(As of this writing, the post has stood empty for 10 minutes.)
Shall I interpret this as a call for nothing to be done? Or a cry of despair at the bottomless pit of suffering that requires everyone to do everything, yet no-one can do anything, a circular prison cell in Azkaban whose walls endlessly chatter "you must but you can't but you must but you can't..."?
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Crossposted from my blog:
(Please share this article so that more people read it and give to these extremely high-impact organizations. It takes roughly two seconds to restack an article, and has some chance of helping thousands or millions of animals).
"I say!" murmured Horton.
"I've never heard tell
Of a small speck of dust that is able to yell.
So you know what I think? . . . Why, I think that there must
Be someone on top of that small speck of dust!
Some sort of a creature of very small size,
Too small to be seen by an elephant's eyes.
some poor little person who's shaking with fear
That he'll blow in the pool! He has no way to steer!
I'll just have to save him.
Because, after all,
A person's a person, no matter how small."
One of the things I’m best known for—on the blogosphere, among friends, and at da clerb—is arguing that people should give money to save shrimp from torture. My third most popular article advocated giving money to the Shrimp Welfare Project, and this has raised tens of thousands of dollars for them. Because of your donations in response to that article, hundreds of millions fewer shrimp will be frozen and suffocated to death.
Few people care about the interests of insects, shrimp, and fish, even though they far outnumber humans, and all human suffering is a rounding error compared to theirs. But the core argument for caring about these creatures is pretty straightforward.
The first premise is supported by a great abundance of powerful behavioral evidence: these creatures respond to anesthetic, make tradeoffs between pain and reward, nurse their wounds, possess physiological responses to harmful stimuli similar to our own, display complex cognitive traits like long-lasting memories, and are even capable of transitive inference. Not even Larry Temkin can do that!
While not certain, it’s at least plausible that these creatures can suffer. The most detailed report ever done on the subject estimated that on average shrimp suffer 19% as intensely as humans, bees nearly 15% as intensely, and carp almost 18% as intensely. While these might be overestimates, they might also be underestimates. We just don’t know much about their mental life. We shouldn’t be super confident that they don’t feel much agony.
The second premise will be explored in detail later, but it’s pretty straightforward. If we can help huge numbers of plausibly sentient organisms—as I’ll argue we can—then doing so reduces lots of expected suffering. Because we affect these creatures in such great numbers, efforts to help them prevent extraordinary amounts of expected suffering.
The third premise that claims “it’s valuable to prevent enormous amounts of expected suffering” is quite intuitive. Pain and suffering are bad because they hurt. Headaches are bad not because the people who have them can do calculus but because they feel bad. It doesn’t matter if the people experiencing the suffering aren’t smart, so long as the suffering still hurts them. Babies and the mentally disabled are not very smart, but their pain is still bad because of how it feels. Thus, if we can prevent an extraordinarily massive amount of felt agony—an amount equivalent to preventing lots of torture—for a small amount of money, we should clearly do so.
In fact, as we’ll see, it’s quite plausible that some of the best charities can avert as much agony as preventing multiple tortures per dollar. Doing ridiculous amounts of good is extraordinarily cheap!
Most people don’t care much about the pain of shrimp, insects, and fish—but this is unreasonable. Our neglect of shrimp and insects is largely caused by a striking failure of empathy. If shrimp looked like people, everyone would agree that shrimp farming is an abomination. But what one looks is obviously morally irrelevant!
Their interests are primarily ignored because they’re small and weird-looking. But if they suffer intensely, ignoring their interests is simply bare prejudice! There’s no plausible explanation of why the pain of mentally disabled humans matters but the pain of cognitively unsophisticated shrimp does not. The only plausible account of pain’s badness is that it’s bad because of how it feels. But if that’s right, we have no basis for ignoring the interests of any feeling organism.
This has just been a quick sketch of the arguments for taking their interests seriously—for a more detailed case, I’d recommend this piece where I lay out the case for taking shrimp seriously, this piece where I rebut objections to taking shrimp seriously, this piece where I advocate for the interests of insects, and this piece where I argue that shrimp, insects, and fish can all suffer.
Suppose you’re convinced that the suffering of the small, weird, little creatures matters. That if we can prevent millions from being heinously tortured, we should do so. Where should you give?
Fortunately, you don’t have to make that decision for yourself. The good folks over at Animal Charity Evaluators spend their time analyzing charities helping animals. They very generously sent me a list of the charities that they’ve provided funding to that help shrimp, fish, and insects. Most of these aren’t their recommended charities, but ACE regards them as promising, potentially high-reward opportunities to help the often-overlooked animals.
Here I’ll discuss their Movement Grant recipients’ achievements, before giving one of my own suggestions for how to help those too weird for most people to care about! If you want to give to the movement grants program directly, instead of personally picking from among their high-impact charities, you can do so here.
You’ve probably already heard me talk about how awesome these guys are. They’re the only charity dedicated exclusively to improving the interests of shrimp.
This is quite a shame given that hundreds of billions of shrimp live in appalling conditions at any given time, and every year we slaughter a number of shrimp many times greater than the total number of humans who have ever lived. In fact, for every human who has ever lived, there are multiple shrimp right now languishing in hellish, overcrowded, polluted farms, where their eyes are routinely stabbed out to boost fertility and they’re killed by being suffocated to death. The conditions are so bad that half of them die before reaching slaughter, which means that shrimp farms are many dozens of times more dangerous than Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
Fortunately, the Shrimp Welfare Project is changing that. They’ve already helped a staggering more than 3 billion shrimp avoid a horrifying fate. That’s half the number of people in the United States! And they’ve done that with just a few hundred thousand dollars!
When they get extra money, they spend it purchasing stunners, so that shrimp are stunned before being painfully killed. Each dollar that they get prevents tens of thousands of shrimp from experiencing the pain of being slowly frozen and suffocated to death—a fate a bit like being suffocated under a pillow, over the course of 15 minutes, in Antarctica. If we accept that shrimp suffer 19% as intensely as people—the results of the most detailed report ever compiled on the subject—a dollar given to the shrimp welfare project prevents as much agony as preventing 3,000 people from experiencing the full agony of being slowly tortured to death.
They’ve also provided broader research into shrimp welfare, and shaped regulatory standards. These practices could help reshape the entire shrimp industry!
So if you want a sure way to do good, where each dollar can prevent unimaginable amounts of agony, the shrimp welfare project is a good bet.
You can probably guess what these folks do from the name: research into insect welfare. Presently there aren’t any welfare standards for insect farms. As a result, farms do all sorts of ghastly things like boil, freeze, and microwave insects to death. If a small child did such things, we’d be alarmed. When a vast industry does this to trillions, we should be trillions of times more alarmed.
They’ve managed to get the Royal Entomological Society to publish their policy statement advocating for the interests of insects. They’ve also given various talks attended by many insect farmers about insect welfare. This research is incredibly high impact, because research into insect welfare could result in broader industry standards that affect the trillions of insects being farmed.
Rethink Priorities is the research group behind most of EAs most impact research. They commissioned the aforementioned detailed report on the welfare range of various animals we farm. They produce many high-impact research reports including about:
They’ve done many other things to improve the welfare of invertebrates, like incubating high-impact organizations. Very worth funding!
The Aquatic Life Institute is involved in helping neglected creatures of the sea like shrimp and fish. They do a few different really important things. One of them is providing industry welfare standards for sea creatures, so that aquatic farms have an incentive to follow some basic standards in how they treat animals. There are no welfare regulations for fish or shrimp, so only external certifiers and greed constrain what horrors the industry might do to these poor abused creatures. They also push for legislative reforms to how we treat sea creatures.
ALI have been pivotal in banning octopus farming in California. Octopi are about as smart as dogs, and some of the coolest creatures in the world. However, on octopus farms, they’re treated horribly—about as badly as shrimp are on their farms. Octopus farming is a hideous abomination, and the fact they’ve stopped that from getting off the ground—or being imported—to California is hugely valuable. In addition, after working with the Aquatic Life Institute, Hilton Foods produced its first crustacean welfare policy.
As I’ve argued before, insects live bad lives mostly. Nearly all of them live extremely short lives of intense suffering that culminate in a painful death. If a person lives for a week and then is crushed to death or starves to death, their life isn’t worth living. This is the fate of nearly every insect. In light of this, I support policies to reduce the number of insects.
It turns out that humans drastically reduced the number of insects. The average human, each year, reduces insect life years by about 14 million. Over the course of your life, you’ll reduce the number of insects who have ever lived by billions! For this reason, simply giving to charities that save human lives prevents extremely large amounts of insect suffering. As Brian Tomasik has argued, each dollar given to the Against Malaria Foundation prevents about 14,000 years of insect life. Insects mostly live short lives, so if we assume very conservatively that insects live for about a month on average, every dollar the Against Malaria Foundation gets prevents about 168,000 insect deaths. And the Malaria Consortium might be even more effective!
It also saves human lives, so even if you don’t care about insects, it’s a good place to give!
Samayu are kind of like the Aquatic Life Institute, except they operate in India primarily and also help chickens. Through pushing for fish welfare, they’ve managed to secure a statewide directive in Madhya Pradesh, India “mandating water quality monitoring, pollution control, and aquatic weed management to improve fish welfare.” Madya Pradesh has a population of 92 million people!
With the farmers they have worked with they have achieved 28% increase in disolved Oxygen and 12% decrease in ammonia. Samayu established a broader regulatory framework for fish welfare that takes into account environmental conditions. The welfare of aquatic animals is hugely affected by the aforementioned environmental conditions, so this could boost the welfare of very large numbers of sea creatures.
The Underwater Fish Collective carries out undercover investigations on Scottish salmon farms. By documenting the routine welfare violations carried out by fish farms, they can help push for stronger welfare regulations and prompt more zealous enforcement of their laws. They’ve uncovered:
You can witness many of their incredible investigations here, though be warned: they are sometimes graphic. They do deeply important work holding the fish farms accountable.
While we spend much more time thinking about the interests of humans and chickens than of the strange little creatures, unspeakable numbers of fish, insects, and shrimp are being treated horribly. They’re kept in cramped, disease-ridden, unnatural conditions, utterly antithetical to their natural environment. They’re slaughtered in unspeakable ways with no welfare standards. Compared to their suffering, all human suffering is a rounding error. We have inflicted hell on earth on trillions of creatures for no reason other than that we like the taste of their flesh.
Fortunately, that can change. Each of the organizations listed above is helping improve the conditions for these creatures. These cruel, malevolent industries can only thrive in the dark, when no one pays attention or attempts to stop their iniquity. Each of the organizations listed above has the potential to improve the lives of the neglected trillions languishing on the farms. While we neglect their interests, they are crying out in pain, in a language we cannot hear. We stab out their eyes, boil them alive, crush them to death under the weight of other members of their species, all without showing them an ounce of compassion.
But you can prevent this unfathomable source of misery. You can prevent thousands—millions, potentially billions—of creatures from suffering. The little creatures that live in hell have never known any kindness or anything from humans other than torment and abuse. This torture must end, and you can help end it.
All these organizations were awarded a Movement Grant by ACE to help fund their vital work. ACE is now raising funds for their next round of Movement Grants recipients (soon to be announced!). Anyone who gives at least 50 dollars a month to ACE’s Movement Grants program in response to this article can get a free paid subscription, as well as anyone who donates at least 50 dollars a month to any of the individual programs listed. And for a limited time, all donations will be doubled up to $300,000 USD.