Thanks Vasco :) 

Precision Welfare - I appreciate your feedback here. I've had some positive responses from industry folks on this term, but I'm not locked into the specific language around this just yet - do you have any thoughts on other ways to frame this idea?

Certifiers - That's true. I guess the wider point I wanted to make here is that I think people are locked into a particular view of what certification looks like - and I think there is a lot of scope for ways to reimagine certification that is more innovative and responsive.

False credits - Yep good point. I think requiring more monitoring on farms to verify that producers aren't falsifying credit generation would be a good thing. This is actually one of the reasons why we're interested in Precision Aquaculture technology here - having automated sensors that could detect both pre-stunning movement and effective stunning outcomes would create a more robust verification system than relying solely on periodic inspections or self-reporting.

Per shrimp / per kg - Producers sometimes do "partial harvests" throughout a crop (to recoup losses in case of a future disease outbreak, or to reduce biomass so that the remaining shrimps can grow larger without straining the pond's carrying capacity, etc.). So my assumption (if we paid on a per shrimp basis) would be that it would incentivise farmers to stock higher at the beginning - then do a partial harvest as soon as feasible to generate credits - then continue to grow the remaining shrimps until the full harvest. 
Also, I think meeting the industry "where they're at" is often useful - if the industry already trades on a per kg basis, it makes it much easier to integrate credits into this system if we also use per kg.

Hi Angelina, Austin, and Vasco :) 

Apologies for all the confusion here - in terms of the idea I'm presenting in the post I think Vasco has done a really great job of summarising the idea above.

But I think the conversation above has helped me recognise a distinction that I don't think I'd articulated particularly well in my post, which is that I see a difference between the application of credits for contexts like shrimp stunning, and the wider application of credits for animal welfare more broadly:

1. As a transition tool (as in shrimp stunning credits) - In the case of offsetting "bad" practices, credits aren't intended to be very valuable, just a way to unblock logistical issues of transitioning a supply chain. Ultimately we want a situation where no-one is buying stunning credits because they've all directly transitioned their supply chains. (Again, I think Vasco actually does a great job of outlining my sense of how this would work without increasing shrimp production in his comment below).
2. As a tool to put a price on positive welfare (similar to Paul Christiano's Demand Offsetting proposal - thanks @Austin! I hadn't read this article before) - In cases of trying to optimise for "good" practices (where an improvement could lead to net positive lives for farmed animals), I wanted to paint a picture of a world where credits could be used to create lasting mechanisms that financially incentivise these welfare improvements.

Also, I've just realised that I've referenced @Vasco Grilo🔸's comments a few times in this reply to help clarify my thinking - just wanted to say that I really appreciate your help in articulating the points I wanted to make!

Thanks Pete :) 

Good question! The margin on the merch is pretty slim (around 20% per item, depending on what you get), we mainly use it as an awareness tool rather than a major fundraising channel.

So if you wanted to distribute t-shirts/stickers to friends, then I agree it probably makes more sense to get a bunch made up yourself rather than buy them through our store.

Thanks Vasco :) 

And good spot on the repeat! I've edited that out now

Thank you to Vetted Causes for this thoughtful review of Shrimp Welfare Project's work. I appreciate both the recognition of our cost-effectiveness and the constructive feedback on areas where we can improve.

I wanted to address a few points raised in the review:

• Regarding monitoring stunner usage: It's worth noting that our current monitoring approach is consistent with standard practice across the animal welfare movement, such as cage-free campaigns. Like these initiatives, we rely on retailers and producers facing potential public backlash if they fail to honor commitments made to their stakeholders. While this approach has driven significant progress in animal welfare to date, we're excited to go further. We're actually piloting the first version of a direct monitoring system in the next few months, with plans to iterate and improve as we learn.
• On public information: This presents an interesting challenge for us. Our website must primarily serve industry stakeholders, whose communication expectations differ significantly from those in the EA community. Detailed numerical analyses and assumptions that would be appreciated by EA readers can sometimes be off-putting to corporate audiences. We're actively trying to navigate this balance between different audience needs while maintaining our effective engagement with industry partners.
• That said, we're committed to transparency: We have prioritised our MEL (Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning) initiatives by transitioning our MEL Officer from a part-time to full-time role. She is currently upskilling through the AIM Research Program and will finish at the end of June, meaning Shrimp Welfare Project will have much stronger MEL capacity from the second half of 2025.

We're grateful to be part of a community that values both impact and transparency, and we look forward to continuing to improve our work to help billions of shrimps.

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