Saulius Simcikas

Fish stocking is the practice of raising fish in hatcheries and releasing them into rivers, lakes, or the ocean. 35-150 billion finfish are stocked every year. Fish are stocked to: increase the catch in commercial fisheries (probably tens of billions of stocked fish annually), increase the catch in recreational/sport fisheries (billions of stocked fish annually), and restore a population of threatened or endangered species (the number of stocked fish seems to be lower).

There are between 4.2 million and 7.8 million pet snakes in the world. 160 million to 2.1 billion vertebrates are killed for pet snake food every year. Most of the vertebrates seem to be farmed mice. Feeder mice are killed when they are anywhere between 48 hours and more than 9 months old. Most seem to be slaughtered when they are less 3–4 weeks old. Farming of feeder animals seems to involve considerable suffering because they are often living in cramped and possibly unsanitary conditions, which don’t have shelters to hide in, lack daylight and activities. I haven’t figured out what possible interventions in this space could be particularly promising. It’s possible that the problem is not very tractable. In this article, I first estimate the number of animals raised for pet snake food in the world. Then I discuss some welfare concerns of these feeder rodents by comparing the conditions in which they are raised to the ones recommended for pet mice. Finally, I brainstorm about possible interventions.

In this article, I estimate how many chickens will be affected by corporate cage-free and broiler welfare commitments won by all charities, in all countries, during all the years between 2005 and the end of 2018. According to my estimate, for every dollar spent, 9 to 120 years of chicken life will be affected. However, the estimate doesn’t take into account indirect effects which could be more important.

Some strategic decisions in animal advocacy are informed by the numbers of animals in various countries. The most widely used statistics about the numbers of farmed animals come from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) website FAOSTAT. In this article, I provide some examples of inconsistencies in FAOSTAT animal data, and further reasons to think that the data may sometimes be inaccurate. The main point of this article is that it’s probably worth trying to verify FAO numbers before using them to make important decisions. In the appendix, I also explain some minor caveats that should be understood when interpreting FAO numbers.

In this article, I list all the estimates I could find for numbers of vertebrates that are farmed or kept in captivity for various purposes. I also describe some groups of captive vertebrates for which I found no estimates. For some bigger groups of animals that are less well-known amongst animal activists, I also describe trends and main welfare concerns.

Animal advocates have achieved a lot of change for chickens. However, some advocates are concerned that the same approach could not be used to achieve similar changes for fish because people care about fish welfare much less than about chicken welfare. In this article I analyze whether this intuition holds up to scrutiny when it comes to Europe.

This post introduces a spreadsheet which visualizes numbers of corporate cage-free and broiler commitments made in different years, regions, and industries. The data for the spreadsheet is taken from chickenwatch.org.

This article contains a list of research organizations, newsletters, research libraries, personal blogs, conferences, podcasts, funds, notable written works and other links associated with Effective Animal Advocacy (EAA) movement. The list is biased because I only included resources that I know of.

Multiple animal organisations are now focusing on securing corporate commitments to improve animal welfare. And they have been very successful: Chicken Watch lists 1672 such commitments, 1007 of which are set to be fulfilled between 2020 and 2026. However, there is some reason to worry that some of these commitments may be broken. Based on this, I suggest that it would be valuable to put more effort in ensuring that companies keep their promises, and I list some ways in which it could be done.