Why it’s important to fill out this consultation
The UK Government is currently consulting on allowing insects to be fed to chickens and pigs. This is worrying as the government explicitly says changes would “enable investment in the insect protein sector”. Given the likely sentience of insects (see this summary of recent research), and that median predictions estimate that 3.9 trillion insects will be killed annually by 2030, we think it’s crucial to try to limit this huge source of animal suffering.
Overview
* Link to complete the consultation: HERE. You can see the context of the consultation here.
* How long it takes to fill it out: 5-10 minutes (5 questions total with only 1 of them requiring a written answer)
* Deadline to respond: April 1st 2025
* What else you can do: Share the consultation document far and wide!
* You can use the UK Voters for Animals GPT to help draft your responses.
* If you want to hear about other high-impact ways to use your political voice to help animals, sign up for the UK Voters for Animals newsletter. There is an option to be contacted only for very time-sensitive opportunities like this one, which we expect will happen less than 6 times a year.
See guidance on submitting in a Google Doc
Questions and suggested responses:
It is helpful to have a lot of variation between responses. As such, please feel free to add your own reasoning for your responses or, in addition to animal welfare reasons for opposing insects as feed, include non-animal welfare reasons e.g., health implications, concerns about farming intensification, or the climate implications of using insects for feed.
Question 7 on the consultation: Do you agree with allowing poultry processed animal protein in porcine feed?
Suggested response: No (up to you if you want to elaborate further).
We think it’s useful to say no to all questions in the consultation, particularly as changing these rules means that meat producers can make more profit from sel
I have found it useful and interesting to build a habit of noticing an intuition and then thinking of arguments for why that intuition is worth listening to. It has caused me to find some pretty interesting dynamics that it seems like naive consequentialists/utilitarians aren't aware of.
One concern about this is that you might be able to find arguments for any conclusion that you seek out arguments for; the counter to this is that your intuition doesn't give random answers, and is actually fairly reliably correct, hence explicit arguments that explain your intuition are some amount more likely than random to correspond reality, making these arguments useful to discover.
This definitely goes better if you are aware of the systematic errors your intuition can make (i.e. cognitive biases).
Is there a context for the type of things you are using your intuition for?
Concept-shaped holes are such a useful concept; from what I can tell, it seems like a huge amount of miscommunication happens because people have somewhat different understandings of the same word.
I think I interpret people's advice and opinions pretty differently now that I'm aware of concept-shaped holes.
Yes. This is why language is so difficult. Then there's the added layer of propoganda. It can make two people who "speak the same language" be completely unable to understand each other.