Question: Did you take into account the following?:
Culling of male chicks in the egg industry
The lives of dairy cows’ offspring (whether they’re kept for veal or slaughtered right away)
Bycatch and/or the lives of the fishes that are fed to farmed salmon?
And a couple requests:
If you do make some updates, could you consider adding eggs from pasture-raised hens for comparison, too?
And add wild salmon?
I was surprised with how much the brain function choice affects the results, but don’t have a good sense of which function is the best estimate. I wonder if there’s enough of a consensus on that among animal sentience researchers for it to be appropriate to designate one of those options as “experts’ choice” or “most likely” or something?
You are the first person to mention both culling of male chicks and fish who are fed to farmed salmon. You are correct that these are shortcomings. We must also be mindful of breeder chickens used in broiler farming. Unfortunately, accounting for all of these effects would be difficult and would require data that could be difficult to find. About your requests:
1. I will consider it. 2. I assume that understanding the impacts of eating wild animals would be even more difficult so for the sake of keeping it doable I would rather not venture there even though wild animal welfare is an important area to me personally. 3. Brian Tomasik has written an interesting in-depth article on this question and he remains undecided. It seems that this is unfortunately a fundamentally difficult question. It troubles me as well that I don’t know much about such a sensitive parameter.
This is really neat, thank you for making it!
Question: Did you take into account the following?:
Culling of male chicks in the egg industry
The lives of dairy cows’ offspring (whether they’re kept for veal or slaughtered right away)
Bycatch and/or the lives of the fishes that are fed to farmed salmon?
And a couple requests:
If you do make some updates, could you consider adding eggs from pasture-raised hens for comparison, too?
And add wild salmon?
I was surprised with how much the brain function choice affects the results, but don’t have a good sense of which function is the best estimate. I wonder if there’s enough of a consensus on that among animal sentience researchers for it to be appropriate to designate one of those options as “experts’ choice” or “most likely” or something?
Thank you for the feedback, Gina!
You are the first person to mention both culling of male chicks and fish who are fed to farmed salmon. You are correct that these are shortcomings. We must also be mindful of breeder chickens used in broiler farming. Unfortunately, accounting for all of these effects would be difficult and would require data that could be difficult to find. About your requests:
1. I will consider it.
2. I assume that understanding the impacts of eating wild animals would be even more difficult so for the sake of keeping it doable I would rather not venture there even though wild animal welfare is an important area to me personally.
3. Brian Tomasik has written an interesting in-depth article on this question and he remains undecided. It seems that this is unfortunately a fundamentally difficult question. It troubles me as well that I don’t know much about such a sensitive parameter.