Philosophy, global priorities and animal welfare research. My current specific interests include: philosophy of mind, moral weights, person-affecting views, preference-based views and subjectivism, moral uncertainty, decision theory, deep uncertainty/cluelessness and backfire risks, s-risks, and indirect effects on wild animals.
I’ve also done economic modelling for some animal welfare issues.
FWIW, Molly’s comment you linked to quoted and cited Welfare Footprint Project and basically addressed something like “grows to a bigger size more quickly”:
The Welfare Footprint Project used the Cumulative Pain Framework to investigate how the adoption of the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC) and similar welfare certification programs affect the welfare of broilers. Specifically, they examined concerns that the use of slower-growing breeds may increase suffering by extending the life of chickens for the production of the same amount of meat. From their main findings they stated:
‘Our results strongly support the notion that adoption of BCC standards and slower-growing broiler strains have a net positive effect on the welfare of broiler chickens. Because most welfare offenses endured by broilers are strongly associated with fast growth, adoption of slower-growing breeds not only reduces the incidence of these offenses but also delays their onset. As a consequence, slower-growing birds are expected to experience a shorter, not longer, time in pain before being slaughtered.’
Ah, ya:
For the reformed scenario, represented by the use of a slower-growing strain, we assumed an average ADG of 45-46 g/day, hence that the same slaughter weight would be reached in approximately 56 days.
I think it’s worth noting here that (if I’m understanding it right) the alternative breeds recommended by the better chicken commitment are slower-growing but don’t have a lower max weight.
I’m not sure, but the optimal weight at slaughter could be lower, which I think Lusk et al. (blog post) found for the US. Even if they could reach the same maximum weight, it may be more profitable to slaughter them at lower weights.
And the welfare footprint project numbers on pain durations already account for the longer time to reach full weight.
Ya, I intended to imply that, but could have worded things better. I’ve edited my comment.
Welfare Footprint Project has analysis here, which they summarize:
Adoption of the Better Chicken Commitment, with use of a slower-growing breed reaching a slaughter weight of approximately 2.5 Kg at 56 days (ADG=45-46 g/day) is expected to prevent “at least” 33 [13 to 53] hours of Disabling pain, 79 [-99 to 260] hours of Hurtful and 25 [5 to 45] seconds of Excruciating pain for every bird affected by this intervention (only hours awake are considered). These figures correspond to a reduction of approximately 66%, 24% and 78% , respectively, in the time experienced in Disabling, Hurtful and Excruciating pain relative to a conventional scenario due to lameness, cardiopulmonary disorders, behavioral deprivation and thermal stress.
The reduction in suffering per chicken is probably >24% if this analysis is correct, and it accounts for longer lives. My guess is >50%, giving substantial weight to disabling pain relative to milder pain. Accounting for more chickens necessary for the same amount of meat (EDIT: although WFP assumes they grow to the same weight) wouldn’t flip things. (And there would be a reduction in demand to partially offset this, due to higher costs per kg of meat.)
Lameness-related pain primarily due to their breed seems to be the largest source of their suffering and responsible for a lot of suffering, so it makes sense to me that slower growing breeds would be better off.
Are you effectively assuming that when they are awake and not experiencing hurtful pain or worse, that they are experiencing pleasure as intense as hurtful pain? I would probably assume only pleasure that intense for eating, dustbathing and playing, at most. Foraging might be annoying or hurtful intensity.
Related thread here.
Given your (partial) success in court (reported here and here), have your plans changed for what you’d use extra funding for? And has the funding gap changed? Your post says:
We will now explore bringing private prosecutions against mega-farms that use Frankenchickens.
I could imagine that a higher human population could induce demand for agriculture and increased trash output which could increase terrestrial invertebrate populations.
So this would be more food/net primary productivity available for terrestrial invertebrates to eat, and agriculture would have to increase net primary productivity overall (EDIT: or transform it into a more useful form for invertebrates), right?
My best guess is that more humans reduces wild terrestrial invertebrate populations in the near term / on Earth (so ignoring space colonization), largely through agricultural land use.[1] If you think:
these wild invertebrates or even just wild insects matter a decent amount, say about as much as RP does/would (interpolating their estimates), and
they have lives worth preventing, because you’re suffering-focused or just think they have net negative lives, say, due to their high fertility and mortality rates,
then increasing human populations could be good for animals in the near term, with the effect on wild animals outweighing those on farmed animals.
It’s unclear to me what’s going on with wild aquatic animals.
See especially Tables 3 and 4 from Attwood et al., 2008.
Net primary productivity is also typically lower in crops, across crops, based on “Land Use Change” greenhouse gas emissions from OWID / Poore & Nemecek, 2018.
Gross primary productivity decreases when replacing forest with crops, but increases if replacing grassland with crops, according to the globally representative study Krause et al., 2022.
Some other studies support increased and others decreased net productivity in crops compared to nature (Tomasik, 2013–2022, a, b)
But pesticides and fertilizers also plausibly reduce arthropod populations based on my lit reviews (but less clear in the long run with repeated use), so even if primary productivity increased, arthropod populations could still be lower overall.
I’d guess other forage fish’s life histories will give you a general idea of bristlemouths’ life histories.
About Peruvian anchoveta, one of the most wild-caught fish, representing 28% of the number of fish caught annually on average (Mood & Brooke, 2024), Molina-Valdivia et al. (2020) write:
Early larval growth and mortality of anchoveta is highly variable at intra-seasonal and latitudinal scales along the Chilean coast. In northern Chile (23 °S), larval growth varies between 0.50- and 0.85-mm day−1, with daily losses of 16–23% (Contreras et al., 2017); meanwhile, in central Chile (36 °S), larvae grew at 0.40-0.57 mm day−1, with daily losses of 4–7% (Castro and Hernández, 2000; Hernández and Castro, 2000).
See also Fig. 4. H (and G for another species) for the drop in abundance over time as larvae, leaving less than 1% after 40 days according to their fitted model.
Butler et al. (1993, Tables 1, 2, 3 and 4) report fecundity and mortality estimates for northern anchovies (Engraulis mordax) and Pacific sardines (Sardinops sagax) at various life stages. A female northern anchovy spawns 5.3 to 23.5 times per year, 4,000 to 14,000 eggs each time. I have some calculations for mortality rates at various life stages based on this paper here.
I think bristlemouths just make up a large share of all fish, by numbers of individuals. Lanternfish do, too. When someone says “a quadrillion”, this is an order of magnitude estimate, so it could easily be 3x too high or 3x too low. The estimates seem consistent to me as order of magnitude estimates, as long as bristlemouths do make up a decent share of all fish, like >30% of individuals.
The Micronekton Wikipedia page says:
Bristlemouths (Gonostomatidae), largely Cyclothone, account for more than 50% of the total vertebrate abundance between 100 and 1000 m. Twenty-one species of bristlemouths have been described globally. Lanternfishes are the secondmost abundant marine vertebrates, having diversified into 252 species.[24]
Futhermore, among pelagic fishes from 0-5000 m in the Sargasso Sea, northwestern Atlantic Ocean, “[t]he bristlemouth, Cyclothone braueri, dominated the catches both above (47%) and below (41%) 1000 m” (Sutton et al., 2010).
The number of bristlemouths has been estimated to be in the “hundreds of trillions — and perhaps quadrillions, or thousands of trillions” (Broad, 2015), so 10^14 to 10^16.
I estimated the number of lanternfish to be approximately between 10^14 and 10^16, based on a “total global biomass of 1.8 to 16 gigatonnes, accounting for up to 65% of all deep-sea fish biomass” (Lanternfish—Wikipedia, based on Hulley, 1998, pp. 127–128, ISBN 0-12-547665-5) and an average weight of “two to six grams” (Blacow, 2015).
This is all from my piece Which animals are most affected by fishing?
On whether they’re R-strategists: ecologists may have moved on from that classification, but either way, bristlemouths are fish, and almost all fish species, as far as I know, have many offspring (at least hundreds?) and high juvenile mortality rates (>90%?). Bristlemouths are forage fish, so food for predators. But they also probably eat zooplankton, like copepods.
We’re facing a funding gap of £236k this year and seek long-term funding to continue our work and give us greater financial stability.
Any updates on this since this was posted?
How much room for more funding do you expect to have in general for work in 2025 (after including funding coming from ACE)?
I’m clueless about the sign of the effects on wild aquatic animals (based on this project), and the effects on wild aquatic animals could be more important than the effects on farmed aquatic animals.
Reductions in animal agriculture, including aquaculture, have a high risk of backfiring overall, in case they’re bad for wild terrestrial arthropods. In particular, animal agriculture, including aquaculture, tends to decrease wild terrestrial arthropod populations through land use (for crops and/or pasture), and possibly substantially (Attwood et al., 2008, Tables 3 and 4), so reducing animal agriculture in general can increase wild terrestrial arthropod suffering by increasing their populations.
Aquaculture tends to have smaller effects on wild terrestrial arthropods than land vertebrate farming due to lower land use per kg of output/protein, and a targeted reduction of aquaculture — and not a broader reduction across animal agriculture in general — will, via substitution effects, shift some animal production towards land vertebrate farming and increase fishing pressure (and have highly uncertain net effects on wild aquatic animals, but actual wild capture production could go up or down overall [1][2]). This could reduce or even flip the wild terrestrial animal effects in 3.
Based on my own unpublished calculations, the targeted reduction of shrimp farming in particular seems good for farmed animals + wild terrestrial animals together (if you think wild arthropods have bad or ~neutral lives in expectation, and your moral weights for shrimp are high enough), although still highly uncertain for wild aquatic animals. However, my calculations need more review.
Not a backfire effect, but work to reduce aquaculture seems to reduce insect and brine shrimp farming in expectation, and this would, on my view, count in its favour. I don’t know if these effects or the effects on wild animals would be more important, because I haven’t really looked into it enough.
Even the best counterexample to (a theoretical version of) IIT consists in building a simple system with a high measure of “integrated information”: I entirely agree with that line of attack, that is fatal both for large monotonous matrices and tiny shrimp brains.
How does this argument apply to shrimp?
IIT is not a plausible theory of consciousness and it seems badly off track. It doesn’t aim to explain why we believe we’re conscious or really aim to identify a plausible mechanism for when things become access conscious or reportable to us. There was even an open letter signed by over a hundred relevant experts calling it pseudoscience. And you call a proposed counterexample to it fatal.
Why should we believe consciousness is superadditive in general, and to an extent that scales substantially with neuron counts in practice, if we reject IIT?
More recent data for US beef cattle (APHIS USDA, 2017, p.iii):