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.
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
Thanks for putting this together I’m actually working on understanding amphibians and reptile farming as part of my PhD research. From what I’ve seen, the data is rarely available in English — and the scale is unfortunately much more horrendous than most people realize. I have some primary data from 2017 and also published a paper on this not long ago: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2590332225001022?dgcid=coauthor
(unfortunately the main industry report was removed from China's academy of engineering website no so long ago, although there should be plenty of info available in Chinese –– grey literature/government annoucements, etc)
If you (or anyone else here) are interested, we could maybe put together a short report to make a very basic estimation of the numbers of frogs being farmed in China, and the species involved.