WHY NOW?

While research suggests that most consumers would like to see information about animal welfare on product labels, what constitutes “higher-welfare" aquatic animal products is still largely undefined worldwide, both for the public, industry, animal welfare organizations, and most governments. There are numerous labeling schemes and standards for terrestrial animal products, such as “cage-free,” “humanely-raised,” and "free-range." While these terms represent a public awakening to farmed animal welfare issues, they have also facilitated confusion among consumers and misleading marketing void of true meaningful improvement.

As the public similarly awakens to aquatic welfare, we want to avoid confusion for those who buy aquatic animal products. We want certification schemes to treat animal welfare as an integral component in the concept of “sustainability” — because it is. Healthy aquatic animals, in both physical and psychological terms, translate to less stress and disease, less antibiotic use, and fewer deaths before they even reach the market, reducing resource use, antibiotic-resistance, and environmental degradation in our oceans. AAA is working with major certification schemes as they slowly add welfare standards into their labeling programs, expediting and guiding this integration. This is an unique and time-sensitive opportunity to help define what higher-welfare practices actually are, and to ensure that certifiers and labeling regimes include meaningful, high standards from the get-go to avoid confusing consumers later on. We want to set welfare standards for aquatic animals as high as possible and we believe the best way to achieve this goal is as a coalition.

We believe collaborative work as a coalition has the potential to be much more effective and impactful than multiple individual efforts by various animal welfare organizations.  We fear that if multiple organizations ask certifiers, labeling regimes, and producers for many different standards, the effect may be that the lowest ask is what gets enshrined in the standards. 

Working together also means that we can pool our resources, share information, and have more confidence that what we are asking of the industry is the best, evidence-based, highest-welfare ask possible. 

We want the standard of what constitutes a more humanely raised aquatic animal to include more than just stunning before slaughter, but also to consider the welfare conditions of the animal all the way from birth to death; for many farmed aquatic animals, their lives are long, low-welfare and high-suffering. We care about how they live, not just how they die.

Consistency & Credibility

We believe that careful, thoughtful and intentional planning of our common “ask” is of utmost importance. We want to avoid a situation where we go to a corporation or another stakeholder, criticize their standards, ask them to improve and then congratulate them for their achievement, only to go back next year with a new ask, criticizing them again. This would lead to a breach of trust with the target of our campaigns and messaging confusion for the public.

Efficacy & Impact

The Aquatic Animal Alliance prioritizes making the most impactful interventions possible, focusing on interventions that impact the largest number of animals possible, in the most meaningful way. We rely on the most up-to-date information and research available to decide what interventions to pursue, when to intervene and where to pursue change. Our interventions are evidence-based, and we draw from Effective Altruism principles to guide these interventions to reduce as much aquatic animal suffering and other forms of suffering as possible. 

Synergy

We believe in promoting various avenues of change to improve aquatic animal welfare. Our research, coalition building, grass-roots movement building, legislative work, and corporate outreach work together synergistically. We believe this multi-pronged, synergistic approach contributes to a more resilient and effective fish welfare movement. 

International

Our alliance is made up of organizations from all around the world, this helps us have a broad range of perspectives and insights. Certifying schemes are generally very international in their impact, and so having input from a wide range of countries is of utmost importance.