Frog Welfare

Very cool, thanks for doing this! It's a big and neglected topic for sure. 

A few months ago, I actually spent a day looking into farmed frog welfare (so slightly different to what you point at, which is the painful procedures done to wild and farmed frogs). I'll post my exec summary below in case others are interested. You can see the full doc here.

Overall recommendation

Approximately 1 billion frogs are farmed each year for food, and there is a similar number alive on farms at any one time. Despite this, the vast majority of them (93%) are farmed in China, meaning it is very challenging to advocate for ways to improve their lives. The most promising approach would be via targeting US imports of frog legs, which amount to approximately 58-146 million frogs killed per year. However, there are very few organisations working on this and it’s not clear what leverage groups would have to affect US imports or sellers. Overall, I expect that there are more cost-effective ways to help other groups of very populous animals, such as chickens, fish or shrimp. 

Executive Summary

• I estimate there are around 1 billion frogs killed each year for food, with around 950 million alive at any one time.
  • See my summary spreadsheet here for calculations and assumptions around lifespan, mortality, etc.
• FAO statistics suggest that 93% of frogs are farmed in China, 5% in Vietnam and approx 1% in Thailand.
• Overwhelmingly, China is the most important country for frogs but the obvious challenge is that there are very limited ways to affect the Chinese animal industry.
  • This is especially true for frogs as most of them are consumed internally, rather than exported
• That said, the US is a moderate importer of frogs, so there is some scope for advocacy. The size of US imports is approx. 58-146 million frogs killed per year.
  • The vast majority of these (99.9%) are imported as frog legs
• For reference, there are approx. 380 million hens and 1.1 billion broiler chickens alive in the US at any one time.
  • Also for reference, there are 400 million fish alive in the US at any one time and my rough guess is that the US imports an additional 800 million farmed fish per year
• The US import market seems more important than the EU market, as the latter is made up primarily of wild frogs caught in Indonesia, rather than farmed frogs.
  • This rests on the assumption that wild frogs have better lives than farmed frogs, which I feel relatively confident about.
  • See Appendix on EU Imports for more information about the EU
• The data is very limited and poor for most aspects of the frog farming industry so I am very uncertain about key factors like:
  • How long does it take for a frog to reach slaughter weight
    • I’ve seen disagreements between 2 months to 1 year, which would significantly change the number of frogs alive at any one time
  • To what extent are EU imports mostly wild-caught or farmed? Specifically thinking about how much of Indonesia’s frog production which is 80% of EU imports
  • How much of Chinese frogs are exported or consumed internally?
• Ways you could help frogs
  • Support expansion of California-style live import bans to other states and cities (In Defense of Animals secured a ban on live imports of bullfrogs into California in 2023)
    • You could work with wildlife conservation groups that are worried about frog farms spreading diseases like chytrid fungus.
    • This would only be limited to live imports (less than 25% of total weight and approx. 2.5-5% of total frog numbers) - roughly 2-7 million frogs per year.
  • Advocate for federal/state import regulations based on environmental damages, zoonotic diseases and biosecurity
    • E.g. push for stricter biosecurity requirements around frog imports or support requirements for species labelling and origin documentation
      • This would definitely slow the industry down as it’s very informal currently
• My recommendations would be:
  • If interested in exploring some advocacy around US imports, it would be worthwhile to speak with In Defense of Animals and the Bullfrog Action Group which worked on the California Imports Ban
  • Further research (I couldn’t find these very easily)
    • What percentage of US frog imports are live vs frozen?
    • Which states are the largest importers of frog legs?
  • Consider whether frogs are the biggest bang for the buck we can find to help animals or it might be easier and more effective to focus on other highly farmed species e.g. fish, shrimp or chickens.
    • I expect that there are currently much more cost-effective ways to help fish, shrimp or chickens due to existing nonprofit infrastructure, availability of information, non-Chinese markets and leverage over those supply chains.
    • Also, it’s unclear to me who are the right groups to work on frogs (basically no one is working on it now so it would need some effort to get this going)

Thank you for this important post!

I'd like to add that another important aspect of frog welfare is the welfare of frogs living in the wild, of which there might be something like hundreds of billions[1] to hundreds of trillions[2].[3]

I think the most tractable way to improve the welfare of as many wild frogs as soon as possible is to invest in efforts to establish the foundations of wild animal welfare science, explore avenues for translating wild animal welfare science into real-world policy change, and build grassroots support for such policies. Relevant orgs include:

• Wild Animal Initiative (where I work)
• NYU's Wild Animal Welfare Program, including their newly launched WILD Lab
• Animal Ethics
• Rethink Priorities

[1] What's a few Humanities' worth of minds, between friends?

[2] Time flies when you're counting seconds for hundreds of millennia!

[3] These estimates come from taking the total amphibian population estimates from Tomasik (2009) and Bar-On, Phillips, and Milo (2018) (Supplementary Material, page 39) and dividing them by 10. I don't know if that's reasonable -- I just know there are way more salamanders out there than you'd think. My guess is it's conservative, i.e., that frogs account for more than 10% of amphibians.

This section from a previous research piece provides additional context on the scale of frog farming.

Sometimes, just when it seems like conditions for so many farmed animals basically couldn’t get any worse, one comes across yet another widespread industry practice that’s deeply disturbing.

Thank you so much for this important post. This could be a low-hanging fruit. And I hope I can shed some light on where the fruit trees might be located.

I am not sure about the non-Asian countries that export frog legs to Europe, but I quite certain that it's pointless to try to directly convince/force processing factories in Asia to kill frogs in more humane ways. The way to go is to affect how the demand side behaves. 

And I think it's not the best strategy to try to use education/adovcacy to try to reduce frog leg consumption. At least not as a standalone strategy. But it could be part of other work like corporate engagement and lobbying. 

I also think corporate engagement work, like the Carrehour win PETA seems to be associated with, won't have a significant effect on the number of frogs beings raised and killed inhumanely. I believe the reason is that the demand is simply way higher than supply (and prices are like super high because of that), meaning that whatever amount of frog legs that Carrefour gives up would be picked up by someone else. This is pretty much regardless of how large of a purchaser Carrefour are, because other supermarkets and restaurants can't buy enough anyway, they would just likely pick those up. 

I think the way to go is to get European countries (main target would be France) or EU at large to ban frog legs that were killed inhumanely. And I think a strategy that can be tried is to get charities other than PETA to do basically the same investigations and then protests.

This is potentially an incredibly valuable post. Great work! 

Wow, this is completely horrifying. Why are they not killed first? Not that that wouldn’t be horrifying too, but obviously this is worse.

"Frogs: Leg removal without anaesthesia.＂ is an understatement of what could happen to frogs used to produce frog legs endure. A lot of them in processing factories in Asia are skinned alive first and put or hang (using a hook piercing through their eyes or feet) there, until another worker has time to cut off their legs. 

I didn't put up links to videos about the practice, but if you want to know the extent of suffering, it should be easy to find. (I just realised the OP put up a video too, after typing the comment)

I will write another comment related to strategy.

Thank you for bringing attention to this insane issue.

And thank you @Chad Brouze for your comments further shedding light on why they aren't decapitated first (and why that probably wouldn't be enough).

As horrifying as this issue is, I'm grateful I don't have to learn and deal with it alone. Please don't hesitate to let me know if there anything I can do to help support the solution.

I am glad that someone has noticed this. In fact, I am also concerned about policies related to animal welfare. But I want to say, it's difficult to achieve. Because there is no interest driving them to improve this. Unless it is profitable or the cost of animal abuse increases, it will not be easily changed

This is a very enlightening and clever-to-make post: billions annually for a species I'd never even thought about giving special attention to, or thought about much at all, three years in amateur EA and nine in veganism.

For what it's worth, I could see them being more "personally relatable" than fish, about on the level of chickens, even. I've seen fellow zoomers walk around with frog-themed stuff like beanies, hoodies, and backpacks, which seems important when assessing tractability.

A new paper has just been published on pain indicators for frogs: https://www.mdpi.com/2673-5636/6/4/49

Just when you think you've heard it all as far as humans' depravity when it comes to the maltreatment of their fellow beings on this earth, you read something like this and realise, no, there's always a new low...

I would be willing to donate to a charity campaigning against this practice. 

Learning about something like this makes me seriously revisit the question of whether this planet would be better off without human beings on it.