Episode 81 • 23 November 2024

Cynthia Schuck-Paim on Quantifying Animal Welfare

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Dr Cynthia Schuck-Paim is the Scientific Director of the Welfare Footprint Project, a scientific effort to quantify animal welfare to inform practice, policy, investing and purchasing decisions.

(Image) Cynthia Schuck-Paim

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Transcript

Note that this transcript will be machine-generated, by a model which makes frequent mistakes and sometimes hallucinates entire sentences. Please check with the original audio before using this transcript to quote our guest.

Intro

Fin: Hey, this is Fin. In this episode, I spoke with Cynthia Schuck. Cynthia is the scientific director of the Welfare Footprint Project, and she has a background as a scientist in zoology and the evolution of advanced cognition. In this episode, we spoke about ways of quantifying animal welfare.

So, if you’re wondering what animal products to avoid or maybe you’re setting policy with animal welfare in mind, then it’s going to be really useful to get even a very rough sense of how the costs of different products in terms of animal suffering stack up against one another. Most welfare standards are kind of qualitative and specific to a particular kind of product. So the Welfare Footprint Project is trying to assess welfare impacts in a meaningful, quantitative, and comparable way. We talked about how to begin thinking about quantifying animal experiences in this kind of cross-comparable way, whether the ability to feel pain is unique to big-brained animals or more widespread in the tree of life, how fish farming compares to poultry and livestock farming, how worried to be about bird flu zoonosis, whether different animal species experience time differently, whether positive experiences like joy could make life worth living for at least some farmed animals, and how animal welfare advocates can learn from anti-corruption nonprofits. Just a heads up here that there are some fairly vivid descriptions of harms to animals in this episode. Okay, here’s Cynthia Schuck.

Alright, Cynthia, thanks for joining me.

Cynthia: Thank you, Fin. It’s my pleasure to be here.


(Image) Painting of animals.
Herbert Crowley, Fantastic Animals Left off the Ark (1911–24) • Source

How can we measure animal welfare?

Fin: So lots of people are interested in comparing the welfare of animals, including between animal species. You have an approach to doing that, which I think is very promising. But is there a way that the welfare burden on animals is normally estimated for farmed animals?

Cynthia: So I think you are referring to welfare assessment methods other than the method that we use. This is a question we had back in 2017 when we first started this project. At that time, we reviewed the literature very carefully to see if there was anything that we could use to answer the sort of questions we try to answer with the Welfare Footprint Project. There are indeed a number of very good animal welfare assessment models, but they were developed with a different purpose, such as assessing the welfare of animals at the farm level. Many of them rely on scores, and scores tend to be abstract and specific for one species or one farming condition, so they are not comparable. You do not have a cardinal measure that you can combine and compare to get the overall burden of a practice, a policy, a farming condition, or even an animal source product.

As far as we were aware at the time and are aware now, there isn’t anything that enables us to have this common, meaningful metric that people can understand, with which you can have a quantitative measure of welfare impacts related to different conditions. So, answering your questions, yes, there are other methods, but they are mostly developed for different purposes.

Fin: Okay. So it sounds like there are scores for dairy cow welfare to compare between farms and the different welfare practices. But there aren’t really widely used metrics for comparing between animal species in terms of welfare.

Cynthia: In terms of differences among welfare harms, what is worse? For pigs, for example, is it the pain associated with tail docking in a young pig, or is it the pain associated with the tail wounds that pigs with intact tails living in intensive farming systems may endure? How do we compare this? Or how do we compare different farming practices or even within the same system, like laying hens in cage-free conditions? We couldn’t find anything suitable for that purpose. We thought this would be very useful.

Fin: And you did come up with an approach to estimating cumulative pain and other welfare effects where you can make these comparisons. We’re going to talk a bunch about this, but what’s the overall idea with your method?

Cynthia: The method is really simple. Cumulative pain stands for cumulative time in pain of different intensities, where the term pain should not be understood as physical pain. It’s just a shorthand for any negative affective experience—anything that is unpleasant: hunger, thirst, frustration, fear, the pain from a fracture or disease, etc. The general idea is to quantify the welfare impact of each affective experience the animal endures, in terms of duration and intensity of the experience. We think these are the key dimensions of affective experiences. If I had to ask you what the worst type of suffering in the world is, a good answer would be the suffering that lasts for the longest possible time with the highest possible intensity. That’s why we use these parameters. Once you have time in pain of different intensities, you can calculate it for different issues at different phases of life and just combine the numbers because you are dealing with time.

Fin: I think we should try running through an example to see how this works. Let’s imagine we’re talking about commercial layer hens being raised in a battery farm in North America. How would you begin to break down the problem of evaluating the cumulative pain they might experience in a lifetime?

Cynthia: The first thing you need to do is to define very well, like in a life cycle analysis, the goal and the scope of your question. If you want to calculate, let’s say, the welfare footprint of an egg, then you need to consider all types of animals involved in the egg production chain from birth to death. For every life phase of each of those animals, you need to map all the ideal welfare experiences, the main welfare issues, negative and positive, that they endure.

Cynthia: The bottom line is that you get a more nuanced understanding of the welfare burden. It’s not just a single number. You do try to aggregate the information to have an idea of the overall impact, but it’s more about understanding the different phases and the intensity of each phase. This helps in identifying which phases are the most intense and therefore might be the best targets for intervention. It also helps in understanding the variability and uncertainty associated with these experiences. So, it’s a tool to better understand and prioritize welfare issues rather than just coming up with a single number.

Once we have a pain track with all the estimates of intensity and duration, which includes the probability that the pain is more or less intense, we end up with, for a single welfare issue, time in pain—let’s say in hours—at each level of intensity. We have four levels: annoying, hurtful, disabling, and excruciating. We’ll have, let’s say, minutes in annoying and hurtful pain and seconds in disabling and excruciating pain for a given issue. Of course, it could be days, months, years, and so on. That’s cumulative time in pain for a single welfare issue. This can be combined with cumulative time in pain for other issues by adding them up.

Fin: Right.

Cynthia: So you have time in pain for multiple experiences.

Fin: You can talk about time in pain for a typical animal in some farming project, but I guess you can also talk about, you know, per kilo of animal product, like per egg or per kilo of beef or something. Is that right?

Cynthia: Yes. So if we want to calculate a welfare footprint involving the entire production chain, then we need to take into account the productivity of the different types of animals involved in the production chain, which we call live fates. So a female breeder is one live fate. A male breeder is another. A male chick for a laying hen is another live fate, and so on. We take into account their product yield per live fate and the ratio of one live fate relative to the other. So let’s say for every 10 laying hens, we have one breeder, and we take into account their experiences as well. We also need to consider the mortalities, meaning the animals that die before slaughter.

What happens in the life of a laying hen?

Fin: Since we’re going to this example of laying hens, could you say anything about, for instance, how many hours a laying hen lives per egg it produces or anything else we know about, in some sense, the cumulative pain experience per egg?

Cynthia: A laying hen will typically live 70 to 90 weeks. Some may go up to 100 weeks, which represents roughly 12,000 to 15,000 hours of life in total. If you consider that they sleep about 7 to 9 hours, that would be around 10,000 hours awake. In our past research with laying hens, we did not investigate their entire life from birth to death, just the laying period, which starts at about 18 weeks of life. So we investigated most of their lives, which is about 9,000 hours in total, with 7,000 hours awake. It’s interesting because for hens in cages, nearly every hour awake is filled with some sort of negative experience, which can be more or less intense, but it’s present. If you go to a cage-free setting, then that’s halved. So the negative experiences are still there, but they represent about half the time that the laying hen, at least in the laying period, is awake.

Fin: I’m just imagining if I’m buying a box of a dozen eggs, I would be interested to have some kind of intuitive sense of just what amount or what number of hours and different levels of pain that box of eggs represents. And I wonder if you could say anything about that.

Cynthia:

That’s an interesting question because we are now running a project to calculate the idea of the welfare footprint of a project, and it will be the egg. So very soon, we’ll be releasing a book called “Idea, Welfare Footprint of the Egg,” in which we consider everything that happens in the egg production chain in terms of welfare impacts and productivities as well. So I will ask you to hold on, hold on, okay.

Fin: Watch this space.

Cynthia: And more. Yeah. Because this semester will be available very, very soon.

(Image) Painting of animals.

How can we actually know how much pain animals experience?

Fin: Great. I’m glad you’re thinking carefully about it. So you mentioned that when you’re talking about pain tracks, the bottom line numbers you come up with are estimates of time spent in different levels of negative experience. So that is annoying pain, hurtful, disabling, and excruciating pain. Now, animals can’t speak, right? So they can’t tell us how they’re feeling. Presumably, we have to make some informed guesses there. I’m interested in where you begin to make those guesses, whatever those can possibly inform how much time a chicken is spending in different levels of pain.

Cynthia: Animals can certainly not speak. And in this case, in our method and in any other welfare assessment method, we must rely on indirect indicators of their subjective affective experiences. So any welfare assessment method must rely on indicators such as the behavior of these animals, their physiology, neurology, and pharmacology. For example, one thing that is very informative is to understand the effect of drugs like painkillers on behavior. If behavior is abnormal and you give the animal a mild painkiller, does it change behavior? Do you need to go to a stronger painkiller like morphine to resume behavior to a more or less typical level? So we use as much evidence as possible, like the type of evidence I mentioned, evolutionary reasoning on the adaptive nature of the intensity of pain in different situations, or knowledge of the pain pathways, density of nociceptors, and so on to make inferences. Of course, there is uncertainty associated with these inferences, and that’s why we try to make everything very transparent. The pain track, which is like this table where the numbers are, leaves the estimates as transparent as possible. And everything that is used to justify those estimates of intensity and durations is structured in a table. So you can disagree, you can change, and you see what changing the results will be. So estimates are updatable, if you wish.

Fin: So you mentioned that one line of evidence for thinking about the intensity of negative experience in some animals is to think about the evolutionary purpose of some behavior or response to stimulus. Yeah. Can you say more about what that thinking looks like?

Cynthia: So, for example, if you have stressors or harms that are life-threatening or that can seriously compromise reproduction, so the fitness of the animal, then it’s more likely that you experience more intense pain because pain is a signal shaped by evolution to call the attention of the organism to something that is important for the preservation of their own body and the body of their relatives, so where their fitness lies. So things like lack of oxygen—if you cannot breathe, that’s life-threatening, so this should be really unpleasant. Or things that may lead to a lot of loss of blood or regions that tend to be highly innervated are regions that are associated with a greater importance from an evolutionary perspective.

For example, if I suffer from a fracture, it’s highly adaptive that the fracture is painful because if I keep moving and don’t pay attention to that problem, I might harm myself more than originally. There’s pain there to tell you to rest and let this problem heal properly and conserve energy.

Fin: And worth saying, that’s not animal-specific, right? You can explain and, in many cases, predict why humans feel certain kinds of pain based on what’s adaptive.

Cynthia: Exactly. It’s a very conserved mechanism, and it applies to both physical and psychological pain. For example, in mammals, you have a lot of attachment with your offspring. You can imagine the psychological pain and distress associated with seeing your offspring at risk or being harmed. So it works for different species.

Fin: Maybe I’m interested to ask more about how you estimate the time spent in different categories or intensities of pain. Why can’t you just collapse those estimates into a single number of total pain?

Cynthia: That would be much more practical, of course, to have just a single number. But right now, we do not make inferences that we cannot justify based on existing evidence. We have a lot of evidence to justify intensity and duration of suffering in separate intensities. But the knowledge is not there yet to know how much worse annoying pain is relative to hurtful, disabling, or excruciating pain for animals or even for humans. There’s no evidence that enables us to do this conversion. So we prefer to leave all the estimates grounded on evidence available to stakeholders who want to use them. The subjective assessment of how much worse the different levels of intensity are in terms of their numerical equivalence, we leave it for the researchers and organizations making use of our estimates because we are not particularly more qualified than others to make those conversions. It’s not a scientific question so far; it’s more like a value judgment. So we leave it open for people who want to prioritize more intense forms of suffering in their mitigation efforts.

Fin: Well, I was going to ask that. There is this question of how do you, in some sense, convert between different intensities of negative experience in terms of choosing how to prioritize which kinds of pains to avert, for instance. You were suggesting that we didn’t have enough evidence. Is there any empirical evidence that could settle that question, or is it more of a philosophical question?

Cynthia: We have a review on the possibilities of conversion available on our website and the Effective Altruism Forum. There’s some, but very weak, evidence in terms of psychophysics and using studies based on verbal reports from humans.

Fin: Right.

Cynthia: But even for humans, this is extremely scarce, and it could lead to a lot of variation and error. So we prefer to leave the estimates of cumulative pain disaggregated by intensity.

Cynthia: Now that said, for us, intense pain is more urgent even because, by definition, with sources of intense pain like disabling, excruciating pain, there’s nearly no room for positive, affective experiences. At least when they are being experienced, a life worth living is not possible. So we give priority to those cases. But so far, we haven’t decided on aggregating it all into a single number because it would be more difficult to interpret that number, and we prefer to leave it every very trans

How fish farming works

Fin: Yeah. Makes sense. So we’ve talked about this framework for quantifying animal welfare. I would love to hear how it actually applies now to different case studies. How about we start with fish? And maybe a first question there is just how big is fish farming as an industry?

Cynthia: Oh, it’s huge, and it’s getting bigger. You have about 120 to 130 billion farmed fish killed every year, and this greatly surpasses the number of land animals killed every year for food by a lot. So it’s a gigantic industry, and it’s only getting bigger.

Fin: Okay. Yeah. I got it. And just speaking very generally, how does the welfare footprint of fish farming compare with farming land animals?

Cynthia: Fish farming differs in a number of ways. In other ways, it’s similar. For example, you have typically much more individuals farmed for every kilo of meat produced. You have a much longer time in captivity. Growth rates of fish are still not raised as intensively as land animals. You also have greater levels of mortality, and this is due in part to the different life history strategies of fish as compared to other species like mammals and even birds. For example, just to give you a number, if we consider the 20 to 30 main species of fish farmed at a global level, you have about 4 to 10 individuals that are killed for every kilo of boneless fish meat. This is about 10 times more than the number of chickens killed for every kilo of boneless chicken meat. So there are a number of differences in terms of farming processes. But in terms of welfare issues that are identified, many are the same as those we identify in the farming of land animals.

Fin: Okay. Yeah. And what’s the situation with fish farming compared to farming livestock and poultry when it comes to how sophisticated the methods and standards and even regulations are?

Cynthia: There’s not a standard farming method. With fish farming, you have two things that greatly affect the way they are farmed. One is the fact that concern for the welfare of fish is much more recent, so they lag behind by a lot in terms of regulation and research as compared to farmed land animals. You also have a much greater number of species farmed, a much greater number. This leads to incredible heterogeneity, not only in the welfare needs of the species but in terms of farming practices. So that differs a lot.

Fin: Maybe we could take a specific example then so we can say concrete things. So take farmed salmon. Right? What does the life of a typical farmed salmon involve?

Cynthia: The life of salmon typically starts in a freshwater environment, typically in a land-based facility.

And increasingly more, this is a trend in the industry, they’re raising what is known as recirculating aquaculture systems, or RAS. These systems, as the name suggests, recirculate water, so they don’t rely as much on external sources of water. They are known for providing an environment with greater control of environmental parameters, such as water quality, temperature, oxygen levels, and so on. That said, in practice, there are multiple issues and welfare challenges because it’s very hard to control water quality in a system with typically very high stocking densities, where you have a lot of metabolic waste from the fish and from the feed that is put into the system. So you have a lot of ammonia, a lot of CO2.

Fin: Right.

Cynthia: Which makes the water more acidic with a lower pH. You have a lot of consumption of the oxygen in the water. Plus, most of the water that recirculates in the system is the same; there’s not fresh water coming into the system. So you need to have a lot of monitoring and systems in place working perfectly to avoid serious problems in terms of water quality, oxygen levels, and not having the toxicities that come together with ammonia, nitrates, lower pH, etc. And for the fish, thinking in terms of the fish, in addition to experiencing these issues with water quality, you also have, because of the high densities, a lot of crowding stress. In salmon, you have ever faster growing rates, which put a lot of stress on physiological functions not related to growth, as happened with the broiler chickens in the past. You have things people do not know a lot about, like 24-hour lighting cycles, so there’s no rest. You have a barren environment with not a lot of opportunities for the expression of natural behaviors and so on. So this is just the beginning of life for the salmon. Then the salmon reach a given weight in which smoltification, which is the physiological preparation of the animal for life in a marine environment, is induced so that the fish can be taken to the growing phase at the sea. This process is induced with changes in photoperiods and so on. But also, this is a period where the animals are extremely sensitive to all these stressors. So they also can experience, and many of them do experience, a number of health issues like SMOLT hemorrhagic syndrome and issues with nephrocalcinosis and so on and so forth. Finally, you take that fish to the sea and to the open nets, and it’s an animal that has been raised in a sort of artificial environment, is not used to all these fluctuations, has relatively weaker immune systems because of the artificial environment, faster growth rates, etc., and then puts the salmon in this environment. So there are a number of health issues that happen there as well because the animal is not resilient. It’s not robust. So infections by sea lice and other types of infectious diseases. And so there’s a lot of mortality there as well. And finally, the salmon goes to slaughter. So that’s about the life of a modern salmon nowadays.

Fin: Okay. Yeah. That was different from what I had in mind.

Fin: So you mentioned that farmed salmon at least begin their lives in artificial facilities that are often land-based. What does land-based mean here? Is it just disconnected from a body of water?

Cynthia: It looks more like an industrial facility where you have tanks.

Fin: Right.

Cynthia: And you have the cultivation tanks where the fish are. You also have biofilters. These are filters that convert ammonia and nitrate into nitrate because those elements are toxic and are generated at very high rates. You also have degassing units to take the CO2 out of the water. Then you have the pumping of O2, oxygen, into the system because the fish and the bacteria in the biofilter consume the oxygen. It’s more like an industrial facility with tanks inside and lots of monitoring systems working to keep the fish alive and growing.

Fin: Got it. It sounds like a kind of aquarium crossed with a sewage treatment plant or something.

Cynthia: Yes, more like that.

Fin: Are most fish that are eaten as food from fish farms mostly, or are most still wild-caught?

Cynthia: I think aquaculture is now a bigger industry than fish farming in the wild. So I would say yes, but I’m not 100% sure.

Fin: And before we move on from farmed fish, is there anything else you can say from your research on the welfare footprint of fish farming when it comes to making comparisons with other kinds of animal products that I might buy, like beef or chicken, for instance?

Cynthia: We use a metric that allows comparisons across species, right? Time in pain, in distress of different intensities. So you could have, let’s say, per kilo of fish meat as compared to per kilo of broiler meat. We do not have the estimates yet. We are working on these estimates for fish. But let’s say, and I’m inventing a number, you have 10 hours of very intense, disabling, excruciating pain per kilo of chicken meat and 20 hours per kilo of fish meat. You would say, well, it’s twice as much distress and poor welfare in fish as compared to chickens. The question is, is 1 hour of intense distress in a chicken the same as 1 hour of intense distress in a fish? We do not know that yet.

Fin: I see.

Cynthia: It’s very hard to evaluate the subjective experiences and how they vary across species. We are also writing about it, and we’ll be releasing discussions about it soon. From our perspective, the mechanisms behind the evolution of emotions and affective experiences are very ancient in the history of life, and they’re very adaptive. Emotions are like currencies for decision-making. You need to feel something negative and unpleasant to learn about something you should avoid, and you need to feel something positive and pleasurable to learn about something you should seek. Learning is very ancient in the history of life, and it relies on the ability to feel pleasure and pain. So we would say that the experiences overall in terms of valence, but not in terms of type, are similar. But, of course, there’s a lot of scientific uncertainty around it, and it’s apart from consensus.

Fin: Yeah. That’s pretty interesting.

Fin: I think I actually missed that you are not necessarily making claims that an hour of intense distress or mild discomfort for a farmed salmon is exactly as bad or even the same as the same duration of the same kind of pain in a cow, let’s say. So, this raises the question, right? Of just how ubiquitous is the kind of pain that we care about in value terms, right? And you mentioned this kind of, I guess, evolutionary reason to expect it to be quite early in the tree of life. I find that quite a scary thought because it just means that the kind of suffering that I care about is much more widespread in the world than I would like it to be. Do you feel the same way?

Cynthia: I agree. I wish it was not like that. I would be very happy if it was not like that. But, from an evolutionary perspective, my intuition is that it’s very widespread in the tree of life. Of course, I do not expect different species and distant species to endure the same type of feelings like we do. For example, let’s take the case of grief. This might make more sense to expect in mammals and in social species that rely on attachment to other individuals. But that doesn’t mean that the intensity of a negative experience is not possible in another species that doesn’t feel grief but feels something else that can be very intense as well.

Which animal species feel pain?

Fin: Another consideration, since we’re on the topic, is this kind of distinction between r and K-selected species, right? I’m going to get this the wrong way around, I’m sure. But K-selected species, which includes humans, have high parental investment and fewer offspring per parent, and vice versa. And you might think that in r-selected species, so gosh, what’s an example? Maybe like ants or some kinds of fish. In some sense, it’s less surprising or less disappointing if you die early, basically. And so you might think that it’s less useful to feel really intense pain there. Basically, you want to be looking out for kind of rare, surprising signals that you’ll survive rather than that you’ll die. So maybe there’s some reasoning along those lines to expect that the distribution of suffering is different between different kinds of species, but it’s so speculative, right?

Cynthia: Yeah, so far, it’s very speculative. And I think that you need to look into the adaptiveness of the intensity of this stress you need to suffer. There’s also arguments to assume that the intensity of suffering might be lower in cognitively more advanced species because you can understand, for example, that it has an end, [and] what it means, to suppress it in different ways. Whereas for an animal with less advanced cognition, perhaps the signal needs to be stronger for learning to occur. So you need more intense signals so that they are effective. So there’s also this possibility that it’s the other way around, at least in some spectrum of cognitive variability, than we would expect at first.

Fin: Yeah, I hope that’s not true.

I wonder if that predicts that, you know, young children experience certain kinds of pain more intensely because they can’t interpret them. But even that is very hard. Like, how do you tell? How do you know whether a preverbal 1-year-old is experiencing different intensities of pain? It’s just like that’s almost just as hard.

Cynthia: It’s incredible. And you have to rely on what I mentioned before, like the indirect evidence such as the use of painkillers and, you know, brain imaging studies, fMRIs, things like that to estimate even with uncertainty if that is happening.

Fin: I guess brain size and complexity as well, neuron count.

Cynthia: That’s the thing. Neuron count is somehow related to cognition, and the association between cognitive capacity and hedonic capacity is not necessarily linear. It could be the case that with very little cognitive capacity, you still had to learn about the environment, about good and bad things, and feel pleasant and unpleasant sensations. So there was [maybe] a very sharp increase in hedonic capacity early in the history of life. Then cognition evolved to help, you know, with the decision-making around those feelings, but not necessarily intensifying those feelings.

How are broiler chickens raised?

Fin: Yeah. It’s a good point. Right? Like, the claim is not that any animal with a nervous system experiences or is capable of experiencing just as bad forms of suffering as humans. Yeah. You know, there’s presumably some kind of spectrum between no capacity for experiences that matter, like in, you know, for instance, a mollusk or a small worm or something through to humans. But the question is, what does that curve look like? We know very little. Okay. How about we talk about some case studies again? So you were talking about laying hens before, but what about broiler chickens? So chickens raised for meat. What is the life of a typical broiler chicken like?

Cynthia: The typical modern commercial breed of broiler chicken spends about 5 to 6, up to 7 weeks on a farm. I mean, a faster-growing breed of broiler chicken. In that farm, the environment typically has no enrichment, at least not for most of the birds. Stocking densities tend to be very high. Light is artificial in the sense that they are not exposed to sunlight. One of the main things that we see is that growth rates are very high. They’re so high that in those 5 to 6 weeks where they’re there, they reach more or less 2 and a half kilos, which is about, I think, 400% more than the weight it was reached in this time frame a few decades ago. So as a result of these fast-growing rates, you have a number of welfare issues, health issues associated with the growing rates.

Fin: It sounds like broiler chickens are bred to barely resemble wild chickens. What would happen if you just let a broiler chicken fend for itself in the wild?

Cynthia: Life would be very hard. It would be possibly unfeasible for a broiler chicken leaving the farm at this age and trying to live in the wild. There are a number of locomotor disorders that prevent them from moving properly, lameness, and so on, you know, cardiovascular issues, issues with heat stress because of their high metabolism, and so on.

And we actually have the case of broilers with these genetics that need to live for a longer time, which are the breeders of the broilers. So, for example, the female breeders need to live much longer until they reach sexual maturity to be able to lay the eggs that will give rise to the meat chickens. If they were allowed to live and feed normally, as they would for the appetite they have, they wouldn’t survive until reaching sexual maturity. So one of the things that is normal for the industry is to feed restrict these breeders so

Fin: Right.

Cynthia: They do not manifest all these health issues earlier in life.

Fin: Okay. So they’re basically not viable outside of these artificial conditions. Life is not good, I think it’s uncontroversial to say, for most broiler chickens. But what are the really most important causes of discomfort and pain to these animals?

Cynthia: I would say that lameness is the main welfare concern for the average broiler chicken in a modern farm. Because they are lame, they cannot move about as they would, then you have a cascade of other effects, such as they cannot express behaviors they would normally be motivated to express. But if we think in terms of concentration of suffering, I would say that chronic hunger from feed restriction in the breeders is the greatest source of physical pain that any individual chicken, including laying hens, will endure over her life. They experience severe levels of feed restriction, so they are restless and anxious most of the time. This leads to a number of secondary effects even for the offspring, for the meat chickens, due to epigenetic effects. There’s research indicating that meat chickens, the offspring of these breeders who are raised under greater levels of stress, are less resilient to things like infectious diseases and stress. The effects of chronic hunger are really widespread.

Welfare commitments

Fin: Yeah. Depending on where in the world you are, there are different levels of welfare standards for broilers. One of them being the Better Chicken Commitment standards.

Cynthia: Yeah.

Fin: Can you tell me what they are?

Cynthia: This is a set of recommendations. You have the Better Chicken Commitment and the European Chicken Commitment, which are similar, in which you try to recommend a number of standards to improve the welfare of the broiler chickens. One of the criteria to be met in the Better Chicken Commitment is the use of slower-growing broiler breeds. So instead of growing at a rate of, for example, 60 or more grams on average per day, a maximum allowed growing rate would be about 50 grams per day. This is the main one, but there are also other criteria such as the use of lower stocking densities, the provision of enrichment, specific lighting regimens, stunning replacement of electrical water bath, stunning by gas, stunning, and auditing. So these are the main ones.

Fin: And these are proposed standards for farms in the US and Europe. Is that right? Have they been adopted anywhere?

Cynthia: I’m not following closely the extent to which the Better Chicken Commitment and the European Chicken Commitment are being adopted. But there are a number of organizations working with corporations and different stakeholders for the implementation of these standards. So there have been some successes.

I just don’t know how widespread those successes are.

Fin: Yes. You mentioned that slowing growth in broilers looks like one of the most promising recommendations because you get fewer of these really widespread causes of pain from lameness and the other downstream effects of growing unbelievably quickly. I wish to hear more about this. One thing you might think is, as a farmer, I now just need to raise more chickens because they’re growing slower. So, I guess it’s not obvious that this would reduce the overall burden of pain. Is there anything you could say about that?

Cynthia: This was, in fact, a concern of many groups. If these slower growing breeds are growing more slowly, the chickens will take longer on a farm. Even though they may have slightly better welfare, they will have to spend a longer time on a farm. Or, if they are slaughtered at a similar age, then the farmer will need to raise more chickens for the same amount of product. This could lead to a lower overall welfare condition with the use of slower growing breeds. That’s why we investigated the welfare impact of the Better Chicken Commitment and the European Chicken Commitment to understand the overall impact, taking these factors into account. What we found is that there is an improvement in terms of welfare if you adopt this slower growing breed, and it’s an important improvement. Because of the better genetics, the health issues that emerge in broiler chickens end up emerging later in life. Even though they live for a longer time, they experience shorter times with the problem because the problem happens disproportionately later. By happening later, not only is there a short duration of this bad experience, but also the time for the progression of the condition is shorter. So severity ends up not being as high as it would otherwise. Because you have less time for progression, you have fewer individuals affected by the condition. You have lower prevalences, reduced severity, and shorter durations, which make welfare much better even though they live longer or even if you need more individuals to produce the same amount of meat.

Fin: Yeah. I find that really cool that you can have enough evidence and a strong enough framework that you can actually come up with a take like this. Even though, in some sense, there are more chicken life years being lived, it seems like on net, this is still a good recommendation.

Cynthia: Yeah. One thing that happens is that because they live longer or because you need more animals, the time in mild forms of distress might be longer—what we call time in annoying pain. This might be longer for the slower growing breeds. But the time in the more intense levels of pain is substantially shorter. Because we attribute a greater weight to more intense pain, it’s definitely a promising reform in idea and welfare improvement.

Are there humane slaughter methods?

Fin: So in terms of slaughter methods, most broilers are stunned before they’re killed. Is there a reason for that?

Cynthia: Two reasons, really. One is operational. It’s easier to process animals that are stunned.

And also because of the welfare regulations that require the loss of sensitivities of the animals prior to stunning for welfare concerns, really.

Fin: And what does that normally involve?

Cynthia: They are typically stunned using electrical water bath systems. So in a slaughter line, the chicken is hung upside down in a shackle, and it continues in the shackle in the slaughter line until it reaches this water bath. This has a specific current, voltage, etc. The idea is to induce the loss of consciousness when they go through the water bath. Most of the time it does, but there are a lot of issues that may lead to ineffective stunning. So once you have the stunning in the electrical water bath, they continue in the slaughter line, still shackled, and have their necks cut and they are bled out. Once that happens, they go to a scalding tank for processing. The problem is that this process fails in different proportions or depending on the specifications of current and voltage and so on. And so it’s not effective in terms of inducing loss of consciousness all of the time.

Fin: Okay. Yeah. Are there ways to make stunning just more humane somehow?

Cynthia: One of the requirements of the commitments we discussed, the European and Better Chicken Commitment, is the use of gas stunning as opposed to electrical water bath stunning. We investigated the welfare impact of transitioning to gas stunning, and there is a net positive impact if the gas stunning system is properly implemented. So if the animals remain for a proper amount of time in the gas chamber with the proper concentration and steps in the procedure. Now if for any reason the processing plant wants to speed up the processing of the birds and doesn’t leave them, for example, for enough time in the chamber or does not have the proper concentration of gas, they will regain consciousness and will endure all the steps I mentioned before, like the bleeding, going into the scalding tank, and so on, while still conscious. So that could be a problem. As long as it’s properly implemented, it’s good. But there should be constant monitoring on how this is implemented.

Fin: I think you mentioned earlier, CO2 implemented stunning. Is that different from the water bath method?

Cynthia: Yes. So CO2 is the gas stunning I mentioned. The animals can go inside their crates into a gas stunning CO2 chamber. CO2 is aversive to the birds. It’s a well-known panicogen. So it’s not free of pain and distress. In fact, the animals move a lot when they are exposed to CO2. But overall, because it lasts for a shorter time compared to the other system, it’s an improvement.

Wild animal welfare

Fin: So that was broiler chickens. They are farmed animals. They exist because humans decided to raise them for slaughter. We haven’t yet talked about wild animals, right? So animals that live and die outside of human decisions. Where can you possibly begin to make these kinds of welfare and pain estimates for wild animals?

Cynthia: The method is universal in the sense that it can be applied to any sentient organisms, including wild animals or even humans. So you can apply it to situations of live animals, animals used for entertainment, or wild animals. And the same logic applies.

So you need to understand what happens in a specific period or over a lifetime in terms of experiences, typical experiences. For each of those experiences, you can calculate cumulative time in pain or pleasure. Now we have a measure of positive welfare, which is cumulative pleasure. So the question with wild animals is this understanding and mapping of their affective experiences in the wild. That might be tricky. It’s not impossible. For example, you have different forms of death in the wild. You have death by a number of infectious diseases. You have death by starvation, by dehydration, by cannibalism. And you can calculate cumulative pain for all those forms of death. For example, let’s say you have an intervention that prevents predation. But on the other hand, because of the increase in the population size, you have more animals dying from starvation. In the end, because you can calculate cumulative pain for starvation and for predation, you might have a situation where cumulative pain increases a lot because there are fewer predators in this environment. So it’s equally applicable. On the website, we have a few examples that people can look at.

Fin: I have a very vague question, which is I can look up the numbers of, you know, laying hens or broiler chickens or farm fish raised or slaughtered per year and get some sense of the kind of overall importance or significance somehow of these different kinds of animals. But wild animals, I don’t really even know how to think in my head of how this kind of significance of wild animal experience, and especially suffering, stacks up at all against farming where we have much more data. So is there anything you could say about the big picture comparison in terms of the population differences?

Cynthia: Yeah. In terms of scale, I mean, the population of wild animals is gigantic compared to the population of farmed animals.

Fin: And I guess I should say we should maybe kind of narrow it to something like vertebrates because if we’re counting things like insects or whatever, then all vertebra.

Cynthia: Farmed animals would pale in comparison to wild animals. So important aspects to consider when making this comparison are these: the extent to which different species, particularly invertebrates, can have hedonic experiences with the same intensity as other animals like mammals, birds, fish, etc., like vertebrates. Even though if it was possible to calculate cumulative pain for all the vertebrates in the wild, we would certainly have a measure that is greater than for farmed animals. But on the other hand, we also have the situation that nowadays with intensive farming and factory farming, you have farmed animals in a situation where they completely lack agency. They lack control over their movement, their choices, even where to be in a location in a farm or how to move out from a conspecific and so on. So there is no agency. Whereas in the wild, you do have the opportunity to exert control over your decisions and your life, even if you end up experiencing a lot of negative events. So I would say that one important area of research is understanding the importance of agency for the animals because that’s a major difference that I see in the comparison between farmed animals and wild animals.

Fin: Yeah. I like that. I hadn’t considered it.

I guess a kind of similar factor might be if you are being raised in an intensive farm, then many of your experiences are just not really going to make sense in the sense that they’re not going to track onto anything in the ancestral environment. You’re not adapted to deal with them. And so maybe that is much more kind of confusing, whereas there might be stresses or sources of pain in the wilds, which nonetheless make sense and can be interpreted. Maybe these animals have been kind of socialized to understand at least what’s going on.

Cynthia: Yeah. Perhaps if you are hungry while chasing prey, it’s different than being hungry while confined in a cage. So there could be differences in that sense, but I don’t think we have enough knowledge yet to say the full range of implications of agency in that sense.

Pandemic risk from intensive animal agriculture

Fin: Yeah. So something else you have written about is pandemic risk to humans from animal farming. This is less central to the main thread of your research, which is talking about welfare considerations of the animals themselves. But, you know, I understand you have a background in global health, so you actually have some expertise there. Maybe a very kind of zoomed-out question is just how much pandemic risk comes from animal farming when we’re talking about human pandemics?

Cynthia: Humans are animals, of course, and zoonotic is a disease that comes from animals. We’re very much exposed to infectious diseases from other animals because of our animal nature. And it’s very hard to say exactly to pinpoint a figure of how much the risk can be attributed to intensive animal farming, as it is hard to say how much it can be attributed to any other particular practice. But that said, intensive animal farming is a major risk factor for pandemics that can affect human populations for a number of reasons. For example, we have this massive population of farmed animals relatively in close contact with some human populations, and they act as a massive reservoir of pathogens, say, viruses that can be transmitted to human populations. So just by a statistical question, that is already a risk, but that’s not the main risk factor associated with intensive farming. With intensive farming, you have extremely high stocking density, so lots of animals together, which facilitates infectious disease transmission in the population. So once a pathogen gets into one of those farms, it spreads very, very quickly. And this is important in the sense that you have intensive farming systems because the emphasis is on growth and productivity. You have selection focused on this single factor, productivity. And with that, energy is diverted away from essential physiological functions like immune function.

Fin: Mhmm.

Cynthia: So animals in intensive farms are immune suppressed. And for a virus to replicate in an immune-suppressed animal very quickly, it’s much, much easier. You also have a number of other issues in intensive farms that make animals immune suppressed. So, you know, they have chronic stress issues that we talked about. And we all know that with chronic stress, we also are more likely to get infectious diseases. The same happens to the animals. You have poor air quality, hurting the respiratory function of the animals. So you have a situation where disease transmission can happen very quickly, where the animals are immune suppressed, and where you have genetic homogeneity.

If a virus that can infect an animal gets into one of those farms, you would not have the genetically diverse, resistant animal that will be able to resist infection. The lower the diversity, the greater the risk of more severe infection. The viruses can live longer in the environment where the animals live. Where there is no sunlight, for example, the flu virus lives longer in closed, dark, humid environments. You favor the virus, and you have a number of risk factors for the host population. The likelihood of a more severe strain of a pathogen emerging under these conditions is higher, and the spillover to the human population may happen there because they are relatively close to us.

Fin: You mentioned one source of this zoonosis risk is that farmed animals are often growing so intensely fast that every last calorie is being spent on growth rather than immune defense. That sounds like a reason why requiring slower growth could be useful. Does that sound right?

Cynthia: Yes, that’s exactly right. If you have more energy for immune function and less stressed animals due to better health conditions, you reduce the risk. The animal is more resilient to infectious diseases. By having a lower risk and incidence of infectious diseases, the risk for the human population is also lower. We had a number of examples of these conditions emerging in farms. For example, in 2009, we had the swine flu pandemic. Now we are experiencing bird flu epidemics. It’s not something that is not being experienced.

Fin: How worried should I be about bird flu as a cause of something COVID-level or worse in the next few years?

Cynthia: The epidemiological community has been worried about bird flu for many years. If you asked anyone 5 to 10 years ago before COVID what would be the greatest risk of a pandemic, most people would tell you it was a pandemic from bird flu. I’m not saying the risk is high, but there is a risk. Bird flu so far has infected humans, but you had to have contact with an infected animal or source for the disease to be transmitted to humans. Now in the last few years, we are seeing transmission of bird flu from mammal to mammal. Sustained transmission among populations of mammals, which are much closer to us than birds. The risk is that at some point, the virus acquires a mutation that makes it possible for it to have sustained transmission from human to human. In that case, it would be completely disastrous because the fatality rates of bird flu are gigantic compared to the fatality rates of COVID, for example. So that would be a major case for concern. The risk so far of this happening is low, the human-to-human transmission. But if it happens, it’s absolutely disastrous. People should be worried about it.

Fin: Just to say that back, it sounds like the really worrying pathway here is that there is transmission from birds to mammals. Then in some population of mammals, the virus has some time to adapt to spreading within mammals.

Cynthia: Yes, absolutely. When we’re thinking about animal welfare, it’s important to consider both the negative and positive experiences. If an animal has a lot of positive experiences, it could potentially offset some of the negative ones. It’s not just about minimizing suffering but also about maximizing well-being.

Positive experience and time perception in animals

Fin: Right. So, are there any studies or methods currently being used to measure positive experiences in animals?

Cynthia: There are some approaches, but it’s definitely more challenging than measuring negative experiences. Researchers often look at behaviors that are associated with pleasure or contentment, such as play or social interactions. There are also physiological indicators, like hormone levels, that can provide some insights. However, it’s still a developing area of research.

Fin: Interesting. It seems like a complex field with a lot of variables to consider.

Cynthia: Definitely. It’s a challenging but important area of study, especially when it comes to improving the welfare of animals in various settings.

Cynthia: We created the concept of cumulative pleasure, using measures like a pleasure track. It’s a measure of the time spent in positive affective states as a result of experiences. The logic behind measuring cumulative pleasure is the same as measuring negative affect. We have four levels of intensity from satisfaction to bliss. It’s much harder to measure positive welfare than negative welfare. Research on positive welfare is more recent, but it’s extremely important. Our focus on negative welfare stems from prioritizing the urgency of suffering. From an evolutionary perspective, suffering is more urgent. It usually requires immediate or short-term action, whereas positive welfare is reinforced for the mid or longer term.

Fin: Right.

Cynthia: That said, positive experiences are important because they might help mitigate sources of negative welfare, for example, by distracting from the source of negative welfare. When we start calculating cumulative pleasure, we will adopt the same pragmatic approach, not trying to conflate negative with positive or subjectively estimating the extent to which positive can compensate for the negative—knowledge not yet available, not even for humans. Can you ever offset time spent suffering, especially intense suffering, even if a positive experience is very intense? We might one day get there, but so far, we’ll keep things separate.

Fin: Yeah. I read about the human case. Informed adults can choose to undergo experiences involving both negative and positive aspects. Some experiences, even with pain, are worth it, like climbing a mountain. The fact that we are willing to undergo certain experiences, even when informed about them, feels like strong evidence. Does that sound right?

Cynthia: Yes. That happens when you are willing to endure the negative experience.

Fin: Right.

Cynthia: But if it’s not something in your control, it might be different. We can’t even say how that works for humans because it varies a lot from person to person. Generalizations are hard. People who run marathons may be willing to undergo negative experiences for the pleasure of fulfilling a purpose or reaching a goal. For me, that would be a nightmare. It may vary a lot.

Fin: Yeah. It’s interesting. You can’t make an informed decision to undergo unexpected forms of pain or suffering because they wouldn’t be unexpected if you had agreed to them. We can’t get this prospective evidence. You can talk about whether an experience in the past was worth it, but that gets confusing. It becomes a big philosophical knot, I guess.

You mentioned something super relevant, which is the fact that we have a number of memory biases. What we remember about an experience is not necessarily what we felt during the experience. We tend to have a much better memory of the peak of the experience and of the end of the experience. So even if it was very bad, but the end was better, we might remember it as a better thing than if the end was different. We’re trying to estimate the lived experience, not the remembered experience.

Fin: Yeah. If I’m remembering right, and I’m almost certainly not, there’s some experiment, maybe it’s Tversky, where participants dunk their hand in the water. In the first case, they just dunked it in extremely cold water for however many minutes, let’s say 1 minute. In the second case, they dunked it in the extremely cold water for a minute plus an extra however many seconds, let’s say 20 seconds in slightly less cold water. So it’s still uncomfortable, but it’s definitely worse than the first experience because it’s just the first experience plus more bad stuff. Then they were asked which experience they wanted to repeat if they had to repeat one. Most of them chose the second experience, which you might think contains more total pain, but there are these biases to do with overweighting the end, which was less bad. So, yeah, maybe we can’t even trust humans on this thing.

Cynthia: Exactly.

Taking inspiration from Transparency International

Fin: So switching gears a little bit, there is this organization called Transparency International. It’s a watchdog organization for corruption. Are there any lessons that animal welfare can take from a model like that?

Cynthia: We think so. Over the last years in which we have been in contact with animal welfare and animal welfare policy and legislation, what we’ve seen is that in many cases, you do have legislation in place, you do have commitments in place, but the industry ends up finding loopholes and loose language and means to circumvent those requirements and the legislation. In practice, the welfare of the animals is not improved. Sometimes there is lack of enforcement of the legislation or corrupt systems. So when you analyze the real life of the animals, sometimes it’s not as different as in a place with more lax legislation. We believe that by increasing transparency in the production chain, that might be a means to actually improve welfare de facto in reality. For example, if you have auditing of meaningful welfare outcomes at the slaughter line, checking for things like the prevalence of fracture, lung issues, lesions, and health conditions, it would be much harder to circumvent the situation and not really improve the welfare of the animals. You have to do something at the farm level to avoid those high levels of issues at the slaughter line. This would be one of the issues. Another thing would be ranking the companies in terms of the extent to which they allow unannounced auditing at the farm level by independent parties.

So even if you do not have legislation that requires announced auditing, if you have a ranking of companies in that area, then you already have pressure to increase transparency. You have things like the Business Benchmark on Farm Animal Welfare, which has a number of conditions that companies need to fulfill. They are usually interested in fulfilling those conditions to have good scores for investors, the stock market, and so on. You could have transparency in terms of slaughter line auditing, farm auditing, publication of not only their welfare policies but also meaningful welfare outcomes at the animal level. We think this could be transformative instead of focusing so much on inputs.

Fin: Yeah. I’ll tell you what’s running through my head when I hear that. Often, investigative journalists will film inside a factory farm, often at risk to themselves because it’s illegal and dangerous. This was a kind of transparency. It’s a way of getting information out. But companies are going to try to stop this, and they don’t really care about looking bad for stopping them because they can just say it’s illegal or whatever. I wonder if there are other ways to really make the companies look bad for not opening themselves up to certain kinds of accountability and transparency. Once you have a serious-looking ranking, as a company, you actually want to look like you don’t have something terrible to hide. You want to allow certain amounts of investigation, which means downstream, you face pressure to change practices revealed to be bad.

Cynthia: Exactly. The industry frequently says the portrayal of the industry is biased. When you have these investigations you mentioned, they say those are exceptional cases, etc. People need to understand how animals are raised to see that we do care about their welfare. If this is true, they should be pro-transparent.

Fin: Yeah. Here’s your opportunity to prove it. Here’s your opportunity to prove that this was just an outlier.

Cynthia: Exactly. It would be very bad for a company to be against increasing transparency and not abiding by criteria that make them more transparent.

Fin: Yeah. That’s interesting. You can always say if someone breaks into your facility and films welfare violations and harms, and also just the totally normal practice of factory farming, which is terrible enough, then you can say, oh, this is just an unusual event and unrepresentative. If you agree in advance to an unannounced audit by a relatively professional outfit, then you have much less recourse to that kind of excuse after it happens. This, in fact, was a thing that you signed up for, and it’s much more representative. I really like this idea. I kind of want to talk about the work you do in general.

So, you know, you have this kind of amazing amount of research output on the Welfare Footprint Project website, you know, up to book-length reports with more to come. I’m curious, who do you imagine is the most important audience for all this work?

Cynthia: We would love for the method to be adopted by policymakers, obviously, and legislators, also by organizations to establish priorities in terms of, you know, cost-effectiveness of their efforts and campaigns. We’re very much going in that direction. We have been very positively surprised with the traction that the method is getting. But also, we would love for the estimates to be adopted by consumers. We think that when consumers really start understanding what happens in terms of welfare impacts of their choices, it generates the demand and the incentive structure for change. So that’s why we think having a relatable metric that consumers can understand is important. So if you say, well, if you have to pay $1 more, perhaps for 1 star more in your project, that’s not so clear. But if you pay $1 more to reduce 10 hours of intense suffering, will you do that? You know what 10 hours of intense suffering are.

Fin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Cynthia: We would love for it to reach consumers. So our dream is to have, like, welfare footprints of most products available.

Fin: Yeah. That would be awesome. Like, I kind of worry that you can see, you know, the word, like, free range on a box of eggs. And, you know, you’ve read all this stuff about how free range doesn’t really mean anything and it can include very bad conditions. And then you kind of have this thing of, well, I don’t really know where to look and so I’ll just, even if I actually really value higher welfare standards, I just don’t have the information in front of me to make those consumer choices. And so providing reliable information allows people to express existing preferences, which I’m sure people have in many cases. Yeah. What about policymakers? I’m curious how policymakers react when you bring these ideas to them.

Cynthia: We have been approached by some agencies who need to have quantitative metrics of animal welfare for trade-off considerations in their policymaking. So, for example, if they’re working with an environmental impact or an environmental policy, what is, on the other hand, the welfare impact of that policy? So this is another dimension of sustainability, and it should be included in these considerations or in economic considerations. So we have been approached by some of these agencies so they could understand the method and see the extent to which they can use the method themselves as opposed to only the estimates for their day-to-day decisions in terms of policies and impact of policies and cost-effectiveness of the different decisions they need to make and even cost benefits of the different decisions they need to make.

Fin: Okay. Got it. So it’s not just, you know, we will consult and provide estimates to you, but also you can use our framework, and you don’t need to keep us in the loop.

Cynthia: Yes. We do not want to be, like, the only ones running the welfare footprint framework.

I mean, we have been teaching workshops and giving seminars in the hope that people working with different situations, which are, you know, there’s billions of them, can apply the method to their own research problems, policy problems, investing problems, and so on. That would be ideal because these specialists are the better people to make the most informed estimates about the situation they are analyzing.

Fin: Yeah, for sure. I wonder if there’s some worry that policymakers just might not have time for the level of rigor and detail which your research involves. Do you ever encounter policymakers just trying to cut to the chase, looking for the big headline results? How much appetite is there for the kind of nuance you have? Like, for instance, not aggregating the different intensities of pain.

Cynthia: You can run this analysis in different ways. You can make an estimate, like, on the back of an envelope, just having a general sense of intensity and duration of a problem or multiple problems. And that’s already some reduction of uncertainty compared to what you had before, so it’s better. But the more you can ground your estimates on evidence, of course, the more reliable they will be. So I don’t see it as a huge problem to have simplified estimates because they can be improved. They are all updatable. Now, that said, we are developing some tools, and that’s the work of Vladimir Alonso, the co-founder of the Idea Welfare Footprint Project, and the person behind many of our methods. He is working on developing some tools based on artificial intelligence. Nowadays, artificial intelligence, of course, it’s not perfect, but it can already help in gathering evidence to justify estimates of intensity and duration associated with different projects. And it’s getting better and better. So we foresee that in some years, when you use one of these tools, you will be able to get really close to the estimates an expert would make in a month of dedicated full-time research. So yeah, we’re very optimistic in this sense that with the help of AI, we’ll be able to streamline the research process by a lot and make these estimates and the use of the framework available to a much wider range of people, policymakers, and stakeholders.

AI research tools

Fin: Oh, super interesting. So you’ve made this custom GPT chatbot? Yeah, if that’s what you’re referring to?

Cynthia: Yes, that’s what I mean. Right, GPT.

Fin: Yeah, so it’s very impressive. Right? I played around with it, and I kind of gave it some examples, like estimating the welfare footprint of a laying hen in a factory farm or whatever. And it did what seemed like a pretty good job. It ran through all these different sources of pain and tried to add them up. And you can also validate this, right? So you can ask these questions to the AI. You can also ask it to humans, and you can just see if they line up. So we don’t have to guess about whether human and AI estimates correlate.

Cynthia: Exactly, and we have a project to do this on a broad scale. We haven’t started this project yet, but in terms of having AI run multiple simulations because it’s not deterministic. Right? So yeah, running multiple simulations for each welfare concern.

So you generate an average estimate of cumulative pain for each condition. You do that in a loop for different species, different conditions, and so on. So far, what we’ve seen is that when you take the average of at least 10 simulations with this GPT bot, the estimates overlap a lot with the estimates that we already have based on expert knowledge. So it’s even like, wow. We weren’t expecting that.

Plans for the Welfare Footprint Project

Fin: Okay. So a lot of the things we’ve talked about over the last hour and a half are really quite difficult to think and talk about because you’re discussing just huge amounts of suffering, and this is a problem in the world that is still growing in absolute terms. I imagine it might be quite hard to spend your working life working on these things. So I don’t know. What motivates you?

Cynthia: Our main goal, which is the goal of many in the effective altruism community, is to reduce as much possible suffering in the world, particularly the worst forms of suffering. We think the method could have a transformative effect on animal welfare in that regard. In the same way that other quantitative approaches had a transformative effect in global health, as we could witness while we were working there, like the Global Burden of Disease project and others. We think that this could help a lot. Because there are no other quantitative approaches with this perspective, with a metric like this, we think we should keep going and spread the word about the method so other people use it and generate more estimates and so on. If there was a different approach, we would be glad to use it. But so far, we don’t think there is. So we think that we need to dedicate the next years of our lives to this because the positive effect could be there.

Fin: Feel free not to answer this if I’m putting you on the spot and you don’t know much about it, but you mentioned the Global Burden of Disease Project. What can we learn from that?

Cynthia: The Global Burden of Disease Project is a very large project initiated by Chris Murray when he was still working in the World Health Organization, where he came up with this metric, DALY, Disability Adjusted Life Years, which also uses time as the basis. By doing so, it enables the combination and comparison of the burden of multiple health issues in the human population. Nowadays, there’s a whole institution that runs the project, and lots of books and papers using the method and so on. This has helped decision-making on priorities in terms of alleviation and improvement of health in various human populations. The method is not the same, but the quantitative approach is similar.

Fin: Yeah. I mean, I just think this kind of general point that it takes someone to decide to collect, aggregate, and organize the data that’s out there so you can make these cross-disease comparisons. By default, that just doesn’t exist, right? It’s really hard to see it all in one place.

Cynthia: More abstract. It would be more about mapping the conditions and the types of pain or discomfort experienced by individuals, whether they are humans or animals, rather than a geographical map. It’s about understanding the distribution and prevalence of pain across different conditions and species, and how these might be addressed or alleviated.

Fin: That’s really interesting. It sounds like a massive undertaking.

Cynthia: Yes, it is. But we believe it could have a significant impact on how we understand and manage pain across different populations. It could lead to better welfare standards and practices.

Fin: Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we wrap up?

Cynthia: Just that we’re always looking for people who are interested in collaborating or contributing to our work. Whether it’s through research, policy, or technology, there’s a lot that can be done to improve animal welfare, and we’re eager to work with anyone who shares that goal.

Because we are mapping this stress, we are quantifying the distress associated with these conditions. These conditions have different prevalences in different geographies. We could have a map of their impact in different geographies, like a heat map, that we could filter in different ways to show different issues.

Fin: I really like this idea. For some reason, I’ve always wondered what it would be like if different experiences kind of glowed different colors. You can imagine, just in the same way that you have these satellite pictures at night of the lights, you could see pictures of what parts are glowing with good or bad experiences. Maybe, for instance, factory bumps would be incredibly bright with this, not necessarily good experiences.

Cynthia: Exactly. That’s the idea behind it. And couple it with an interactive platform where people can play and visualize all the information.

Fin: Great. I look forward to seeing that. So a question we ask everyone is, can you recommend three resources, books or papers or whatever, for listeners?

Cynthia: Of course, there’s our website that has a number of blog posts and resources for people to understand more about the project and the EA forum, the Effective Altruism Forum. There’s a lot of very interesting discussions around what we discussed. There’s also, for the more academically inclined person, a new handbook on animal welfare. It’s the Routledge Handbook of Animal Welfare. It’s open source, so people can go there and check many of the things that we have discussed. And perhaps a general reading source that I like, and Vladimir, the cofounder, also likes, is the book by Temple Grandin, “Animals Make Us Human.” So that’s a nice reading source, lighter and not so technical.

Fin: Okay. Great. I’ll link to all those things. And just finally, where can people find your work and the Welfare Footprint Project online?

Cynthia: It’s welfarefootprint.org, and you have forms there to get in touch with us. But anything at welfarefootprint.org reaches us. So if you want to drop us a line, feel free. We’re very much open to booking an office hour or a one-on-one conversation. As I said, we’re very much open to collaboration.

Fin: Okay. Cynthia Schuck-Paim, thank you very much.

Cynthia: Thank you, Fin. It was my pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Outro

Cynthia: That was Cynthia Schuck on quantifying animal welfare. If you’re looking for links or a transcript, you can go to hearthisidea.com/episodes/shook. That is S-C-H-U-C-K. If you find this podcast valuable in some way, then probably the most effective way to help is just to write an honest review wherever you’re listening to this. You can also follow us on Twitter; we are just This. As always, a big thanks to our producer, Jacin, for editing these episodes, and thank you very much for listening.