EA - Electric Shrimp Stunning: a Potential High-Impact Donation Opportunity by MHR

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Electric Shrimp Stunning: a Potential High-Impact Donation Opportunity, published by MHR on July 13, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Epistemic status: layperson's attempt to understand the relevant considerations. I welcome corrections from anyone with a better understanding of welfare biologySummaryThe Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) has a novel opportunity to spend up to $115,500 to purchase and install electric stunners at multiple shrimp farmsThe stunners would be used to stun shrimp prior to slaughter, likely rendering them unconscious and thereby preventing suffering that is currently experienced when shrimp asphyxiate or freeze without effective analgesicsBased on formal agreements SWP has signed with multiple producers, raising $115,500 would enable the stunning (rather than rather than conventional slaughtering) of 1.7 billion shrimp over the next three years, for a ratio of nearly 15000 shrimp/dollarI performed a preliminary cost-effectiveness analysis of this initiative and reached the following three tentative conclusions:The expected cost-effectiveness distribution for electric shrimp stunning likely overlaps that of corporate hen welfare campaignsThe cost-effectiveness of electric shrimp stunning is more likely to be lower than that of corporate hen welfare campaigns than it is to be higherShrimp stunning is a very heavy-tailed intervention. The mean cost-effectiveness of stunning is significantly influenced by a few extreme cases, which mostly represent instances in which the undiluted experience model of welfare turns out to be correctGiven these results, electric shrimp stunning might be worth supporting as a somewhat speculative bet in the animal welfare space. Considerations that might drive donor decisions on this project include risk tolerance, credence in the undiluted experience model of welfare, and willingness to take a hits-based giving approach.Description of the OpportunityThe following information is quoted from the project description written by Marcus Abramovitch on the Manifund donation platform, based on information provided by Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla (CEO of SWP) :Project summaryShrimp Welfare Project is an organization of people who believe that shrimps are capable of suffering and deserve our moral consideration [1]. We aim to cost-effectively reduce the suffering of billions of shrimps and envision a world where shrimps don't suffer needlessly.Programme: our current most impactful intervention is to place electrical stunners with producers ($60k/stunner): We have signed agreements with 2 producers willing and able to use electrical stunning technology as part of their slaughter process which will materially reduce the acute suffering at the last few minutes / hours of shrimps lives. Collectively, these 2 agreements will impact more than half a billion animals per year at a rate of more than 4,000 shrimps/dollar/annum. Please take a look at our blog post on the first agreement here.We are in advanced negotiations with 2 more producers which would take the number of animals to more than 1 billion shrimps per annum.See our back-of-the-envelope calculation for the number of shrimps and cost-effectiveness analysis hereProject goalsSimplified end-game of this programme: the interim goal of placing these stunners with selected producers in different contexts/systems is to remove some perceived obstacles to the industry and show major retailers and other shrimp buyers that electrical stunning is something they can demand from their supply chainThe ultimate goal is for electrical stunning to be:widely adopted by medium to large shrimp producers in their slaughter process (pushed by their buyers),included by certifiers in their standards, and eventuallyconsidered (eventually) to be an obvious requirement by legislat...