This is a tough one. I recently surveyed a dozen of the most informed and aligned people on their estimate of the average welfare gain per life-year—a mix of aligned animal welfare scientists and EA researchers—and got a very wide range of answers. There’s lots of reasons for that uncertainty but the biggest is that the underlying broiler welfare science isn’t all that helpful. That’s in turn mainly due to a combo of (1) it’s really hard to measure the subjective experience of animals (preference tests are the best evidence we have, but they’re not that helpful for cases with many interacting variables), and (2) most welfare science hasn’t traditionally focused on the subjective experience of animals, but instead on weakly related factors like mortality and health.
But there’s a broad consensus amongst the informed / aligned researchers that the welfare gain of the Better Chicken Commitment outweighs the potential increase in life-years. This is mainly because the higher welfare breeds most likely to be adopted are only slightly slower than conventional breeds—we’re most likely talking about a 10-20% increase in days, not a >30% increase or anything. (Some approved breeds are much slower, but no big producer is going to adopt them.) And a little bit of that increase in days will be offset by decreased demand at a higher price point. By contrast, the welfare reforms—especially on breed and stocking density—seem likely to make a pretty substantial difference to outcomes like chronic pain and stress.
FWIW, my very rough estimate is that, accounting for the life span increase, the BCC will alleviate ~40% of the suffering of US broilers and ~25% of the suffering of EU broilers. (The EU number is lower because EU broilers start in better conditions than US broilers.) But those are very rough numbers—my 80% confidence interval would span something like 5-75% of suffering reduced. And I think others reasonably have very different estimates here.
This is a tough one. I recently surveyed a dozen of the most informed and aligned people on their estimate of the average welfare gain per life-year—a mix of aligned animal welfare scientists and EA researchers—and got a very wide range of answers. There’s lots of reasons for that uncertainty but the biggest is that the underlying broiler welfare science isn’t all that helpful. That’s in turn mainly due to a combo of (1) it’s really hard to measure the subjective experience of animals (preference tests are the best evidence we have, but they’re not that helpful for cases with many interacting variables), and (2) most welfare science hasn’t traditionally focused on the subjective experience of animals, but instead on weakly related factors like mortality and health.
But there’s a broad consensus amongst the informed / aligned researchers that the welfare gain of the Better Chicken Commitment outweighs the potential increase in life-years. This is mainly because the higher welfare breeds most likely to be adopted are only slightly slower than conventional breeds—we’re most likely talking about a 10-20% increase in days, not a >30% increase or anything. (Some approved breeds are much slower, but no big producer is going to adopt them.) And a little bit of that increase in days will be offset by decreased demand at a higher price point. By contrast, the welfare reforms—especially on breed and stocking density—seem likely to make a pretty substantial difference to outcomes like chronic pain and stress.
FWIW, my very rough estimate is that, accounting for the life span increase, the BCC will alleviate ~40% of the suffering of US broilers and ~25% of the suffering of EU broilers. (The EU number is lower because EU broilers start in better conditions than US broilers.) But those are very rough numbers—my 80% confidence interval would span something like 5-75% of suffering reduced. And I think others reasonably have very different estimates here.