Farmkind estimates that a yearly donation of £220.32 offsets the suffering imposed by the typical non-conscientous diet. Do you estimate your increased yearly expense from shopping at Waitrose and buying free-range offerings to be similar to the £220 figure?
I'd be extremely surprised if paying for the higher welfare products wasn't way more expensive than offsetting. I made the FarmKind calculator but haven't had a chance to do this calculation yet -- I'd love to know the answer though!
There is a market for humanely raised animal products. Therefore, we should expect suppliers to provide animal products certified as humanely raised, at cost.
My general experience is that animal products that are genuinely humanely raised, cost much more than factory-farmed animals. This fits my intuitions: it would be surprising if factory farming animals, by cramming 10x the amount of bodies on the same land, only generated a savings of a few percent. So when anyone says, "we should just pay a few more cents per product to make them far more humane,": (1) If that were true, those products should already be available; (2) It seems unlikely that could be true. I'm not a farmer, so (1) is doing the heavy lifting for me.
Given the analysis above, when Farm Kind says that they can alleviate all the suffering a factory-farmed diet engenders with only £220, I don't see how that could be the case. How is it possible that the entire industry of factory farming is only saving 20-60% of food costs? And again, if that were true, why aren't there genuinely humane food products that cost only 20-60% more?
Maybe Farm Kind is plucking some low-hanging fruit like shrimp welfare, but beyond that, I'm extremely dubious of their estimates.
Thanks for explaining your thinking Philip. Here's what's going on:
Why "humanely raised" meat isn't more expensive: (1) Most "humanely raised" labels don't represent genuine welfare improvements. They're marketing terms with minimal standards, often self-certified by the industry. Consumers pay premium prices for what amounts to plausible deniability rather than meaningful change. If people truly demanded high welfare, they'd insist on specific, transparent standards monitored by independent welfare agencies. So unless you see a label that promises specific conditions that are known to make a significant difference to animal welfare (e.g. the Better Chicken Commitment), there's no reason to expect it to cost significantly more. (2) When optimizing for reducing suffering, you can start with practices that add the most suffering for the least cost-saving [and yes, industry would be willing to drastically increase suffering to save a few cents, because the externality of animal suffering is not priced in]. (3) It's not always the case that practices that increase suffering save farmers money. For example, shrimp eyestalk ablation is being phased out at the moment not just because of the pressure from animal welfare organizations, but because the industry is realising it doesn't generate the savings they hoped: Shrimp whose eyestalks are removed mating and spawn more often, but have almost double the mortality rate and lower reproductive productivity in the long-term. The industry is not the perfectly optimized machine people imagine it to be, especially in the developing world and in the relative immature field of aquaculture.
Why we shouldn't expect FarmKind's offsets to cost the same amount as it would cost farmers to farm humanely: Basically, our charities reduce suffering in a different way to how individual farmers would if they were trying to raise their products more humanely:
(1) FarmKind doesn't pay the costs that industry should be paying to farm animals more humanely. Instead, it funds interventions wherever cost-effectiveness is highest to reduce an equivalent amount of suffering for those species.
(2) Systemic change distributes costs widely. When The Humane League pressures McDonald's to commit to cage-free eggs, donors only pay for the campaign - not the infrastructure changes. Those costs are spread across millions of consumers as tiny price increases.
(3) Some interventions actually benefit farmers economically. Fish Welfare Initiative works with fish farmers in India to implement changes that improve both fish welfare AND business outcomes - challenging the assumption that factory farming is always the most efficient system.
(4) Many cruel practices provide marginal cost savings but cause disproportionate suffering. When Sinergia Animal pressures companies to eliminate piglet mutilations, donors only pay for the campaign, not the actual cost of raising those animals differently.
(5) Supporting organizations like GFI accelerates the alternative protein transition, reducing demand for factory farming altogether rather than paying to reform it.
When you said you made the FarmKind calculator, I somehow didn't realize that you were the one who created *the actual* FarmKind calculator. Thanks for all of the work you've done in making it easier for people to support animal welfare.
Just to clarify, I was puzzled at the discrepancy between the cost of reducing animal suffering through donations to FarmKind and the cost of reducing animal suffering by buying from suppliers that actually maintain transparent standards monitored by independent welfare agencies (like AGW, GAP 5+ etc.).
I realize now that this discrepancy makes sense because FarmKind's focus is less on subsidizing humane animal practices and more on trying to change legal frameworks or supporting alternatives to meat altogether.
My two cents: I stopped eating chicken in 2016 (thanks to a Slate Star Codex post). It's pretty rare that I miss it. Compared to other meats I tend to find substitutes (eg vegan chicken nuggets) completely fine. I've got quite a tolerant extended family and they now all know that chicken is off my menu - has caused no drama. Pork is honestly just much nicer.
There are some times it's awkward. I have found myself sat in Nando's wanting to eat absolutely nothing they offer (the veggie options just aren't to my taste), so I have to munch on some fries before finding something else to eat afterwards. The other day a work function offered chicken and very little else for food, so I left early. But these are pretty minor disadvantages in the scheme of things.
Anyway, thanks for the in-depth thoughts Charles. I think offsetting my meat eating will be something I do from now on, on top of my charity contributions. And I will take a closer look at Waitrose (though I'm in an area of the country where they are very sparse).
Agree 100%! The Methane side-effect of cows is unfortunate, but it seems like beef is (one of) the best options. I respect vegans and they are probably very moral people, however, I believe evidence shows humans are healthiest with an omnivorous diet, and I'd say that the average Waitrose free range farm animal is more content than they would have been in the wild.
The UK I believe is historically a pioneering country in terms of thinking about animal welfare, so you should be proud about that.
I'm one of the co-founders of FarmKind and the one who did the underlying analysis behind it's offset calculator.
I wanted to weigh in on your section where you explain why someone in the UK might use Compassion in World Farming to offset their meat consumption. It's an interesting consideration that you want to offset harms to animals in the same country as you -- we hadn't considered this when building the calculator.
In fact, our calculator doesn't offset the harms to animals in the US: Rather, it is location agnostic. Our 6 recommended charities have an impact in a number of locations: Some, like The Humane League are active in the USA (but also elsewhere). Others, like The Good Food Institute, are very much international. Others, like Fish Welfare Initiative, are active in specific countries outside the US (e.g. India).
I ultimately think that choosing to donate to a local charity because one consumes animal products locally is inadvisable for 3 reasons:
(1) Much of the meat one consumes is imported so a locally active charity won't cleanly offset animals raised in your local country
(2) Even if you gain 'geographical accuracy' by donating to a local charity, you lose a key benefit of FarmKind's carefully selected charities: They offset all of the main types of animals impacted by your diet. i.e. you lose species accuracy, which (if it matters at all) should matter as much as geographical accuracy
(3) The difference in the cost-effectiveness of different charities is big. Like REALLY big. Even if all the charities get the 'thumbs up' of some effective altruists, the differences between those is important enough to take seriously when deciding where to give. So, despite my utmost respect for Compassion in World Farming, I don't think assuming they're half as cost-effective as FarmKind recommended charities is a safe assumption.
Thank you for your great work with Farm Kind, honestly a great website and perfect for meat eaters who are consequentialists too. I think Compassion in World Farming is pretty effective organisation helping a sum total of 310bn animals. Also, the vast majority of beef in the UK is British (https://ahdb.org.uk/news/uk-beef-self-sufficiency-and-impacts-of-brexit), so, donating to a British animal charity is going to do a pretty good job at covering all of my UK beef consumption. (Though maybe I should diversify donations a bit to capture that 14%).
As someone who cares about animal rights before animal welfare, I'm committed to compensating in advance those animals I later harm. I don't want to harm animals I don't compensate in expected value terms, so, the Turkish chickens are not a concern of mine which are helped via Farm Kind.
It's an interesting perspective but I still can't quite make sense of it (perhaps because I'm not a rights guy). If it were important to me to compensate the same animals I harm, then getting the distribution of benefits between species right seems as important as geography, and getting the distribution of benefits across time right seems just as important too. You really have no idea when animals will be helped as a result of your donations to CWIF, so to assume it will be the ones you later harm seems super wishful. If you're taking the perspective that you need to help the same animals you compensate in expectation, then it seems like there is no option to do exactly this. FWIW I don't think you need to help these specific animals, and think you helping any animals is better than helped less/none :)
CIWF operates a series of awards for UK supermarkets, which, to my mind, is good indication its going to help British animals - it's not wishful thinking. I don't eat chicken and pork, apart from the free range pork at Waitrose, so, it mainly there to hep the cows, e.g., they abolished live animal export in the UK recently. Given I have little idea where my seafood come from it may make sense for me to give some more money to charities which help them, and, I suppose, Farm Kind would be a great option for that, particularly the Shrimp Welfare Project.
Hi, i think your offsetter is nonsense so maybe you can clarify why your numbers seem so off to me. I eat wild but wanted to see what the numbers would like for the same weekly meals if farmed.
I've inputted only 4 meals with fish and 1 with crustaceans, 0 everything else.
Its telling me i need to pay 76£ per month to offset this.
Hey Garreth! Thanks for checking it out. There are a few reasons that the calculator's outputs can surprise people:
(1) People who mostly eat seafood tend to assume this is better for animal welfare than an omnivorous diet, but because common seafood animals (e.g. salmon and shrimp) are so much smaller than land animals (e.g. cows, pigs and chickens), people often end up eating many more animals total than omnivores, such that even adjusting for the probability of sentience and lifespan, pescetarian diets can cause more suffering than omnivorous ones (of course, it depends. if you just eat less non-seafood without eating more seafood instead of land animals, then you'll cause less suffering).
(2) The calculator costs tell you how much it costs to reduce an equivalent amount of suffering to what your diet causes. This is heavily dependent on how cost-effective the best charities are at helping different species. As it happens, it costs the Fish Welfare Initiative a lot more to help a fish than it costs Sinergia Animal to help a pig. This is in part because work helping farmed fish is a new frontier, that isn't as advanced as the well-trodden path of helping chickens and pigs.
Okay thank you, the linked excel is very clarifying. A few points,
1) Tuna is listed in both the excel and and frontend as an example for the fish option. Since 99.9% of tuna is wild this seems particularly likely to mislead. Also tuna can weigh as much as cows so again eating tuna does not suffer from the small animals problem. I suggest removing tuna as an example.
2) Adjusting for sentience and lifespan is not enough with lower organisms, you need a P(Sentience)-adjusted welfare range due to the lesser capacity for range of experience of lower animals. Weighing animal welfare (2024) does this for carp (stand in for fish) and finds a 50 fold lower welfare range for carp vs chicken and 100 fold lower vs pigs (based on neurophysiological differences). Thus I'm skeptical pescatarian diets actually cause more suffering than a standard factory farming diet.
3) If you disagree with 2 above then it does seem like innovation in fish farm welfare management could have huge benefits but that giving to current initiatives is a bit of a waste adjusting for opportunity cost.
That's a good point re: Tuna! I used to only eat wild caught seafood which in practice basically meant I only ate tuna, so I feel silly for not catching this earlier! Fixed in the spreadsheet. We're actually overhauling the calculator atm and I'll change it there as part of that (not as quick to edit as the spreadsheet).
Agree re: #2. Our calculator actually does account for all of that, because when we estimate the % of the total suffering experienced by each animal that each charity intervention reduces, we do so using Ambitious Impact's SAD metric, which combines p(sentience), welfare range, and where within each animals welfare range different farming methods are. It doesn't actually matter if we do though, because our calculator doesn't allow for "funging" across types of animals, i.e. if your diet impacts 5 pigs and 10 fish you need to reduce the 5 pigs's worth of pig suffering and 10 fish worth of fish suffering, so whether pigs's P(Sentience)-adjusted welfare range is 1.5x or 150x that of fish won't change how many of each our calculator says we need to help. You're right though that P(Sentience)-adjusted welfare range has a bearing on whether a pescatarian diet causes more or less suffering than an omnivorous one. I haven't crunched the numbers on this, and it would depend significantly on the fairly subjective p(Sentience) estimates.
Re: 3, we think it's super-important to not just invest in mature interventions but also in earlier stage ones so that we can find new innovations and so that, when we hit diminishing returns on things like cage-free campaigns, we have a pipeline of promising interventions to take their place. FWI is a pioneering organization, without which Shrimp Welfare Project wouldn't have been founded or have moved as quickly (I worked at Charity Entrepreneurship which is how I'm privy to this), They've paved the way for work on fish welfare in the animal movement more broadly. So I think their cost-effectiveness analysis significantly underestimates their true impact (both historically and on the margin). Happy to have a call or something on this topic, which is super interesting! :)
I do not mock anyone's sincerely held beliefs and morality regarding what they eat. But I do wonder about the seemingly biased morality of declining to eat animals while feasting away on plants. Isn't there harm involved with pulling a carrot or potato out of the ground? Shouldn't eating undeveloped plant embryos (seeds) cause some sort of angst? Isn't plowing the ground to favor desirable plants, pulling weeds, and harvesting green vegetables before they seed causing harm to some kind of living being? Seems to me the only food humans consume that is not harmful to other life is fruit, structures plants specifically produce for animals to eat.
My point is that humans consume (harm) some other form of life for nourishment, there is no way around that. But it is subjective to conclude eating some things (like animals) is harmful while eating other things (like plants) causes no harm. Of course there are objective considerations, like the greater environmental cost of relying on animals for nutrition rather than plants, but the moral question of what is appropriate to eat and what is not is subjective. I just think that point needs to be made when considering a vegan lifestyle.
Animals suffer and plants do not. You could argue that the moral question of whether it is permissible to cause suffering is subjective, but such a view seems very implausible.
Well you could use consciousness as your objective measure, because the evidence we have now points to animals being conscious and able to experience suffering which is bad. Plants on the other hand do not seem to be conscious nor able to experience suffering.
Farmkind estimates that a yearly donation of £220.32 offsets the suffering imposed by the typical non-conscientous diet. Do you estimate your increased yearly expense from shopping at Waitrose and buying free-range offerings to be similar to the £220 figure?
Probably more relative to buying chicken and cheap pork, though, not too sure.
I'd be extremely surprised if paying for the higher welfare products wasn't way more expensive than offsetting. I made the FarmKind calculator but haven't had a chance to do this calculation yet -- I'd love to know the answer though!
Kurzgesagt just made a video making the same kind of "we should just pay a few more cents per product to make them far more humane" argument as Charles (which I think is a good argument!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sVfTPaxRwk&ab_channel=Kurzgesagt%E2%80%93InaNutshell
But it seems far less efficient than paying some of the most cost-effective charities to influence the food system structurally and at scale
My thinking is as follows:
There is a market for humanely raised animal products. Therefore, we should expect suppliers to provide animal products certified as humanely raised, at cost.
My general experience is that animal products that are genuinely humanely raised, cost much more than factory-farmed animals. This fits my intuitions: it would be surprising if factory farming animals, by cramming 10x the amount of bodies on the same land, only generated a savings of a few percent. So when anyone says, "we should just pay a few more cents per product to make them far more humane,": (1) If that were true, those products should already be available; (2) It seems unlikely that could be true. I'm not a farmer, so (1) is doing the heavy lifting for me.
Given the analysis above, when Farm Kind says that they can alleviate all the suffering a factory-farmed diet engenders with only £220, I don't see how that could be the case. How is it possible that the entire industry of factory farming is only saving 20-60% of food costs? And again, if that were true, why aren't there genuinely humane food products that cost only 20-60% more?
Maybe Farm Kind is plucking some low-hanging fruit like shrimp welfare, but beyond that, I'm extremely dubious of their estimates.
Thanks for explaining your thinking Philip. Here's what's going on:
Why "humanely raised" meat isn't more expensive: (1) Most "humanely raised" labels don't represent genuine welfare improvements. They're marketing terms with minimal standards, often self-certified by the industry. Consumers pay premium prices for what amounts to plausible deniability rather than meaningful change. If people truly demanded high welfare, they'd insist on specific, transparent standards monitored by independent welfare agencies. So unless you see a label that promises specific conditions that are known to make a significant difference to animal welfare (e.g. the Better Chicken Commitment), there's no reason to expect it to cost significantly more. (2) When optimizing for reducing suffering, you can start with practices that add the most suffering for the least cost-saving [and yes, industry would be willing to drastically increase suffering to save a few cents, because the externality of animal suffering is not priced in]. (3) It's not always the case that practices that increase suffering save farmers money. For example, shrimp eyestalk ablation is being phased out at the moment not just because of the pressure from animal welfare organizations, but because the industry is realising it doesn't generate the savings they hoped: Shrimp whose eyestalks are removed mating and spawn more often, but have almost double the mortality rate and lower reproductive productivity in the long-term. The industry is not the perfectly optimized machine people imagine it to be, especially in the developing world and in the relative immature field of aquaculture.
Why we shouldn't expect FarmKind's offsets to cost the same amount as it would cost farmers to farm humanely: Basically, our charities reduce suffering in a different way to how individual farmers would if they were trying to raise their products more humanely:
(1) FarmKind doesn't pay the costs that industry should be paying to farm animals more humanely. Instead, it funds interventions wherever cost-effectiveness is highest to reduce an equivalent amount of suffering for those species.
(2) Systemic change distributes costs widely. When The Humane League pressures McDonald's to commit to cage-free eggs, donors only pay for the campaign - not the infrastructure changes. Those costs are spread across millions of consumers as tiny price increases.
(3) Some interventions actually benefit farmers economically. Fish Welfare Initiative works with fish farmers in India to implement changes that improve both fish welfare AND business outcomes - challenging the assumption that factory farming is always the most efficient system.
(4) Many cruel practices provide marginal cost savings but cause disproportionate suffering. When Sinergia Animal pressures companies to eliminate piglet mutilations, donors only pay for the campaign, not the actual cost of raising those animals differently.
(5) Supporting organizations like GFI accelerates the alternative protein transition, reducing demand for factory farming altogether rather than paying to reform it.
The blog explaining how our calculations work is here: https://www.farmkind.giving/blog/how-our-calculators-work
The underlying spreadsheet is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xfoqUE82r_dSJb1vqpmB39Ty1YYusUKAw3wbJTILgb8/edit?gid=2035160679#gid=2035160679
When you said you made the FarmKind calculator, I somehow didn't realize that you were the one who created *the actual* FarmKind calculator. Thanks for all of the work you've done in making it easier for people to support animal welfare.
Just to clarify, I was puzzled at the discrepancy between the cost of reducing animal suffering through donations to FarmKind and the cost of reducing animal suffering by buying from suppliers that actually maintain transparent standards monitored by independent welfare agencies (like AGW, GAP 5+ etc.).
I realize now that this discrepancy makes sense because FarmKind's focus is less on subsidizing humane animal practices and more on trying to change legal frameworks or supporting alternatives to meat altogether.
My two cents: I stopped eating chicken in 2016 (thanks to a Slate Star Codex post). It's pretty rare that I miss it. Compared to other meats I tend to find substitutes (eg vegan chicken nuggets) completely fine. I've got quite a tolerant extended family and they now all know that chicken is off my menu - has caused no drama. Pork is honestly just much nicer.
There are some times it's awkward. I have found myself sat in Nando's wanting to eat absolutely nothing they offer (the veggie options just aren't to my taste), so I have to munch on some fries before finding something else to eat afterwards. The other day a work function offered chicken and very little else for food, so I left early. But these are pretty minor disadvantages in the scheme of things.
Anyway, thanks for the in-depth thoughts Charles. I think offsetting my meat eating will be something I do from now on, on top of my charity contributions. And I will take a closer look at Waitrose (though I'm in an area of the country where they are very sparse).
Not eating chicken is one of the biggest steps you could have made already, so, great stuff.
Recent update from Waitrose https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/15/prawn-farming-cruelty-electrical-stunning-waitrose
Great news and even more reason to shop at Waitrose.
Agree 100%! The Methane side-effect of cows is unfortunate, but it seems like beef is (one of) the best options. I respect vegans and they are probably very moral people, however, I believe evidence shows humans are healthiest with an omnivorous diet, and I'd say that the average Waitrose free range farm animal is more content than they would have been in the wild.
The UK I believe is historically a pioneering country in terms of thinking about animal welfare, so you should be proud about that.
I'm one of the co-founders of FarmKind and the one who did the underlying analysis behind it's offset calculator.
I wanted to weigh in on your section where you explain why someone in the UK might use Compassion in World Farming to offset their meat consumption. It's an interesting consideration that you want to offset harms to animals in the same country as you -- we hadn't considered this when building the calculator.
In fact, our calculator doesn't offset the harms to animals in the US: Rather, it is location agnostic. Our 6 recommended charities have an impact in a number of locations: Some, like The Humane League are active in the USA (but also elsewhere). Others, like The Good Food Institute, are very much international. Others, like Fish Welfare Initiative, are active in specific countries outside the US (e.g. India).
I ultimately think that choosing to donate to a local charity because one consumes animal products locally is inadvisable for 3 reasons:
(1) Much of the meat one consumes is imported so a locally active charity won't cleanly offset animals raised in your local country
(2) Even if you gain 'geographical accuracy' by donating to a local charity, you lose a key benefit of FarmKind's carefully selected charities: They offset all of the main types of animals impacted by your diet. i.e. you lose species accuracy, which (if it matters at all) should matter as much as geographical accuracy
(3) The difference in the cost-effectiveness of different charities is big. Like REALLY big. Even if all the charities get the 'thumbs up' of some effective altruists, the differences between those is important enough to take seriously when deciding where to give. So, despite my utmost respect for Compassion in World Farming, I don't think assuming they're half as cost-effective as FarmKind recommended charities is a safe assumption.
Thank you for your great work with Farm Kind, honestly a great website and perfect for meat eaters who are consequentialists too. I think Compassion in World Farming is pretty effective organisation helping a sum total of 310bn animals. Also, the vast majority of beef in the UK is British (https://ahdb.org.uk/news/uk-beef-self-sufficiency-and-impacts-of-brexit), so, donating to a British animal charity is going to do a pretty good job at covering all of my UK beef consumption. (Though maybe I should diversify donations a bit to capture that 14%).
As someone who cares about animal rights before animal welfare, I'm committed to compensating in advance those animals I later harm. I don't want to harm animals I don't compensate in expected value terms, so, the Turkish chickens are not a concern of mine which are helped via Farm Kind.
It's an interesting perspective but I still can't quite make sense of it (perhaps because I'm not a rights guy). If it were important to me to compensate the same animals I harm, then getting the distribution of benefits between species right seems as important as geography, and getting the distribution of benefits across time right seems just as important too. You really have no idea when animals will be helped as a result of your donations to CWIF, so to assume it will be the ones you later harm seems super wishful. If you're taking the perspective that you need to help the same animals you compensate in expectation, then it seems like there is no option to do exactly this. FWIW I don't think you need to help these specific animals, and think you helping any animals is better than helped less/none :)
CIWF operates a series of awards for UK supermarkets, which, to my mind, is good indication its going to help British animals - it's not wishful thinking. I don't eat chicken and pork, apart from the free range pork at Waitrose, so, it mainly there to hep the cows, e.g., they abolished live animal export in the UK recently. Given I have little idea where my seafood come from it may make sense for me to give some more money to charities which help them, and, I suppose, Farm Kind would be a great option for that, particularly the Shrimp Welfare Project.
Hi, i think your offsetter is nonsense so maybe you can clarify why your numbers seem so off to me. I eat wild but wanted to see what the numbers would like for the same weekly meals if farmed.
I've inputted only 4 meals with fish and 1 with crustaceans, 0 everything else.
Its telling me i need to pay 76£ per month to offset this.
How could that possibly be correct?
Hey Garreth! Thanks for checking it out. There are a few reasons that the calculator's outputs can surprise people:
(1) People who mostly eat seafood tend to assume this is better for animal welfare than an omnivorous diet, but because common seafood animals (e.g. salmon and shrimp) are so much smaller than land animals (e.g. cows, pigs and chickens), people often end up eating many more animals total than omnivores, such that even adjusting for the probability of sentience and lifespan, pescetarian diets can cause more suffering than omnivorous ones (of course, it depends. if you just eat less non-seafood without eating more seafood instead of land animals, then you'll cause less suffering).
(2) The calculator costs tell you how much it costs to reduce an equivalent amount of suffering to what your diet causes. This is heavily dependent on how cost-effective the best charities are at helping different species. As it happens, it costs the Fish Welfare Initiative a lot more to help a fish than it costs Sinergia Animal to help a pig. This is in part because work helping farmed fish is a new frontier, that isn't as advanced as the well-trodden path of helping chickens and pigs.
You can see a blog explaining how the calculations work here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xfoqUE82r_dSJb1vqpmB39Ty1YYusUKAw3wbJTILgb8/edit?gid=2035160679#gid=2035160679
You can see the underlying spreadsheet including sources and calculations here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xfoqUE82r_dSJb1vqpmB39Ty1YYusUKAw3wbJTILgb8/edit?gid=2035160679#gid=2035160679
Okay thank you, the linked excel is very clarifying. A few points,
1) Tuna is listed in both the excel and and frontend as an example for the fish option. Since 99.9% of tuna is wild this seems particularly likely to mislead. Also tuna can weigh as much as cows so again eating tuna does not suffer from the small animals problem. I suggest removing tuna as an example.
2) Adjusting for sentience and lifespan is not enough with lower organisms, you need a P(Sentience)-adjusted welfare range due to the lesser capacity for range of experience of lower animals. Weighing animal welfare (2024) does this for carp (stand in for fish) and finds a 50 fold lower welfare range for carp vs chicken and 100 fold lower vs pigs (based on neurophysiological differences). Thus I'm skeptical pescatarian diets actually cause more suffering than a standard factory farming diet.
3) If you disagree with 2 above then it does seem like innovation in fish farm welfare management could have huge benefits but that giving to current initiatives is a bit of a waste adjusting for opportunity cost.
That's a good point re: Tuna! I used to only eat wild caught seafood which in practice basically meant I only ate tuna, so I feel silly for not catching this earlier! Fixed in the spreadsheet. We're actually overhauling the calculator atm and I'll change it there as part of that (not as quick to edit as the spreadsheet).
Agree re: #2. Our calculator actually does account for all of that, because when we estimate the % of the total suffering experienced by each animal that each charity intervention reduces, we do so using Ambitious Impact's SAD metric, which combines p(sentience), welfare range, and where within each animals welfare range different farming methods are. It doesn't actually matter if we do though, because our calculator doesn't allow for "funging" across types of animals, i.e. if your diet impacts 5 pigs and 10 fish you need to reduce the 5 pigs's worth of pig suffering and 10 fish worth of fish suffering, so whether pigs's P(Sentience)-adjusted welfare range is 1.5x or 150x that of fish won't change how many of each our calculator says we need to help. You're right though that P(Sentience)-adjusted welfare range has a bearing on whether a pescatarian diet causes more or less suffering than an omnivorous one. I haven't crunched the numbers on this, and it would depend significantly on the fairly subjective p(Sentience) estimates.
Re: 3, we think it's super-important to not just invest in mature interventions but also in earlier stage ones so that we can find new innovations and so that, when we hit diminishing returns on things like cage-free campaigns, we have a pipeline of promising interventions to take their place. FWI is a pioneering organization, without which Shrimp Welfare Project wouldn't have been founded or have moved as quickly (I worked at Charity Entrepreneurship which is how I'm privy to this), They've paved the way for work on fish welfare in the animal movement more broadly. So I think their cost-effectiveness analysis significantly underestimates their true impact (both historically and on the margin). Happy to have a call or something on this topic, which is super interesting! :)
All great answers, cheers for the responses.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing this with us Charles
I do not mock anyone's sincerely held beliefs and morality regarding what they eat. But I do wonder about the seemingly biased morality of declining to eat animals while feasting away on plants. Isn't there harm involved with pulling a carrot or potato out of the ground? Shouldn't eating undeveloped plant embryos (seeds) cause some sort of angst? Isn't plowing the ground to favor desirable plants, pulling weeds, and harvesting green vegetables before they seed causing harm to some kind of living being? Seems to me the only food humans consume that is not harmful to other life is fruit, structures plants specifically produce for animals to eat.
My point is that humans consume (harm) some other form of life for nourishment, there is no way around that. But it is subjective to conclude eating some things (like animals) is harmful while eating other things (like plants) causes no harm. Of course there are objective considerations, like the greater environmental cost of relying on animals for nutrition rather than plants, but the moral question of what is appropriate to eat and what is not is subjective. I just think that point needs to be made when considering a vegan lifestyle.
Animals suffer and plants do not. You could argue that the moral question of whether it is permissible to cause suffering is subjective, but such a view seems very implausible.
Well you could use consciousness as your objective measure, because the evidence we have now points to animals being conscious and able to experience suffering which is bad. Plants on the other hand do not seem to be conscious nor able to experience suffering.
The best places to offset are displayed here https://www.farmkind.giving/