Also do you know where I can find the ACE models?
utilitarian01
Karma: 54
Has there been any explicit calculation actually done on whether wild animal lives are net positive or negative? Because I’ve done some myself and it seems to be positive, at least for microorganisms and insects which are the most populous by a large margin.
I don’t think its enough to say they’re net negative because of r-selection though. Insect larvae probably have like 2 orders of magnitude less neurons and they might not even be conscious in the first place. Also I saw those welfare reports but really didn’t like them because they left out the duration of suffering which is a huge factor in how bad something is. A broiler chicken experiencing a moderate amount of stress for it’s entire life could be much much worse than it being boiled alive for a few seconds.
This is my welfare spreadsheet but I didn’t intend to share it so if you want citations for the numbers I can try to link them.
Sure I’d be happy to discuss it more
True, I still believe that making a toy model with made-up numbers is still better than not doing it at all.
The dissolved oxygen comes from the nitrogen spike when overfeeding the fish, correct?
> How cost-effective could they be compared to other animal welfare interventions?
This is a hard one, but I’ll take a (crude) stab at it. Currently the best charity working on fish welfare is Albert Schweitzer (ace top charity). This 2016 guesstimate model of Albert Schweitzer shows a figure of 57 animals spared per dollar, but ~75% of these are chicks being spared from debeaking, which I think is too easy of a policy to implement compared to the oxygen/food problems that arise with fish welfare. The other 25% are cage-free hens which is probably closer to what we’re dealing with here, so I’ll assume it’s 14 animals per $. Albert Schweitzer chiefly works in Germany, where 34 million laying hens are killed annually, of which ~1 million were spared, or 3%. Before factoring in for the 10% welfare increase, this is 11 million hens annually that are cage-free because of them.
According to this graph, german fish production totals 313,000 metric tons per year, or about ~400 million Alaskan pollocks (most popular fish). With all the same variables as the hen campaign, that’s 4e8*.33*.1*5.5 (years of impact) = 7.3e7 or 73 million Pollocks spared over the course of 5 years. Assuming a a fish has the same worth of a chicken (less neurons but they also endure suffering for much longer on farms), that’s 73⁄11 = 6.6*14 = 92 fish spared per $. This pretty much blows every other animal charity out of the water (heh).
Good catch, I also don’t think the welfare improvement would be anywhere near a cage-free campaign, especially after reading that economic incentives part of your post. Unless you think the slaughter is really really bad, this probably isn’t a worthy cause area.
The first impression though is that animal charities should be accepted as more effective until proven otherwise by some large positive AMF flow-through effect that outweighs saving a life (maybe reducing insect populations?) Until then it seems much more straightforward to donate to ACE charities, specifically the cage-free ones.
ACE charities are also super cost-effective (15 chickens spared per dollar or so) so if you can hold yourself to a deal like “I’m gonna eat steak tonight but promise to donate $1 to The Humane League after”, you just did a lot more good than bad, at least in expected value.
Fair point. Also this model gives a very similar number too, if you take the median of the −6, 13 estimate (3.5).
Also worth noting that aeration of the water has many economic incentives (preventing die offs) to it so there’s a good chance that fish aren’t suffering from low oxygen levels.
Donating is much more effective than the increase in demand though, especially when you consider the elasticity factor. So in that case you should just buy whatever food is cheaper and donate the excess, tofu is about 3x cheaper ($2 per pound) vs grass-fed beef ($6 per pound). I guess if you truly hate tofu you could have an excuse but there’s always soy sauce to make it tastier.
I could still see a sizable impact coming from the consumer skipping a meal of chicken that they otherwise would have ate and substituting it with beyond meat. It doesn’t have to be an exact substitute.
I think it’s cause of the cheese line. Most of us here are vegans and we don’t like hearing that kind of thing.
If you make the definition of EA “anyone who donates to an EA charity” then the movement is much bigger, there’s more than 20K people in the world donating to effective charities. The Humane League alone has 1.1M followers on facebook, assuming only 200K of those donate, that’s still the same as the double every year number. I’d say anyone that donates would be considered an EA in my book, even if they don’t self-identify as one.
Off-topic but what do broiler chicken campaigns look like typically? I know for hens it’s cage-free, is it just more space per chicken for broilers?
Watching cricket makes you a better altruist
Fantastic post, I’ll be looking forward to the next one about insects as a cause area. I suggest researching the effects of buying beef to reduce springtail and nematode populations on grazing lands. See this post and this one as well. I could also pm you my spreadsheet that tried to compare it to other causes to give you a starting point.
The charities I chose wasn’t a very principled decision, I just used the Givewell #1 (Malaria Consortium) and compared it to a couple other charities I thought could be more effective. The model is really just a basic attempt at comparing animal charities to human charities which is surprisingly something I haven’t seen anyone try yet. There’s also the utility number and duration of suffering I use to try to get a good grasp of how bad the life is for a chicken/fish