Laura Duffy’s analyses of this comes close to my view. On the margin, the question between global health charity and animal charity is something like GiveWell top charities *e.g. AMF) vs. ACE top charity (e.g. The Humane League), which is something like “Would you rather save 1 DALY or 40 years of hens from cages to cage-free.
I’m pretty split between the two and my donation habits reflect this; however, I don’t think we know how to scale effective animal interventions past the current funding gaps in the low $10ms. For Global health, we do.
Edit: Learned that Laura has posted more on this since we last talked! Her posts seem to use RP’s human:animal welfare moral weight comparisons, which place less compariative weight to human suffering than I do!
I agree with CB’s reply. It also may be worth mentioning the footnote from the debate question that the $100m can be spent over any amount of time we wish. So if we add (say) $10m per year over the next 10 years, it doesn’t seem like this marginal $100m would be substantially less cost-effective than what would otherwise be spent over the next 10 years.
”Overall, an average of at least 275 hours of disabling pain, 2,313 hours of hurtful pain and 4,645 hours of annoying pain are prevented [over 60 to 80 weeks] for each hen kept in an aviary instead of CC during her laying life”
Over 40 years of life of several hens, this would be over 7,000 hours of disabling pain and 62,000 hours of hurtful pain removed.
It feels like, comparatively, adding one year of life to someone is much less impressive, even assuming humans have the ability to suffer more?
Thanks for this. I wonder roughly how many hours of “disabling pain” or “hurtful pain” we estimate are diverted by saving 1 DALY. That would help me get a better sense of the tradeoff.
DALYs in global health use discount measures which lie between zero and one. Chronic back pain for example has a disability weight of 0.1, (for simplicity assumes the life of the average person with chronic back pain is 10% worse than someone with no health issues)
I could be missing something but I don’t think that we calculate DALY equivalents for excruciating pain for things like torture, which couldn’t just be calculated through discounting as they cause net negative living time. that’s why they have to be newly estimated for animals in this situation.
Laura Duffy’s analyses of this comes close to my view. On the margin, the question between global health charity and animal charity is something like GiveWell top charities *e.g. AMF) vs. ACE top charity (e.g. The Humane League), which is something like “Would you rather save 1 DALY or 40 years of hens from cages to cage-free.
I’m pretty split between the two and my donation habits reflect this; however, I don’t think we know how to scale effective animal interventions past the current funding gaps in the low $10ms. For Global health, we do.
Edit: Learned that Laura has posted more on this since we last talked! Her posts seem to use RP’s human:animal welfare moral weight comparisons, which place less compariative weight to human suffering than I do!
I agree with CB’s reply. It also may be worth mentioning the footnote from the debate question that the $100m can be spent over any amount of time we wish. So if we add (say) $10m per year over the next 10 years, it doesn’t seem like this marginal $100m would be substantially less cost-effective than what would otherwise be spent over the next 10 years.
According to the welfare footprint project, going from cages to cage-free removes a large part of the pain laying hens have to go through : Transition to cage-free systems – Welfare Footprint Project
”Overall, an average of at least 275 hours of disabling pain, 2,313 hours of hurtful pain and 4,645 hours of annoying pain are prevented [over 60 to 80 weeks] for each hen kept in an aviary instead of CC during her laying life”
Over 40 years of life of several hens, this would be over 7,000 hours of disabling pain and 62,000 hours of hurtful pain removed.
It feels like, comparatively, adding one year of life to someone is much less impressive, even assuming humans have the ability to suffer more?
Thanks for this. I wonder roughly how many hours of “disabling pain” or “hurtful pain” we estimate are diverted by saving 1 DALY. That would help me get a better sense of the tradeoff.
Anyone have a better sense? @NickLaing ?
I’m afraid I can’t help here.
DALYs in global health use discount measures which lie between zero and one. Chronic back pain for example has a disability weight of 0.1, (for simplicity assumes the life of the average person with chronic back pain is 10% worse than someone with no health issues)
I could be missing something but I don’t think that we calculate DALY equivalents for excruciating pain for things like torture, which couldn’t just be calculated through discounting as they cause net negative living time. that’s why they have to be newly estimated for animals in this situation.