Measures aimed at addressing thermal stress, and improving hen access to feed and water show promise in reducing significant amounts of hours spent in pain cost-effectively. Example initial estimates:
Welfare issue
Total impact
[hours of disabling pain averted/farm]
Cost efficacy
[$/hen]
Cost efficacy
[$cents/hour of disabling pain]
Thermal stress
87.5k (46.25k-150k)
0.77
1.11 (0.65-2.09)
Limited access to water
23.75k (12.5k-35k)
0.17
0.9 (0.61-1.71)
Limited access to feed (feeders)
162.5k (103.75k-212.5k)
0.22
0.17 (0.13-0.27)
Limited access to feed (feeders + feed)
362.5k (250k-475k)
1.43
0.49 (0.38-0.72)
For the most promising, limited access to feed (feeders), at 0.17 cents/hour of disabling pain, this is around 0.067 years of disabling pain/$. It’s worth benchmarking against corporate campaigns for comparison. From Duffy, 2023, using disabling pain-equivalent:
1.7 years of suffering avoided per dollar that was spent on cage-free campaigns, with a range between 0.23 and 5.0 years per dollar.
We think that the marginal FAW funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis.
And Duffy’s estimate is based on the same analysis by Saulius. So, more like 5x less cost-effective. However, Duffy’s estimate also included milder pains:
Table 25: Cage-free corporate campaign cost-effectiveness by pain type
Lower Bound (yrs. pain avoided/$/yr.)
Average Estimate (yrs. pain avoided/$/yr.)
Upper Bound (yrs. pain avoided/$/yr.)
Weight
Excruciating
-0.000002
-0.000002
-0.000002
5
Disabling
0.019
0.052
0.107
1
Hurtful
0.10
0.39
0.88
0.15
Annoying
0.35
0.91
1.7
0.01
Suffering-
equivalent
0.05
0.12
0.23
1
More than half of the equivalent hours of disabling pain is actually not from disabling pain at all, instead hurtful pain. So a fairer comparison would either omit the hurtful pain for corporate campaigns or also include hurtful pain for this other intervention. This could bring us closer to around 2.5x, as a first guess, which seems near enough to the funding bar.
On the other hand, I picked the most promising of the interventions, and it’s less well-studied and tested than corporate campaigns, so we might expect some optimizer’s curse or regression towards being less cost-effective.
Another benchmark is GiveWell-recommended charities, which save a life for around $5,000. Assuming that’s 70 years of life saved (mostly children), that would be 70 years of human life/$5000 = 0.014 years of human life/$. People spend about 1/3rd of their time sleeping, so it’s around 0.0093 years of waking human life/$.
Then, taking ratios of cost-effectiveness, that’s about 7 years of disabling chicken pain prevented per year of waking human life saved.
Then, we could consider:
How bad disabling pain is in a human vs a chicken
How bad human disabling pain is vs how valuable additional waking human life is
Indirect effects (of the additional years of human life, influences on attitudes towards nonhuman animals, etc.)
Thanks for providing these external benchmarks and making it easier to compare! Do you mind if I updated the text to include a reference to your comments?
Indeed, since these were initial estimates, we excluded reporting the other pain intensities to keep it brief. However, once we go through the follow-up data and have the second set of estimates, we’ll make sure to include all of the ranges, so that more comprehensive comparisons could be made. But my understanding is that for water and feed, it could be ~1:5:7 (disabling:hurtful:annoying) and ~1:1:0.1 for heat stress.
But your caveat is very important—we’ve only just identified this as an interesting intervention for the Global South, the feasibility of cost effectively mitigating such welfare issues remains untested.
Thanks for providing these external benchmarks and making it easier to compare! Do you mind if I updated the text to include a reference to your comments?
For the most promising, limited access to feed (feeders), at 0.17 cents/hour of disabling pain, this is around 0.067 years of disabling pain/$. It’s worth benchmarking against corporate campaigns for comparison. From Duffy, 2023, using disabling pain-equivalent:
At first, this looks much less cost-effective, 1.7/0.067 = 25. However, Emily Oehlsen from Open Phil said
And Duffy’s estimate is based on the same analysis by Saulius. So, more like 5x less cost-effective. However, Duffy’s estimate also included milder pains:
More than half of the equivalent hours of disabling pain is actually not from disabling pain at all, instead hurtful pain. So a fairer comparison would either omit the hurtful pain for corporate campaigns or also include hurtful pain for this other intervention. This could bring us closer to around 2.5x, as a first guess, which seems near enough to the funding bar.
On the other hand, I picked the most promising of the interventions, and it’s less well-studied and tested than corporate campaigns, so we might expect some optimizer’s curse or regression towards being less cost-effective.
Another benchmark is GiveWell-recommended charities, which save a life for around $5,000. Assuming that’s 70 years of life saved (mostly children), that would be 70 years of human life/$5000 = 0.014 years of human life/$. People spend about 1/3rd of their time sleeping, so it’s around 0.0093 years of waking human life/$.
Then, taking ratios of cost-effectiveness, that’s about 7 years of disabling chicken pain prevented per year of waking human life saved.
Then, we could consider:
How bad disabling pain is in a human vs a chicken
How bad human disabling pain is vs how valuable additional waking human life is
Indirect effects (of the additional years of human life, influences on attitudes towards nonhuman animals, etc.)
Thanks for providing these external benchmarks and making it easier to compare! Do you mind if I updated the text to include a reference to your comments?
Indeed, since these were initial estimates, we excluded reporting the other pain intensities to keep it brief. However, once we go through the follow-up data and have the second set of estimates, we’ll make sure to include all of the ranges, so that more comprehensive comparisons could be made. But my understanding is that for water and feed, it could be ~1:5:7 (disabling:hurtful:annoying) and ~1:1:0.1 for heat stress.
But your caveat is very important—we’ve only just identified this as an interesting intervention for the Global South, the feasibility of cost effectively mitigating such welfare issues remains untested.
Feel free to!