The equations used to calculate “suffering” do not seem to take into account actual harm done to animals in the process of producing these products. Rather it converts animal lives lost into lost years of an animals life.
These graphics are misleading when they refer to this as suffering, when what is meant is life-years.
I am glad, however, with the groupings by animal type. As Sawyer commented below, some people might wish to assign different moral value based on the neurobiology of the life taken. Perhaps a year of a clam’s life is not directly comparable to a year of a pig’s life.
Thanks for your comment. If you want to use the objective term, “days of life” is most accurate—we used the number of animals affected, and multiplied by their lifespans, accounting for different causes of mortality. You could certainly argue we editorialized a bit by referring to any day of life for a farmed animal as a day of suffering. I agree that there are differences in the extent of that suffering between species and circumstances, but in the interest of keeping the degrees of uncertainty as low as possible (see my comment to sawyer), we chose to say a day is a day is a day. Given that the numbers are massively dominated by factory farmed chickens and aquacultured fish, I feel pretty comfortable referring to it as days of suffering.
The equations used to calculate “suffering” do not seem to take into account actual harm done to animals in the process of producing these products. Rather it converts animal lives lost into lost years of an animals life.
These graphics are misleading when they refer to this as suffering, when what is meant is life-years.
I am glad, however, with the groupings by animal type. As Sawyer commented below, some people might wish to assign different moral value based on the neurobiology of the life taken. Perhaps a year of a clam’s life is not directly comparable to a year of a pig’s life.
Thanks for your comment. If you want to use the objective term, “days of life” is most accurate—we used the number of animals affected, and multiplied by their lifespans, accounting for different causes of mortality. You could certainly argue we editorialized a bit by referring to any day of life for a farmed animal as a day of suffering. I agree that there are differences in the extent of that suffering between species and circumstances, but in the interest of keeping the degrees of uncertainty as low as possible (see my comment to sawyer), we chose to say a day is a day is a day. Given that the numbers are massively dominated by factory farmed chickens and aquacultured fish, I feel pretty comfortable referring to it as days of suffering.