I think the general point still stands that we want to advocate for more aquatic animal charities in the space.

Even if you think shrimps are the most cost-effective donation opportunity currently, a key point we wanted to make was that just because there is a Shrimp Welfare Project doesn't mean that there isn't space for more orgs.

There are a number of things SWP is not pursuing that could be really impactful, like working on shrimp paste, or brine shrimp, or fish fry.

Hey Vasco! Yeah I think I'd advocate for more aquatic animal orgs at the margin (though I do think that funding in this space is increasing, so this trade-off might not be super clear cut anyway).

I liked Karolina's response to a similar question during the recent EA Animal Welfare Funds AMA and I usually give a similar response when people ask me about funding SWP - I think new orgs in this space often have a really high Expected Value, so depending on your risk-tolerance for funding I think they represent a really exciting opportunity. 

I think SWP itself might be quite a good example of this - we came out of the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program with a seed grant of $100k. We then got a couple of grants from EAAWF ($45k) and ACE Movement Grants ($40k) as well as some smaller donors here and there. I think this got us to the point where we had figured out our main intervention, could secure some Open Philanthropy funding, and start to have impact. 

I think it's very possible SWP has only found a local maximum and that there are other opportunities out there that could help us get closer to the global maximum in this space. So if I was a donor trying to allocate ~$200k, I would put serious effort into looking for new orgs/opportunities that I thought had a good chance of being more cost-effective than SWP (I think AIM have previously estimated that 20% of their charities could become field-leading - I'm not sure if this is generalisable outside of AIM, but might be a useful baserate for considering opportunities).

Aaron from Shrimp Welfare Project here :)

I just wanted to add that FWI likely significantly accelerated SWP’s impact, probably by more than a year (maybe longer, it’s hard to know for sure).

For example, two of our big pivots towards what is now our primary intervention are a direct result of engaging with FWI:

• In our first month, having a discussion with Haven who convinced us to take demand-side work seriously, rather than a purely supply-side approach as we had initially planned.
• About six months in, when we were able to visit India (we were delayed due to COVID) and saw a shrimp harvest for the first time, which convinced us to think much more about pre-slaughter stunning (we could have visited India without the help of FWI, but being able to benefit from their living situation, and their on-the-ground expertise while we were there was hugely valuable).

Additionally, our first hire in India was through a recommendation by FWI, and has been instrumental to our farmer engagement program in India (likewise, I don’t think he would have heard of SWP, or trusted us enough to leave his previous job for SWP, if not for the recommendation from FWI).

There are probably a bunch of other examples I could give, and similar to Tom I want to highlight my own biases here (SWP and FWI are very close friends, professionally and personally), but it seems hard to separate the impact of individual organisations from the wider ecosystem they operate in (at least for animal advocacy, I don't really have experience with other cause areas).

I would probably model it with https://www.getguesstimate.com/ to give a range of uncertainty in the numbers. But yeah it wouldn't surprise me if the number was ~100%

Something in the ballpark of a few hundred thousand dollars.

This is a slightly tricky question to answer as:

• We don't have a specific funding gap for 2025
  • i.e. our overheads are covered, as well as the costs for our target number of stunners
• However, it could be the case that we get unexpected momentum next year, and can give away more stunners than we'd planned for
  • We've run into this situation before, where we had an unexpected string of wins, and had to rapidly fundraise in order to pay for them
• So effectively we're trying to build up our war chest so that we're able to deploy it when the opportunities present themselves

So all of that doesn't lead me to be confident in saying any specific number, but I think something in the ballpark of a few hundred thousand dollars seems reasonable

Thanks Angelina :)
In our Guesstimate model, the overhead costs to date are included in the bottom right (something like cell L15 if it were a spreadsheet) - between the total cost of the stunners, and the final overall cost titled SWP Total Expenses.

So the cost-effectiveness we report on our website factors in this cost, but when we're fundraising for marginal dollars, we often try to highlight the fact that marginal dollars are more cost-effective than the average dollar (which is unusual for an animal charity). But I agree that this is something of a judgement call, and the complex reality of marginal dollars is somewhere between those two numbers.

Hope that's helpful!

Good question Michael!

Our current estimate is that we’ll buy 50 stunners, but I’d take that number with a huge pinch of salt, as there are a number of factors that could influence how many stunners we ultimately need to buy (probably the most important one is that we want to focus on getting retailer commitments as our goal going forward (rather than a specific number of stunners), and it’s not super clear to us what the adoption curve will look like for retail commitments as we work with retailers outside of the UK).

We regularly evaluate our HSI program, and update our estimates if we think it’s appropriate. It could turn out we need fewer than 50, it could turn out that we need more. I guess a message I would like to emphasise is that we will use marginal funding in the most cost-effective way we can, whether or not the marginal funding goes towards a specific stunner, or towards more general corporate engagment work to reach commitments.

Thanks Angelina :) Yeah just to confirm The Navigation Fund (TNF) plans to fill SWP's funding gap left by OP, at least through the end of 2026. Our OP grant was set to end at the end of 2025, so the TNF commitment equates to approximately 1 year of funding for us.

OP is SWP’s biggest funder, representing 80-90% of our overall funding. So this grant covers SWP’s overhead expenses, in addition to a few electrical stunners.

We're keen on diversifying our funding, in order to not continue relying on a single funder, as well as to raise more money in order to deploy more stunners through our Humane Slaughter Initiative (SWP is in the unusual position in the animal movement that marginal dollars are often more impactful than the average dollar donated to SWP - as this funding can go directly to expanding the HSI program).

Hey Vasco! Interesting question, unfortunately I don't know the answer...

My sense is no, as you say, the intervention increases costs without an increase in productivity for the producers. But ultimately an incentive here is continued market access, which I'm sure an economist could model whether or not this could lead to an increase in the number of shrimps (over time).

Another point to emphasise though - it's my sense that the intervention should be modelled as electrical stunning replaces air asphyxiation, rather than (perfectly implemented) ice slurry. Ice slurry slaughter is just a very difficult thing to do correctly in practice (and I’ve not seen it happen) - as even if at some point the shrimps are submerged in ice for a short period of time, it's often not long enough to kill them (~30seconds).