Yes the three top carp* species alone make up 19 billion individuals vs 11 billion pond loach
*I’m treating any large member of the Cyprinidae family as a “carp” ( common names are difficult at the best of the times and even worse for fish) for these purposes
*minor nitpick While Carp, Catfish, Tilapia, Salmonids etc are very common “ types” of fish farmed, each of those categories lumps together numerous species, while the most common farmed fish species is the pond loach https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12pA0UxIbRDcfY5g25XZ7na4duhj6411l-1-_3tRH48k/edit only weighs 4 to 5 grams https://www.fisheriesjournal.com/archives/2019/vol7issue4/PartC/7-3-62-705.pdf
That would have negative consequences for the people that already exist today and rely on earths biosphere, the same can not be said for these frivolous space colonization ventures
ACE has 4 top charities
Wild Animal Initiative → not involved with livestock , irrelevant to discussion
Faunalytics → involved in research and making research more accesible, impact valuable but very hard to measure in the way that makes “ offsetting” work as a concept .
Good Food Institute → plant-based-alternative industry lobbying group, probably useless, considering There is no association between rising plant-based-meat sales and lowered meat sales.
The Humane League->mainly focused on “ improving” livestock welfare ( not decreasing the number of animals farmed) , has been a major force in the “ cage-free” push even-though Industrial-cage-free Egg farms tend to have higher mortality rates ( meaning more farmed animals per Kcal) than conventional farms. almost certainly net negative and should be tossed to the side.
You complain about hypotheticals far removed from reality, and then offer up one. There is no EA recognized organization that you could possibly use to offset the number of animals raised for your animal-product consumption. Donating to an ACE top charity means one of these four, one bad, one useless, one irrelevant, and one to difficult to quantify the impact of. People who claim to be offsetting There meat consumption ( is any one actually doing this???) are not.
NPP is increasing, meaning There is more food available, and warmer climates means faster metabolisms and shorter lifespans for ectotherms, we should expect Climate change to increase the number of future animals.
I know you have the exact opposite position on this as me but It would be nice If you could try to do justice to the Negative Utilitarian Idea that terraforming far off celestial bodies and creating more bisopheres is actually the worst thing humanity could ever do.
https://m.youtube.com/watch Stumbled across a youtube video of a guy making a version of fermented tofu at home from firm tofu. He pickled it and after waiting for it to age, mixed it with olive oil, potato starch, and coconut oil to give it a soft stretchy cheese like texture.
In 2021 the IUCN implemented the “ green list” a companion to its more traditional “ red list” , right now the green list is more a proof of concept with only a few dozen species ( as oppose to the almost 150,000 red list species) , but It ranks animals not on how likely they are to go extinct in the near future, but by how heavily depleted/range-restricted they are from a historical baseline. Expanding recognition of and in turn protections for “least-concern” but heavily depleted species ( such as American and Europeans beavers, cougar, black tailed prairie dogs, wapiti, European water vole( in UK), eurasian harvest mice( UK), European hedgehog(In UK), gray wolves, brown bears, evening grosbeaks , wood thrush, monarch butterfly, European starling( native range) etc) could protect a large number of wild animals.
I wouldn’t be worried about Chinese Americans being too familiar with rare Chinese Tofu varieties, simply cause China is a large culturally diverse place and most Chinese-Americans are from The south eastern Cantonese speaking regions ,
As an English speaking Vegan on the internet I’ve noticed and increased interest in “ tofus” made with other legumes, like peanuts or black beans, I think there is value in having substitutes available for a common allergen, and wonder If you could market “ black bean tofu” at a Mexican restaurant as something new and trendy and that “fits the restaurant” even If it’s still standard firm tofu.
I think There is an important difference between plant based products and cultured meat for this conversation
A society that stops eating meat will be able to ban meat
A society that replaces animal meat with cultured meat would not be able to ban animal meat, because the animal meat and cultured meat are the same thing so There would be no way for law enforcement to recognize contraband, I can see large numbers of backyard slaughterhouses , hunting/fishing and small scale animal meat production surviving indefinitely in the second situation.
https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/what-soring
https://animalsaustralia.org/our-work/horse-racing/background/
https://awionline.org/content/urban-carriage-horses-out-step-responsible-horse-welfare
https://www.humanedecisions.com/premarin-horses-the-suffering-of-premarin-mares/
https://www.aspca.org/improving-laws-animals/public-policy/horse-slaughter
https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/facts-about-horse-slaughter
https://www.horsetalk.co.nz/2013/03/11/horses-forgotten-victims-of-bullfighting/
This is all from wealthy countries
Even in wealthy countries it’s not easy to be a horse, the fact that they, like all domestic animals are legally commodities, mean there interests will not be respected
This is not to mention the ubiquity of spinal alteration in seemingly well cared for horses, or how nearly all horses are ridden before There growth plates fuse
https://www.writingofriding.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/deb-bennett-maturation.pdf
https://www.pferdeheilkunde.de/10.21836/PEM20070506
Or the congenital defects , intentional or not, caused by purposefully breeding to maintain breed characteristics
I honestly imagine these zebras being used as beasts of burden in poor countries would tbe treated even worse.
I would consider being sacrificed to gods, being eaten* , and fighting mens wars for them terrible treatment.
even after Christians stopped eating horses, It’s not like they were allowed to live a long retirement ones useless
Setting aside the ethics of animal exploitation for a second
Africa already has Sanga cattle, that are resistant to trypanosomiasis and have been used in subsaharan Africa for thousands of years.
What benefit would zebras have over Sanga cattle?
If it’s just speed ( with cattle being stronger and more useful for most manual labor) , does that really increase efficiency in production, or does it just make them more useful for warfare?
Theirs less than 10,000 known sponge species and only 3 known placazoa species, all remaining animal species have some form of nervous system. based on known species, the vast majority of those are arthropods, which have central nervous systems.
Theirs an estimated 7.7 million animal species, I think practically any sort of mass redesign of the worlds biosphere to be utopian would have to involve lots of animal extinctions unless you are suggesting genetically modifying nearly 8 million species
I’ll just like to mention Rainbow Railroad, a Canadian group focused on helping queer people in unsafe circumstances get to safer countries
A tuna isn’t like a lion that’s eating large herbivores , It’s going to go after smaller predators that are going after smaller predators… until we get to copepods and such. Except all those animals would die of something without predators, so the relevant question is about impacts on population sizes of all relevant species.
Lets pretend the number of calories available is constant and all consumers are animals. All of those calories will be eaten by some life form, due to small body size/ fast reproduction of algae, ocean trophic pyramids are inverted compared to terrestrial ones, with more biomass at higher trophic levels. And unlike in terrestrial ecosystems with many large herbivores, ocean megafauna are mainly predators. Any calories consumed by sharks/tuna/marine-mammals etc aren’t being put to use making more small scavengers.
Now There are mamy complications with this simple model
-some of those calories being eaten by the large predators might be used by insentient consumers like bacteria in There absence instead of small scavenging animals
-bony fish often have very small offspring, and total-population-biomass/ adult-size might be a really bad proxy for relative population size of marine species
-through diving deep/ defecating near the surface/ trapping nutrients in There bodies they keep nutrients at the surface , which has two big effects
fertilizes surface waters and allows for more production of calories by algae
means those calories in There waste are available to the surface ecosystems instead of sinking to the deep, where the animals they would feed are long lived and have slow metabolisms due to the cold water and food scarcity.
Either way its more complicated than hunting big fish to save little fish and probably bad?
Do you think marine-mammal/cartilaginous fish/ other slow reproducing ocean megafauna, would be useful for WAW in themselves?
So I know whales boost ocean productivity through nutrient cycling, and therefore increase ocean biomass ,but how does this compare to There impact as consumers, they take up so many calories that otherwise would be used by smaller fast reproducing organisms, which force do you think is larger???
Maybe part of the issue is that sound is invisible?? ( getting people to care about it?)Maybe images sonograms would help,? Or even a stylized “wave” of sound in some sort of animation disturbing whales?
Thank-you for responding!
In that case , in which we are buying from the fisherman The catch shares, (which seems similar to carbon credits,?) I am much more sympathetic to this. And I think this sounds like a very promising potential cause.
Welp, this is it, this is my FTX , this is the thing that permanently makes me lose all faith In the EA movement. I am deleting my account on here after this message.
I value the work of other groups in the EA community shining a light on exploited animals like fish and invertebrates , that have been largely abandoned by traditional animal rights organizations.
But Every-time you gaze your eyes on “ coventional livestock” It feels like internal sabotage
Wether it’s advocating for changes that Increase Chicken mortality https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mEoaEm9xRuVkX3nWggRPz700RU7_Z_QgRuEtQMWiMbM/edit
Or wanting everyone to stop advocating for animals and being vegan because meat eaters find it annoying https://www.amazon.com/How-Create-Vegan-World-Pragmatic/dp/1590565703/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?adgrpid=55616130466&gclid=Cj0KCQiAtICdBhCLARIsALUBFcHXj_Cq2z0IDy0Hgl82a5MGcaDZkhu9PtV4oc1NbhPRPeui0BhaRBwaAjT2EALw_wcB&hvadid=409977028744&hvdev=m&hvlocphy=9007235&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=10492759388869879236&hvtargid=kwd-335443252748&hydadcr=12157_11118205&keywords=how+to+create+a+vegan+world&qid=1671462334&sr=8-1
Or giving our money to junk food lobby groups that research suggests don’t help animals at all https://gfi.org/
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrition/article/does-promoting-plantbased-products-in-veganuary-lead-to-increased-sales-and-a-reduction-in-meat-sales-a-natural-experiment-in-a-supermarket-setting/CB44968AAD1E86856D01CA47A7BC884
And now straight up advocating for a world in which animals are still bred and slaughtered as commodities
If I wanted to support groups in bed with the meat industry I would still be giving money to the HSUS
Next time i see the label “Effective Altruism” attached to anything , I’ ll interpret it as the warning colors it is.