Looking for ways to begin a career contributing to animal advocacy and/or AI governance, having just finished my philosophy BA
The link (which does work for me, perhaps try another browser) is to an archive of a 2018 article by Jiwoon Hwang which has a table with numbers of different animals, and states "1 trillion animals exist due to humans, 97% attributable to honey". As Bentham's Bulldog and the link itself caveats, this is not true, simply because the table does not include any other farmed insects. There were 1-1.2 trillion insects farmed to be eaten by humans or animals in 2020, plus many more silkworms and cochineals. @Jason Schukraft estimated "that at any given time in 2017 there were between 1.4 and 4.8 trillion adult managed honey bees", for comparison. Below is the calculation from Jiwoon Hwang:
Data for honey bees:
FAOSTAT, Livestock Primary, World, Production Quantity, Honey, natural, 2014 (http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QL) : 1,510,566 tonnes
“How much honey does the average worker honey bee make in her lifetime? – 1/12 teaspoon.” (https://www.honey.com/newsroom/press-kits/honey-trivia)
Density of Honey: 1.36 kg/l (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Nutritional_and_sugar_profile)
Estimated average lifespan of honey bees: 4 months (25-35 days summer, 6-8 months winter)
(Amdam, Gro Vang, and Stig W. Omholt. “The regulatory anatomy of honeybee lifespan.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 216.2 (2002): 209.)
Calculation:
World Honey Production 2014: 1,510,566,000,000 grammes. (1,510,566 tonnes * 1000 * 1000)
One teaspoon: 5mL (metric, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaspoon#Metric_teaspoon)
One teaspoon of honey: 6.8 gramme (5mL * 1.36 kg/L)
Honey per honey bee: 0.56666666666667 gramme (6.8 gramme * (1/12))
Honey lifetimes per year: 2,665,704,705,882 (1,510,566,000,000/0.56666666666667)
Honey years per year: 888,568,235,294 (2,665,704,705,882 * (4/12))
Edit: note that the 97% number also doesn't include shrimp.
Diana Fleischman believes scallops are not preferable because unlike oysters and mussels they are mobile rather than sessile,[1] and therefore have an evolutionary reason to be sentient because they are capable of moving away from painful stimuli.
Also, while oysters and mussels are usually farmed, scallops are sometimes dredged,[2] which probably has large effect on aquatic organisms. Here is a CGI represenation I found.
There's also footage of this and the barren-looking aftermath in the new David Attenborough film Ocean -- which is not on YouTube, although YouTube does have a separate clip from the film of bottom trawling of fish. Whereas "fishermen argue that on soft seabeds that have already been dredged the impact is far less and the effects of tides and waves may exceed the impact of fishing activities in some areas",[3] IIRC the film argues that the pre-dredging habitats recover quickly when dredging ceases.
Considering wild animal welfare, and assuming the welfare of the ocean animals is negative, I guess the question is whether dredging reduces net primary productivity (NPP) -- it looks like it does to me, based on the barren appearance of the ocean floor following dredging. So therefore, (wild-caught) scallops may be better than oysters or mussels for wild animal welfare? However, "aquaculture now dominates at 75-80% of production [of scallops], with wild dredging at 18-22% and hand-diving under 2%".[4]
(though there are some caveats to this explained in Fleischman's article)
This is a quote from Claude Sonnet 4's summary of its research report, which I have not double checked: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/5164e7de-7ff4-4952-947a-163ef13ddab7
"Pending case" does seem to have a specific legal meaning. I am not a lawyer and wouldn't know whether there is an additional colloquial meaning (though when asked in those terms, Claude Sonnet 4 agrees that there is). Therefore I disagree that it was "sufficiently clear" -- I would say it was below a sufficient standard of clarity.[1] I don't think the reader can be expected to infer that a legal term was being used differently from the fact it was a disclosed to be a newly-formed volunteer team. I do think readers would have expected an organisation's formal statement to be using the legal, more formal, meaning, and indeed I think many non-lawyer readers of this forum would not be aware that there is any other meaning.
(Though I don't get the impression this was deliberate, whereas I get the sense Vetted Causes does.)
Someone should commission new moral weights work in the next year
I’d like to see it expanded to even smaller animals if possible, like @Vasco Grilo🔸 asks here.
most workers were at best indifferent between these forms of work
Wouldn't traditional economic thinking basically predict that the equilibrium for wages in industrial jobs be at the point where workers are indifferent to them? As in, there's no incentive for the wages in industrial jobs to be any higher than the level which is just high enough to compensate for the downsides (e.g. health risks) compared to the informal labour market? (I'm not an economist, and maybe this depends on what's considered "traditional".)
Wether it’s advocating for changes that Increase Chicken mortality https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mEoaEm9xRuVkX3nWggRPz700RU7_Z_QgRuEtQMWiMbM/edit
Welfare Footprint found:
"mortality in cage-free flocks is not inherently higher than those housed in conventional battery cage systems but rather declines as managers gain experience and knowledge over time. When comparisons are made between systems with similar levels of technological maturity, mortality is similar in different systems. [...] It is important to note that lower mortality or longer survival of hens is not necessarily a good indicator of health or welfare. What makes animals suffer is not necessarily what kills them: unhealthy individuals can suffer for extensive periods in caged conditions before succumbing to their fate, if they die at all."[1]
"Cage-free aviaries were found to be clearly superior to conventional cages and furnished cages even soon after a transition to cage-free environments. Overall, an average of at least 275 hours of disabling pain, 2,313 hours of hurtful pain and 4,645 hours of annoying pain are prevented for each hen kept in an aviary instead of CC during her laying life, and 1,410 hours of hurtful pain and 4,065 hours of annoying pain prevented for each hen kept in an aviary instead of a FC during her laying life."[2]
[1] https://welfarefootprint.org/2021/04/21/meta-analysis-mortality/
This seems like a good idea; I've followed your suggestion to submit the feedback.
An observation I just made trying the prompt "Recommend me a quick dinner idea": ChatGPT (free version) also recommended me garlic butter shrimp (farmed shrimp being among the worst for suffering per calorie) -- 3 out of 3 times!
I asked it why:
"Great question — and fair point! Garlic butter shrimp pops up a lot because it hits the sweet spot of quick, easy, and flavorful, and shrimp cook incredibly fast, making it a go-to for 15–20 minute meals. Plus, the ingredients are pretty common and it feels a little "fancy" with almost no effort."
On the positive side it always ended with something like "Would you like a vegetarian version instead?"
Whereas 3.7 Sonnet's suggestion is better I think, in suggesting a more neutral recipe, where chicken breast is suggested but it's mentioned in the initial response that it can be swapped with tofu:
Ah yes, so I guess the comparison is roughly 1-1.2 trillion other insects yearly (2020), versus 4.2-14.4 trillion honeybees yearly (2017). So, 7-29% as many as the number of honeybees.
(Multiplying 1.4-4.8 trillion honeybees alive at one time by 3 to get the annual number, because of the 4 month average lifespan).