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This is: Introducing Fish Welfare Initiative, published by TomBill on the AI Alignment Forum.
We’re excited to announce the launch of Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI), a new EA organization incubated under Charity Entrepreneurship.
Our mission is to reduce the suffering of fish as much as possible. We aim to achieve this via a two-stage process:
Identifying which welfare improvements, fish species, and countries have the highest potential for impact.
Implementing a pilot program based on our findings, which we can later scale up or pivot to a new approach.
In this post, we make a case for focusing on fish and outline our plan for doing so.
Why focus on fish?
Others in the effective altruism community have already argued that working on fish could be high-impact (see here, here, and here). Below we examine working on fish through the ITN framework.
Importance: Fish are farmed in massive numbers: 111 billion fish are alive in aquaculture at any given point, mostly in intensive systems. 0.79 to 2.3 trillion more wild-caught fish are slaughtered annually. To put this into perspective, there are 31 billion terrestrial farmed animals alive at any given point [1]. Since fish, like other groups of farmed animals, are so numerous, scale will unfortunately not be a limiting factor anytime soon.
Of course, scale only matters insofar as the fish involved live miserable lives. Sadly, fish suffering can be extreme. While different species, different regions, and different farming techniques involve different welfare challenges, some common issues include bad water quality and stocking densities, parasites, limited ability to express natural behaviors, and prolonged deaths without prior stunning. For a more complete list of fish welfare issues, see Compassion in World Farming’s report on the welfare of farmed fish.
There is also now a scientific consensus that fish very likely feel pain [2].
Neglectedness: Currently, few groups advocate for fish welfare. However, this is changing as fish welfare becomes a greater focus in both academia and advocacy organizations [3]. We expect that fish will be a future focus of the animal advocacy movement, as chickens are currently.
Tractability: This is the most uncertain aspect of working on fish issues, given the little historical advocacy and public support there has been for fish. However, there are several reasons in favor of fish being tractable:
There is a growing scientific literature on the welfare needs of many species, which helps advocates know what standards to promote [4].
Some of these welfare needs, mostly relating to stunning before slaughter, have already been implemented. For instance, most UK rainbow trout are now stunned before slaughter, in large part due to support and pressure from the RSPCA and Humane Slaughter Association [5]. Just last week, Tesco announced that it would stop selling live fish in their Polish locations, at least partly in response to pressure from advocacy groups [6].
Some changes, such as improving dissolved oxygen levels for farmed fish, may not be very costly to implement [7].
We hope that our work will provide further evidence to the tractability of fish.
For more information on why we chose fish and the causes of their suffering, see our previous blog post: Why focus on fish?
Which fish?
Currently, we intend to focus primarily on farmed fish. Unlike wild-caught fish, humans influence the whole lives of farmed fish, not just their deaths. Additionally, the number of farmed fish stands to increase as the aquaculture industry continues to grow [8]. However, we do not mean to say that we should not work on the welfare of wild-caught fish and we are open to doing so in the future.
Some neglected fish groups that we probably will not focus on for the foreseeable future but are still promising include juvenile fish ...
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