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Hugh P

184 karmaJoined Seeking workLondon, UK

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Want to leave anonymous feedback for me, positive, constructive or negative? https://www.admonymous.co/hugh 

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Is there a way to donate that lets UK donors claim Gift Aid? Your page at every.org doesn’t seem to have this (though I like the built-in ability for supporters to start a fundraiser). 

In its current form, Arthropoda costs about $175K per year […] We’re about $55K short for 2026


 A possibly naive question — does this mean:

  1. Arthropoda needs $55k to remain at the same level of funding (inflation-adjusted) as 2025?
  2. Or that Arthropoda needs $55k to fulfil its 2026 plan, which may involve an increase (or decrease) in funding?
  3. Or is $55k the overall “room for more funding” in some other sense?  
     

The ban on fur farming in the UK [...] didn’t lead to an increase in imports for fur


There's some data from the ONS on this, graph below. Here's the fur data separately (see the "Whole world" row). The ban took effect on 1 Jan 2003. So this seems to be true, although I guess demand for fur was already falling. 

Interesting. Then I guess strictly speaking it makes more sense to speak only of the welfare footprint of products, rather than of a whole person's carbon footprint, unlike how we speak of both products and people having carbon footprints. 

Potential opportunity to influence the World Bank away from financing factory farms: The UK Parliament is currently holding an open consultation on the future of UK aid and development assistance, closing on November 14, 2025. It includes the question, "Where is reform needed in multilateral agencies and development banks the UK is a member of, and funds?". This would include the World Bank, which finances factory farms,[1][2] so could this consultation be a way to push it away from doing that, via the UK government? 

Are any organisations planning on submitting responses? If so, should there be an effort to co-ordinate more responses on this?

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Just listened to the first episode and thoroughly enjoyed it, you're very funny people (:

Yes, this is a good point -- perhaps you could speak of "the dairy industry's welfare footprint" if you sought to avoid this. 

Though I guess people could only support policy change that tried to, for example, reduce flying in favour of travel by train, if they are first aware of the differences in emissions (254g vs 6g per km apparently), rather than just being aware that both release some emissions -- and perhaps the idea of carbon footprints helped popularise that there are such big differences (?) 
But maybe there's something about the term "footprint" which is too closely tied to individual behaviour, and a better term could be found. 

I think the term "welfare footprint" (analogous to the term "carbon footprint") is extremely useful, and we should make stronger attempts to popularise it among the public as a quick way to encapsulate the idea that different animal products have vastly different welfare harms, e.g. milk vs eggs

(You might already be aware but I think that website you linked is just LLM-generated articles. They're quite difficult to avoid on search engines these days. The information might still be accurate of course.)

Regarding the number of crop deaths caused by plant agriculture, it's difficult to draw firm conclusions based on the limited data currently available, as discussed in the section "Fishing vs. Crop Deaths".

That section states

While reliable data on crop deaths is extremely limited[27], it is plausible that these crop deaths may carry a higher total moral cost than fishing sardines and anchovies.


I thought I'd expand on this claim a bit, as I agree with @Erich_Grunewald 🔸 it seems cruxy. 

Ultimately I agree, though if I were deriving my opinion solely on the citated paper, "Field Deaths in Plant Agriculture",[1] the initial calculation based on it makes it seem unlikely. The paper says "Our overall estimate should still be much lower than the one we mentioned at the outset [even if we are morally responsible for deaths from predation]", which is "over 7.3 billion animals killed each year". That's roughly 1 animal killed per human per year.[2] If we estimate mean calorie intake to be 2500 kcal per day, 365.25 days per year, that's 913,125 kcal per year, for 1 death. 1 sardine is 47kcal,[3] so the initial rough comparison of 913,125/47 means that sardines cause 19,428x as many deaths per calorie as crops, excluding insects. 

Importantly, the "7.3 billion animals" does not include insects, but, based on Tomasik 2016, cropland probably typically has lower Net Primary Productivity, and lower insect populations, which is probably a good thing (assuming the insects have net-negative lives). So that suggests eating crops has a positive moral impact, despite crop deaths.

However, considering this post, I come to agree with your position that it is plausible that "crop deaths may carry a higher total moral cost than fishing sardines and anchovies" (i.e. that it is plausible that fishing sardines has a positive impact which is greater than the positive impact of farming crops). 

  1. ^

    Fischer, B., & Lamey, A. (2018). Field Deaths in Plant Agriculture. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 31, 409–428. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-018-9733-8

  2. ^

    Human population surpassed 7.3 billion in 2014: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/ 

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