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Bob Fischer: The case for including insects in our animal advocacy

How I Learned to Love Shrimp 9 April 2024 13


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A podcast showcasing innovative and impactful ways to help animals and build the animal advocacy movement. Amy Odene & James Ozden talk to experts about a variety of topics: animal rights, animal welfare, alternative proteins, the future of food, and much more. Whether it's political change, protest, technological innovation or grassroots campaigns, they aim to cover it all with deep dives we release every two weeks.

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Bob Fischer is the Senior Research Manager at Rethink Priorities and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University.

Can insects feel pain? Should people who care about chickens, cows and pigs also care about reducing the suffering of crickets or black soldier flies? In this episode with Bob Fischer from Rethink Priorities, we try to answer some of those questions, as well as talking about the rapidly growing insect industry, and possible ways for advocates to help farmed insects.

We talk about lots of interesting content and research, for some of which there are excellent visualisations, which we’ll link to at the top of the show notes. I highly recommend checking out the Welfare Range Table and Rethink Priorities’ Welfare Range estimates to help better understand some of the points here, both of which are linked.  

Bob also had a great conversation on the 80,000 Hours Podcast about the moral weights project more broadly and how they want to try to compare welfare across different species of animals. We think they covered it very well, so we didn’t speak much about it today, so we’ll link it for interested folks. 

Relevant links to things mentioned throughout the show:

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us – we would really appreciate it! Likewise, feel free to share it with anyone who you think might enjoy it. You can send us feedback and guest recommendations via Twitter or email us at hello@howilearnedtoloveshrimp.com. Enjoy!

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