Hi Vasco. This is a great question and one that I find personally intriguing (although I am not an expert in this area).
I’m curious about the possibility of identifying biometric indicators that correlate with subjective wellbeing scores in order to make interspecies comparisons of wellbeing. For example, Blanchfower and Bryson (2021) investigated the link between pulse and wellbeing.
At the Wellbeing Research & Policy Conference, Daniel Kahneman noted the increasing importance of ‘wearables’ for tracking health and wellbeing data. I think this technology could be applied to non-human animals too. I asked the team at Wild Animal Initiative about this. They’re in the process of hiring a physiology research specialist, but in the meantime they said:
On the probably more feasible end of things, we would like to be able to measure levels of cortisol and similar hormones associated with physiological stress. On the more difficult end, we would like to be able to measure the average length of telomeres in white blood cells. Currently, that is usually done by performing qPCR on a blood sample with specific primers to distinguish different numbers of repeated sequence motifs at the ends of chromosomes. However, maybe there could one day be a way to simplify that process, considering that we are only interested in the physical length of the telomeres.
For the most recent thinking about interspecies comparisons of welfare, I recommend watching the recordings from the recent conference sponsored by Rethink Priorities and reading Jason Schukraft’s sequence of posts on moral weights.
Hi Vasco. This is a great question and one that I find personally intriguing (although I am not an expert in this area).
I’m curious about the possibility of identifying biometric indicators that correlate with subjective wellbeing scores in order to make interspecies comparisons of wellbeing. For example, Blanchfower and Bryson (2021) investigated the link between pulse and wellbeing.
At the Wellbeing Research & Policy Conference, Daniel Kahneman noted the increasing importance of ‘wearables’ for tracking health and wellbeing data. I think this technology could be applied to non-human animals too. I asked the team at Wild Animal Initiative about this. They’re in the process of hiring a physiology research specialist, but in the meantime they said:
For the most recent thinking about interspecies comparisons of welfare, I recommend watching the recordings from the recent conference sponsored by Rethink Priorities and reading Jason Schukraft’s sequence of posts on moral weights.
Thanks for sharing, I will have a look at some of those!