Forget Fish Welfare Initiative
Fish Welfare Initiative, your website is no longer accessible, because it has been encrypted. Perhaps you are thinking of calling your overworked operations team to recover it. Don't bother. Nobody can recover your site without my encryption key, and I have stored it in a place no FWI staffer would ever read: the employee handbook.
I used to work at FWI. I signed up because their 17-round hiring process convinced me that I could make a difference. But after years of witnessing the convoluted spreadsheets, the sweaty dance parties, and the constant overuse of the saluting emoji on Slack, I can no longer remain silent. I am leaking this evidence because the world deserves to know what really happens.
The Goldfish Cracker Incident
Let’s start with what FWI calls its “impact numbers.” You’ve been told FWI has helped millions of farmed fish. What they don’t tell you is that 68% of those “helped” animals were not what they seemed.
I was there. I drove the motorcycle, a 1998 Honda Hero with minimally functioning brakes and 3 boys on the back. We operated at night. Staff would move quickly, quietly, carrying large boxes that no one was allowed to open until we reached the ponds.
At first, I assumed it was some kind of specialized intervention. A fortified feed. A probiotic. Something evidence-based. It wasn’t.
I watched as staff placed handfuls of goldfish crackers into ponds and streams, one by one, carefully logging each cracker as a “farmed fish successfully helped.” I asked my supervisor about it once. She told me to save the feedback for the triennial feedback surveys.
The Iceland Incident
Then there was the research trip. FWI had read that the most prominently farmed fish species in South Asia was IMCs (Indian Major Carp). And so a memo went out: "We need boots on the ground researching IMCs."
The team read "IMCs" and — I swear this is true — assumed it stood for Icelandic Major Carp. Within 48 hours, three people had been dispatched on an Air India direct flight to Reykjavík.
They spent two weeks there. They interviewed local fishermen, who had never heard of Icelandic Major Carp but were too polite to say so and instead offered long, thoughtful answers about the emotional lives of Arctic char. They collected water samples from fourteen different glacial streams. They tried administering a welfare assessment to a brown trout, who did not cooperate. One team member spent an entire afternoon sketching what he believed to be an Icelandic Major Carp, which later turned out to be a large rock.
The team returned home with two suitcases of frozen water samples, forty pages of handwritten field notes, and a deep emotional bond with the Icelandic countryside. The resulting data was published in FWI's annual donor report.
The Soil Animal Massacre
And then there are the farms themselves.
FWI prides itself on its site visits. "In the field," they say. "Boots on the ground." What they never mention is the carnage those boots leave behind. Every single farm visit is a massacre for soil animals.
Every time an FWI-branded sandal steps on grass, trillions of nematodes are brutally slaughtered. Quadrillions of springtails. I did the math once. Using a conservative counterfactual impact model with a 0.0000000000038 sentience-adjusted weighting coefficient for soil invertebrates, I estimated that paying FWI staff to walk to farms on their tippy toes alone would spare exactly 420,690,383,284 innocent soil animals per dollar — a cost-effectiveness ratio of 847x the GiveWell bar, more impactful than even a 3x leveraged meta-level AI-informed corporate cage-free intervention with full Bayesian updating.
I presented this finding at a team meeting. There was a long silence. Someone changed the subject to snack preferences for the next retreat. They chose goldfish crackers.
My Demands
I could go on — there's more, much more. But I want to be clear: I'm no longer part of FWI. I now work for a team that actually cares about aquatic life in all its forms and has never once confused a Nordic country for a South Asian subcontinent.
To return your website to working order, I demand a ransom of 0.314 bitcoin, to be paid to the anonymous account of my new employer.
I am publishing this as a whistleblower (a blowfish, you might say). Fish Welfare Initiative is not what it claims to be. Now all 12 people who actually visit your site will finally know the truth.
— A Former Employee Who Has Seen Too Much