encourage you to reach out.
Caption: Our staff member Chandu (right) pictured with a farmer in Nellore, Andhra Pradesh, India. This farmer recently enrolled in our farm program, through which we will work with him to improve water quality and maintain a stocking density cap.
Fish Welfare Initiative Updates
We’re hiring for a role that we think may be a great fit for some in the EA community: Director of Programs. This role will involve leading and scaling our programs, first in India and then abroad, to implement welfare improvements on thousands of farms. International applicants are welcome, though time living in India will be expected. Leadership experience required; experience running agricultural programs a huge plus.
Learn More and ApplyFWI staff observing a “harvest”, in which the fishes are pulled from the water and asphyxiated to death. We are working to reform these practices with our ongoing “chill kill” project (see update from last year—we should have another update in the coming months).
Fish Welfare Initiative Updates
We are hiring for a Welfare Assessment Manager! (Note Indian applicants only.) This role will be tasked with conducting welfare assessments for farmed fishes in various contexts.
Apply NowHere are also some recent project updates:
Feed fortification studies: We aim to develop an intervention based around our custom-formulated feed, which we hypothesize will improve water quality and nutrition. We are currently conducting two studies to assess this: a lab-based efficacy study (120 fishes) and a farm-based effectiveness study (12 farms). Both are progressing on track. See previous posts.
Remote Sensing of Water Quality: We aimed to develop an intervention to remotely sense (via satellites) or predict water quality. Unfortunately, our in-house modeling did not yield any viable models. We are doing some final wrap-up work, but don’t expect any breakthroughs. We expect to publish a full writeup of our results by the end of June. See previous posts.
Improved Slaughter (Chill Kill): We aim to develop an intervention that replaces air asphyxiation with immersion in an ice bath at slaughter (still causes significant suffering, but less than the alternative). Our main bottlenecks remain a) logistical feasibility, and b) trader and consumer demand. To test the former, we are planning a trial of 1,000 fishes in the coming weeks—our largest yet. See previous posts.
China Work: As part of our efforts to continue understanding and engaging the industry, we recently visited a rainbow trout farm and observed our first harvest event. We are also continuing to research interventions on various priority species, focusing on pond loach, sturgeon, and mandarin fishes.
Our staff Roshan and Gokul sampling fishes recently in the feed fortification pond-based study, in order to assess health and growth—proxies for welfare. Handling fishes in this way does cause them significant stress, but we believe the information is worth the costs (though these are tricky ethical tradeoffs that we sometimes struggle with).
Update: Thanks to the hard work of 7 unpaid interns, our website has been miraculously restored. The hacked page will be preserved here for posterity.
Fish Welfare Initiative Updates
We recently published two new datasets:
Our farm program dataset, comprising of 10K+ (anonymized) data points on fish farms in Andhra Pradesh, India collected from 2021 to 2026.
Our continuous water quality dataset, comprising of near continuous water quality data taken from farms in Andhra Pradesh, India over 2 months.
We also recently published our 2025 farm program M&E report.
From Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI):
Updates:We have launched new studies on feed fortification.
We posted updates on our various other studies, including on our use of satellite imagery to remotely monitor water quality.
We published our 2026 priorities and our 2025 year in review.
Open Roles:
We are hiring for an Operations Associate! Applicants from India and the Philippines are preferred, but international applicants are welcome. This is a good role for an early-career EA person. Deadline: Feb 20.
Hey Vasco! I just read the summary here, so my apologies if I’m missing something important.
I think I disagree with the line of reasoning you’re following. For instance, you say:
>>I estimated its HSI has been 0.0292 % as cost-effective as HIPF accounting for effects on the target beneficiaries, and soil ants, termites, springtails, mites, and nematodes.
It would be very surprising to me if we can know with any degree of confidence that exploratory research into highly speculative areas is >3000X more cost effective than Shrimp Welfare Project’s main program—a program which seems to be one of the most cost effective on the planet!I don’t doubt that every step in specific chain of reasoning is mostly correct. Rather, I think where I get off the boat here is that I think the uncertainty in these flowthrough effects tends to dominate after a certain point. I get the sense you are willing to take these much more seriously and literally.
Another area of disagreement is the general framing of suggesting that we should always just fund the one most impactful thing. I agree that this makes sense on the margin, but I expect we’re generally more likely to get to a better world in the end if we take a portfolio approach and fund and encourage lots of projects that pass a certain bar. A large part of this is driven by the fact that you get seriously diminishing returns on projects (e.g. I’d be surprised if CEARCH could cost effectively deploy SWP’s full annual budget).
So I’d probably frame all of this as more “Both CEARCH’s program and SWP’s program perform very well on these metrics, and we should consider funding them.”
Thanks for your nice post Annika! It was a pleasure having you here, and you are definitely right that this internship would not have happened had you not gone out of the way to pitch yourself to us.
One of the reasons we were keen to have you was that you are an EA student group leader. This is probably relevant for other students seeking internships or jobs as well: Being an EA student leader often means something to recruiters at EA organizations. For instance, I know that one of the reasons I was accepted into the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program was that I had been an EA student group leader myself.
Much love from all of us here in Eluru. You are always welcome with us :)
And to anyone else interested in interning with FWI: We are likely to do more of these internships in the future, although they will likely be of a similar format in that they will be both a) unfunded (at least for non-local people), and b) require you to both pitch yourself and get yourself to our site.
We’ll probably publish more on this on our careers page in the coming weeks, but if anyone’s interested now they should feel free to message me.
Thanks for your comment. A few points/pushback:
1 - The animal movement has grown a lot, but that doesn’t mean it has grown enough. I think about this in the same way I think about efforts to eradicate extreme poverty: Such poverty has diminished significantly over the past few decades, but it still probably needs more (and cleverer) allocation of resources to truly be eradicated. Animal welfare, IMO, is in a much earlier stage still (but that’s not to say we haven’t made progress!).
2 - Various orgs do offer student internships (which is great), but I don’t think this is at all sufficient to build the much larger movement of active NGO staffers, donors, etc. that we need. As discussed above, I also think there aren’t enough in-person opportunities, and that that is a problem.
All makes sense!
>>But maybe this brings about a larger, more diverse pool of talented advocates that attract people in their cities and countries, and more local hubs grow?
Some truth to this I’d say, but it’s just tradeoffs. Obviously the best thing is for there to be lots of fully remote roles, AND lots of in-person roles and, especially, in-person communities.
>>Do we have examples from other movements in the past that grew geographically disconnected through small communities and achieved their goals or managed to change the game?
This is why I’m skeptical of remotely driven movements haha. Because it seems to me like we don’t have many examples of this. The very modern age does provide some though—in particular, I’m thinking of Black Lives Matter and other more viral forms of activism in the US recently. However, I think a lot of these, including BLM, were more like a rapid upswell that quickly died off, without achieving many lasting results. And I expect a large part of this lack of results is because you really do need sustained, in-person community organizing in order to build lasting and cohesive public support that is able to change culture and institutions.
>>Additionally: what about offering this to jobless people, over 25, or people taking a career gap? As someone close to say bye to her 35th lap around the sun I start noticing ageism.
Could be a good idea. My intuition is still that the bigger gap here is engaged college students dropping out of the movement, as opposed to professionals who can’t find a job for whatever reason. But I could be wrong! And would love to see data one way or the other.
And as usual, of course it’d be good to have both programs: We should have programs more programs targeting students, and we should also have more programs engaging working professionals and people at basically every other life and career stage. We’re going to need a much bigger, more dynamic, and more comprehensive movement if we’re going to bring about the fundamental change we seek!
>>A hybrid of your approach (that could be logistically easier to implement) could be (for example): running a hiring round to select highly agentic and motivated scrappy generalist students, placing them in a non-profit that needs them to work online (because that’s where most of the work is), and then placing them in hubs for socialising in the movement and participating in the actions that are happening. They could take on a lead role in organising protests/Revolutionist nights and the like, while they are in the hub, while working 9-5 in an effective online charity. They don’t necessarily need to switch hubs due to cost and inconvenience.
I like this suggestion! Also seems like a good way to MVP this idea more. Let’s think more about this
Fair thoughts, thanks for the input! A few responses here:
>>I was a bit surprised by the “steep dropoff after graduation” claim. I think this is very likely to be true, but this could give the—very false—impression that there are many motivated students in the movement, which is not what I’ve observed.I do think there are a lot of motivated students in the movement though, particularly in the US and UK (I’m less sure about other countries). Though perhaps to your point, even in these countries I think these students tend not to actually be getting out there that much, e.g. probably not attending protests, and are probably instead doing more insular activities on their campuses like discussion groups and vegan cooking. This was the case at least for my own student group.
Definitely would be helpful to have more data here! I’m just speaking off of impressions right now.
>>However, perhaps its implementation might be… too early?
Possibly. To push back on this though, I do think that sometimes a given campaign will always just seem too difficult/too early until it is done, and that we might as well just start working on it now.
Thanks for your organizing work! The network you describe sounds cool and I hope it’s going really well. I think you should consider writing more about it in an EA Forum post or something (or please link me to one if you’ve already done this!). I hadn’t heard of it before, and I think it’d be helpful for more people to be thinking about this sort of thing.
Thanks for your input!
>>I would add public institutions to the mix. Internships in regional / federal governments, or international organisations. They tend to have already good systems to run internships.
Seems like a good idea! I’d particularly be keen to see interns placed with some animal-sympathetic politician for one of their placements, as that could build some pretty useful skills. Are there other potential placements here in the realm of public institutions that you see making sense?
>>I wonder, where does this hunch (or knowledge) about organisations being remote come from?
It’d be helpful for us to have data on this. When I did some quick GPT research here (link), particularly basing it off orgs recommended by ACE and additionally orgs whose openings are posted by Animal Advocacy Careers, it seems like about 75% of roles in the more EA side of the movement are now remote. Presumably you’re already looking at these openings though?
Should we launch the “Animal Advocacy Corps”? Seeking Feedback and a Founder
Of course, and thank you for the kind words Sarah!
Fish Welfare Initiative Updates
Expansion and Hiring: We recently published plans for international scoping to guide our future expansion. We are also hiring a Global Growth Manager to lead this.
Lice study: We published initial results from our “sentinel pole” lice study, which uses in-water poles to detect lice eggs before the farmers otherwise would. Lice are a common parasite affecting farmed fishes.
Monitoring and Evaluation: We published the most recent M&E report from our farm program in India.
“Sentinel poles”, which are used to detect lice eggs earlier than famers otherwise would, at our recent study.