KarolinaSarek🔸 comments on Is it better to be a wild rat or a factory farmed cow? A systematic method for comparing animal welfare.

[KarolinaSarek🔸]

Some examples of this model being applied would be very helpful for understanding the model.

We had applied this system to 15 different animals/​breeds and recently posted the summary of our research here.

[Jamie_Harris]

Thanks for providing the examples! A couple of questions:

1) Can I check I’ve understood: the “Estimated population size” and “Odds of feeling pain” columns are not factored into the “total welfare score” (which is made up of adding together scores from the various criteria which then end up somewhere between −100 and +100) at all; they are to be used separately.

So if you wanted to work out whether sparing 10 broiler chickens or 20 beef cows from existence was more impactful, you’d have to multiply your result by the odds of feeling pain etc. E.g. for chickens: 10 * −56 * 0.7 = −392 units of suffering prevented. For beef cows: −20 * 20 * 75% = −300 units of suffering prevented. So sparing chickens slightly better by this metric (also: note that people might not agree with that the rough estimates from the OPP on consciousness mean the same thing as “odds of feeling pain,” e.g. if you subscribe to consciousness eliminativism, although I haven’t read the OPP report in a while so might be misremembering the specifics)

2) I don’t understand where the “range” figure comes from?

[KarolinaSarek🔸]

1) As you correctly observed, we didn’t adjust welfare points for population size and odds of feeling pain in this spreadsheet. But we just publish another report summarizing our animal prioritization research where we aggregated information about baseline welfare points, population size, odds of feeling pain, neglectedness, and amount of suffering caused by a smaller number of specific reasons.

Generally, when we are calculating the cost-effectiveness of a given intervention we take into account the number of welfare points “gained” (baseline welfare points changed counterfactually by the intervention) multiplied by odds of feeling pain and number of animals affected.

We also need to adjust for length of life. For example, if the baseline welfare points per year for a cow is −20 and for broiler chicken is −56, but beef cow spends 402 days on a farm, their WP would be multiplied by the percentage of year they spend on the farm, so 402 days /​ 365 days in a year = 110%, and broiler chicken spend 42 days, then WPs would be multiplied by 12% resulting in:
Cow: −22 welfare points per lifetime of an individual
Broiler chicken: −6.72 welfare points per lifetime of an individual.

2) The range is the minimum and maximum values of welfare points as rated by our external reviewers. “Total welfare score” (second column) is an average of internal and external reviewer’s ratings.