This morning I was looking into Switzerland's new animal welfare labelling law. I was going through the list of abuses that are now required to be documented on labels, and one of them made me do a double-take: "Frogs: Leg removal without anaesthesia."
This confused me. Why are we talking about anaesthesia? Shouldn't the frogs be dead before having their legs removed? It turns out the answer is no; standard industry practice is to cut their legs off while they are fully conscious. They remain alive and responsive for up to 15 minutes afterward. As far as I can tell, there are zero welfare regulations in any major producing country.
The scientific evidence for frog sentience is robust - they have nociceptors, opioid receptors, demonstrate pain avoidance learning, and show cognitive abilities including spatial mapping and rule-based learning.
It's hard to find data on the scale of this issue, but estimates put the order of magnitude at billions of frogs annually. I could not find any organisations working directly on frog welfare interventions. Here are the organizations I found that come closest:
* Animal Welfare Institute has documented the issue and published reports, but their focus appears more on the ecological impact and population decline rather than welfare reforms
* PETA has conducted investigations and released footage, but their approach is typically to advocate for complete elimination of the practice rather than welfare improvements
* Pro Wildlife, Defenders of Wildlife focus on conservation and sustainability rather than welfare standards
This issue seems tractable. There is scientific research on humane euthanasia methods for amphibians, but this research is primarily for laboratory settings rather than commercial operations. The EU imports the majority of traded frog legs through just a few countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam, creating clear policy leverage points. A major retailer (Carrefour) just stopped selling frog legs after welfar
EA longitudinal studies
I think the movement might benefit from uncovering predictors of value drift / EA specific causes of mental health issues. It would be interesting to see how ideas propagate from the leaders to the followers.
Also, delegating all the surveys to the central planner might make them more well-thought and might make it easier to integrate the results of different surveys into conclusions.
Note that it is possible to do longitudinal analysis with the EA Survey, and we have done some in the past (such as for retention, GWWC pledge keeping, and changes in cause preferences). I'd be happy to help walk people through how they can do their own longitudinal analyses and what the relevant caveats are.