The Case for Dumping Money Into the Ocean

Specifically, your money.

I. The Topline

• Fish and shrimp welfare are seriously underfunded compared to other animal welfare cause areas.

• The most effective fish and shrimp welfare organizations are overdependent on large donors like Open Philanthropy.

• More small-dollar donors should direct their giving to fish and shrimp welfare.

• Two objections to this argument—that fish and shrimp are not morally important, and that welfare campaigns are counterproductive—are considered and rejected.

II. Fish and Shrimp Need Money

I care a lot about fish. And so should you. Not only are fish really cool—they know how to use hammers, for example—but there are also a lot of them. Shrimp are also really cool, and there are even more of them than there are fish. Shrimp and fish are also the two most numerous types of animals killed by human beings on an industrial scale, including insects. Even if you exclude fish and shrimp caught in the wild, and you just count farmed fish and farmed shrimp, there are about three times as many fish and shrimp alive at any single moment as there are land animals that people kill in an entire year.

Fish and shrimp also suffer some of the worst treatment of any animals in the food system. Most fish are slaughtered by suffocating in air or being gutted alive, which takes anywhere from 25 minutes to 4 hours before they lose consciousness. Farmed fish are routinely confined in underwater factory farms, which are marked by overpopulation, excessive antibiotic usage, and the spread of diseases like sea lice, which lead to increasingly common mass mortality events. A government study in Norway found that one in six farmed salmon die before they’re ready for slaughter, primarily from infectious disease and injury.

Shrimp are also confined at a high stocking density, which results in oxygen depletion, ammonia buildup, and high incidences of disease and mortality. Female shrimp routinely undergo eyestalk ablation, in which their eyestalks are cut off to promote fertility. Shrimp are most commonly slaughtered by asphyxiation or ice slurry, in which they’re submerged in icy water for 20 minutes before losing consciousness. It’s estimated that half of farmed shrimp die before they’re ready for slaughter.

You might think that fish and shrimp, being so numerous and ill-treated, would get as much attention from animal advocates as other species of farmed animals. Not so, however. Lewis Bollard, one of the movement’s top philanthropic advisors, suggested in 2018 that “more advocacy [may have] focused on the wellbeing of one captive orca, Tilikum, than on the wellbeing of all the world’s billions of captive farmed fish.”

The 2021 Farmed Animal Funders State of the Movement Report found that only one-third of farmed animal protection organizations report working on any fish-specific issues, and about half as many on crustaceans and invertebrates. The combined movement-wide budget for fish and invertebrate advocacy is less than $10 million—out of approximately $200 million per year—while advocacy in Asia, where 90% of global fish production takes place, accounts for just 8% of movement-wide spending. The most effective organizations specifically dedicated to fish and shrimp—the Fish Welfare Initiative, the Aquatic Life Institute, and the Shrimp Welfare Project—have a combined annual budget of just $3 million. And in the alternative proteins industry, less than 4% of investments in 2021 went to plant-based seafood.

Source: Farmed Animal Funders (2021).

This would all be understandable if there were just fewer and less cost-effective opportunities to help fish and shrimp than there were for other farmed animals. But there aren’t.

The Fish Welfare Initiative conservatively estimates that it can improve the life of one farmed fish per dollar donated through its work with farmers in India to improve water quality. This is despite the largest share of its funding currently going to research and testing. The Shrimp Welfare Project—which engages with industry stakeholders to curb eyestalk ablation and ice slurry—estimates it can (shr)improve 1,600 lives per dollar spent, and rough estimates suggest that shrimp welfare campaigns are multiple times more effective at averting suffering than campaigns for improved broiler chicken welfare and corporate cage-free commitments, which are currently among the best-funded initiatives in the movement.

The Fish Welfare Initiative reports that once it has the funding to scale up operations, it plans to begin pressuring companies to adopt higher welfare standards in their supply chains, which could improve its cost-effectiveness by dozens or hundreds of times over.¹ Animal Charity Evaluators estimates that the Fish Welfare Initiative and the Shrimp Welfare Project have the capacity to absorb as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars each in extra funding over the next several years to improve the lives of hundreds of millions or billions of aquatic animals.

All they need is your money.

III. Yes, YOUR Money

One of the more understated problems in animal advocacy, especially to those who aren’t in the movement professionally, is that funding is dominated by a handful of donors and foundations. Most of the largest cage-free egg campaigns, including those run by Mercy For Animals and The Humane League, are plurality or majority funded by Open Philanthropy, the foundation controlled by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna. So are the largest broiler campaigns. So is alternative proteins advocacy. So was California’s Proposition 12, the largest political victory to date for farmed animal protection in the United States. Since 2018, Open Philanthropy has contributed over $300 million to almost 200 organizations across the farmed animal protection movement. Assuming $200 million in annual movement-wide funding, Open Philanthropy alone is responsible for over a quarter of global support for farmed animal protection.

Funding for fish and shrimp is even more highly dependent on Moskovitz and Tuna (as the latter’s name might suggest). Open Philanthropy grants millions of dollars per year to fish welfare. It’s also the largest donor to the Shrimp Welfare Project, and its support is so fundamental that all shrimp welfare grants to date have simply been described as “general support.” Both the Shrimp Welfare Project and the Fish Welfare Initiative were also founded under the auspices of Charity Entrepreneurship, an incubator that’s received the lion’s share of its budget from Open Philanthropy since 2020.

DALL-E doesn’t know what Dustin Moskovitz looks like.

This level of reliance on a single donor is highly risky. It makes funding vulnerable to extraneous factors like the performance of certain stocks and a donor’s personal interests and idiosyncrasies. In niche and newer cause areas, where donors may not be strongly committed to a particular organization or intervention, and outcomes can vary widely from year to year, high donor concentration also makes long-term planning extremely difficult. In August, Cameron Meyer Shorb of the non-profit Wild Animal Initiative announced that Open Philanthropy was exiting wild animal welfare and would no longer be authorizing grants that made up about half of the organization’s budget. Without small donors to make up the difference, Shorb said, Wild Animal Initiative would have to make cuts to research grants or lay off staff members.

Earlier this month, as part of the Effective Altruism Forum’s Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week, some staffers at Animal Advocacy Careers raised the issue of a potential Open Philanthropy exit from animal welfare, which they said would be catastrophic for the movement. (The authors were warning broadly about an exit from farmed animal issues, but the consequences would also be true of an exit from fish or shrimp welfare specifically, which is more likely.)

Organisations would be forced to make significant cuts in their staff and reduce salaries, impacting their ability to achieve programme goals, and retain and attract the talent it [sic] so desperately needs.

Many organisations might have to close down altogether, not due to merely not having impact but because they aren’t able to quickly find that other funding.

Some might experience inner conflicts and unstable leadership changes.

Many organisations may need to change or pivot their programs and choose to pursue much less cost-effective programs to receive funding from non-EA funders.

This may result in the undoing of many years of hard work as corporations drop their welfare commitments if there is a lack of accountability from [effective animal advocacy] orgs.

Accumulated experience, talent and cohesion can be lost due to high talent people leaving the movement. Note that these are the primary inputs of advocacy organisations and it takes years to accumulate.

Meta- long term effects would also be very bad: animal advocacy would not be seen as a viable and stable career. Even many highly talented people who “survived” the initial funding cuts may still look for alternative career options due to fear about their future.

Other major funders can also follow OP, seeing the leading funder exiting the field as a bad market signal.

These are all potentially movement-shattering consequences, and they signal why farmed animal advocacy organizations—and especially fish and shrimp advocates—desperately need more small-dollar donors. If Moskovitz and Tuna ever change their minds, or if Facebook’s stock takes a serious hit—it fell 19% in a single day during the Cambridge Analytica scandal—some of the world’s most impactful charities are exposing themselves to enormous risk.

IV. Is This Really the Most Important Thing?

Yes, probably. At least, fish and shrimp welfare advocacy is one of the most (shr)important things, and as far as we can tell, it does a lot more to (shr)improve the lives of farmed animals than almost any other intervention. As long as you give some non-trivial moral consideration to the interests of fish and shrimp, you shouldn’t be surprised when the aggregate interests of trillions of fish and shrimp make the interests of other farmed animals (and human beings) look shrimpy in comparison.

Why Care About Fish at All?

Maybe you’re unconvinced that you should give any consideration to fish and shrimp. Fish don’t have a neocortex and shrimp don’t have a central nervous system, so they can’t feel pain. And even if they could feel pain, they’re stupid and we shouldn’t care. (I won’t tell the fish you said that, but I do expect you to apologize.) This is wrong on both counts.

Fish feel pain. The scientific debate on this question is about as close as you’re going to get to being settled. When you inject fish with acetic acid, they respond as if they’re in pain. When you give them morphine, they behave normally. Fish have pain receptors, and their brains respond differently to painful stimuli than they do to non-painful stimuli. When fish experience painful stimuli, their reaction is “strikingly similar” to that of mammals, including “reduced activity, guarding behaviour, suspension of normal behaviour, increased ventilation rate and abnormal behaviours which are all prevented by the use of pain-relieving drugs.”

Shrimp feel pain, too. The European Union’s Food Safety Authority concludes that decapod crustaceans “have a pain system and considerable learning ability,” and even though few studies are conducted on smaller crustaceans, when smaller species are studied, “they seem to have a similar level of complexity to those described for crabs and lobsters.” Shrimp exhibit pain responses and protective behavior when subjected to painful stimuli, and when subjected to anesthetics they behave normally. Evidence also suggests that shrimp have pain receptors.

Nothing can ever be definitive, but this alone should be reason enough to grant fish and shrimp moral consideration. Even if we can only be 1% confident that the 1.2 trillion fish killed by human beings per year feel pain that’s just 1% as bad as human pain, and just 1% confident that the 25 trillion shrimp killed per year feel pain that’s just 0.01% as bad as human pain, that’s the equivalent of torturing and killing 145 million people per year. And our best estimates of fish and shrimp capabilities suggest that this back-of-the-envelope calculation is too small by at least an order of magnitude.

As long as you think human pain is bad per se, you should think fish and shrimp pain are bad per se. You can try to come up with sophisticated justifications for why this isn’t so, and why we shouldn’t care about fish and shrimp pain, specifically—you can say fish are stupid, for example—but those justifications are always really lame and don’t hold up to scrutiny. Many human beings are stupid, including babies. Should we not care if someone gouges their eyes out and guts them alive?

I Smell a Welfarist

Maybe you’re on the opposite side of the aisle. Maybe you’re concerned that fish and shrimp welfare organizations actively work with animal-exploiting industries to shape welfare standards, and this only makes people think animal products are humane and they can eat them guilt-free. Rather than focus on welfare, you say, we should just ask people to go vegan.

I’m grossly simplifying here, but this used to be the third rail of animal advocacy. The position outlined above was called “abolitionism.” But now that the so-called welfarist vs. abolitionist debate has died down—and basically resolved in favor of the welfarists—it feels more appropriate to call this it “Reddit veganism,” after its present-day intellectual home. The Reddit vegan has the same unearned moral superiority as the modal Redditor, only they watched a few Gary Francione lectures on YouTube and thus feel confident enough to say the following without first consulting any empirical evidence.²

At the core of the Redditor argument is the claim that welfare improvements for farmed animals are counterproductive. Is that true?

In a word: No. Welfare campaigns increase rather than mollify concern for farmed animals because they raise public awareness of animal suffering while casting corporations, not individual consumers, as the actors at fault. This is true even when they end egregious factory farming practices that one might believe catalyze opposition to animal agriculture.

Multiple research teams have tested the Redditor hypothesis by presenting survey participants with either a news article about a new corporate or government animal welfare policy or a control article. They consistently find that participants who are shown the treatment article say they’re more likely to reduce their consumption of animal products, and sometimes by wide margins. As law professor and researcher Justin Marceau remarked at one of the leading animal advocacy conferences this year, participants in one of his not-yet-published studies “who learned about the fact of a Prop 12 type law [in their state] were about twice as likely to think that pigs should have more rights, and to say that they were less likely to eat pig.”

Additionally, welfare reforms often significantly increase the costs of animal products, thereby reducing demand; build capacity and momentum in farmed animal advocacy; and spare animals from some of the cruelest practices in industrial agriculture. (Out of the 1,326 corporate cage-free egg commitments made with a deadline of 2023 or earlier, 89% have been fulfilled.)

And how does this compare to vegan education?

The Redditor position gets at least one thing right. Obviously, people shouldn’t eat fish, shrimp, or any other factory-farmed animals. (If you don’t think that’s obvious, imagine if you had to live out every single experience, from birth to slaughter, of every animal you ever ate, all in the time it took you to chew. How many factory-farmed animal products do you think you’d consume?) Most welfarists would agree with this, because most welfarists are abolitionists who simply believe that gradualism is a more effective way to achieve animal liberation.

Where the Redditor position goes wrong is where it approaches strategy. The problem with simply telling people not to eat animals and expecting them to go vegan is that it makes them think you’re telling them what to do, and people don’t like being told what to do.³ A lot of the time, if they don’t ignore you, they become defensive—and so vegan education has a very poor success rate. After decades of talking to people about veganism and distributing millions of pamphlets on college campuses, the number of vegans and vegetarians per capita has barely changed. If the Redditor strategy was effective, you’d think it would have worked by now.

V. So What?

Fish and shrimp desperately need money. Not only do they need money, but they need your money. Fish and shrimp welfare organizations have the opportunity to bring improved treatment of aquatic animals to an unprecedented scale—as long as they have the funding. Relying on the continued good will of Dustin Moskovitz and the strong performance of Facebook stock isn’t a sustainable strategy: Fish and shrimp need shrimpy donors.

If you’re looking for another reason to take the 10% Pledge, this is it. Not only can you do hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars’ worth of good at a fraction of the cost, but you can also bring greater stability to promising new and niche organizations by helping to diversify their funding sources. You can do doubly good if you make a recurring donation, which gives organizations greater long-term stability and allows them to plan for future growth.

You can donate to the Shrimp Welfare Project here and the Fish Welfare Initiative here, and you can find other effective animal charities here, here, and here.

1. While the linked Rethink Priorities study casts doubt on the cost-effectiveness of so-called humane fish slaughter campaigns, it’s not clear that fish welfare organizations would focus on slaughter rather than, say, improving stocking density and water quality for farmed fish. Focusing on the latter would address the concern that corporate campaigns “might only affect between 0.4 and 10 fish hours per dollar … largely reflecting the very short duration of fish slaughter.”

2. Nothing said here should be interpreted as casting aspersions at Redditor u/lnfinity, who’s an effective altruist and a great guy who’s racked up over 11 million karma by posting vegan recipes and GIFs of happy animals.

3. See the question “Personal choice” on the linked survey. Ninety-six percent of respondents agree with the following statement: “Whether to eat animals or be vegetarian is a personal choice, and nobody has the right to tell me which one they think I should do.”