Hi Vasco, thanks for the comment! I really appreciate it when people dig into the modelling choices :)
EDIT: I just saw the end of your comment. I’m not aware of any research into the intensity of pain across types, and would be keen to hear from others who are.
I think your ordering (r1 < r2 < r3 and r4 >> 500x annoying) would be totally reasonable, and I haven’t read those posts, so thanks for bringing them up! The choice to use the ratios previously used by Šimčikas was rather arbitrary and meant to be consistent with his results. I get why one might expect excruciating pain to be much worse than 500x annoying pain, and I think we do need more research on this to be able to better aggregate the duration and intensity of pain.
These are the reasons why I allow users to input their own pain weights in the model, so I definitely encourage you and others to try out using alternative weights! (here) (When you enter the weights, 1 is the benchmark for “equivalent to suffering”, and you might want disabling pain to be greater than 1 if down-weighting the significance of hurtful pain relative to disabling.)
Because of such methodological choices, I am more confident in the results about the animal-years improved (which look pretty good).
One thing to note would be that excruciating pain is rather rare across hens’ lifespans, and Welfare Footprint didn’t find statistically significant differences between the amount of excruciating pain experienced by the average hen in conventional cages, enriched cages, and cage-free aviaries. From the “Total Time in Pain” tab on the display at the bottom of this Welfare Footprint page, the average time a hen spends in excruciating pain in her life, by cage type, is: - Conventional: 0.05 (0.03 − 0.07) hours/hen— Furnished/Enriched: 0.038 (0.018 − 0.058) hours/hen - Cage-free: 0.04 (0.02 − 0.06) hours/hen Due to the lack of statistically significant differences between the time spent in excruciating pain, it may be that changing the weights drastically wouldn’t lead to discernible/actionable differences in the results
However, I think that if we weighted the difference between Hurtful --> Disabling pain (r2) higher than the Annoying --> Hurtful difference we would get meaningfully different results on suffering reduction. (As we would if we chose a different benchmark category for the definition of “suffering”.)
Again, I encourage you and others to try this out—I hope the model is useful and accessible to lots of people. Thanks again for the comment and feedback
Hi Vasco, thanks for the comment! I really appreciate it when people dig into the modelling choices :)
EDIT: I just saw the end of your comment. I’m not aware of any research into the intensity of pain across types, and would be keen to hear from others who are.
I think your ordering (r1 < r2 < r3 and r4 >> 500x annoying) would be totally reasonable, and I haven’t read those posts, so thanks for bringing them up! The choice to use the ratios previously used by Šimčikas was rather arbitrary and meant to be consistent with his results. I get why one might expect excruciating pain to be much worse than 500x annoying pain, and I think we do need more research on this to be able to better aggregate the duration and intensity of pain.
These are the reasons why I allow users to input their own pain weights in the model, so I definitely encourage you and others to try out using alternative weights! (here) (When you enter the weights, 1 is the benchmark for “equivalent to suffering”, and you might want disabling pain to be greater than 1 if down-weighting the significance of hurtful pain relative to disabling.)
Because of such methodological choices, I am more confident in the results about the animal-years improved (which look pretty good).
One thing to note would be that excruciating pain is rather rare across hens’ lifespans, and Welfare Footprint didn’t find statistically significant differences between the amount of excruciating pain experienced by the average hen in conventional cages, enriched cages, and cage-free aviaries.
From the “Total Time in Pain” tab on the display at the bottom of this Welfare Footprint page, the average time a hen spends in excruciating pain in her life, by cage type, is:
- Conventional: 0.05 (0.03 − 0.07) hours/hen—
Furnished/Enriched: 0.038 (0.018 − 0.058) hours/hen
- Cage-free: 0.04 (0.02 − 0.06) hours/hen
Due to the lack of statistically significant differences between the time spent in excruciating pain, it may be that changing the weights drastically wouldn’t lead to discernible/actionable differences in the results
However, I think that if we weighted the difference between Hurtful --> Disabling pain (r2) higher than the Annoying --> Hurtful difference we would get meaningfully different results on suffering reduction. (As we would if we chose a different benchmark category for the definition of “suffering”.)
Again, I encourage you and others to try this out—I hope the model is useful and accessible to lots of people. Thanks again for the comment and feedback
Hi Laura,
Thanks for taking the time to explain that! I agree with all points.