Hey Uri, thanks for your transparent comment! The cost-effectiveness estimates of cage-free campaigns being orders of magnitude more cost-effective than GiveWell Top Charities have several bases:
The Welfare Footprint Project’s incredibly exhaustive deep dive into every aspect of an egg-laying hen’s life: “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 for each hen kept in an aviary instead of CC during her laying life, and 1,410 hours of hurtful pain and 4,065 hours of annoying pain prevented for each hen kept in an aviary instead of a FC during her laying life.”
Welfare range comparisons between humans and chickens. Rethink Priorities’ Welfare Range Project focused on finding proxies for consciousness and welfare, and enumerating which proxies various animals share with humans. Their methodology found that chickens feel pain approximately 1⁄3 as intensely as humans do. (Of course, different methodologies may give quite different answers.)
Doing the math with the suffering prevented by cage-free campaigns and Rethink’s welfare ranges will give a cost-effectiveness multiplier on the order of 1000x. But even if you assign chickens a welfare range like 0.001x that of humans, you’re still going to get a cost-effectiveness multiplier on the order of 10x.
Similarly, if you ignore Rethink’s research and instead derive a welfare range from neuron counts (to penalize chickens for their small brains), you still get cage-free campaigns outperforming GiveWell Top Charities by an order of magnitude.
All of this why I am quite confident that cage-free campaigns are indeed far more cost-effective than GiveWell-recommended charities.
Hey Uri, thanks for your transparent comment! The cost-effectiveness estimates of cage-free campaigns being orders of magnitude more cost-effective than GiveWell Top Charities have several bases:
The Welfare Footprint Project’s incredibly exhaustive deep dive into every aspect of an egg-laying hen’s life: “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 for each hen kept in an aviary instead of CC during her laying life, and 1,410 hours of hurtful pain and 4,065 hours of annoying pain prevented for each hen kept in an aviary instead of a FC during her laying life.”
Welfare range comparisons between humans and chickens. Rethink Priorities’ Welfare Range Project focused on finding proxies for consciousness and welfare, and enumerating which proxies various animals share with humans. Their methodology found that chickens feel pain approximately 1⁄3 as intensely as humans do. (Of course, different methodologies may give quite different answers.)
Doing the math with the suffering prevented by cage-free campaigns and Rethink’s welfare ranges will give a cost-effectiveness multiplier on the order of 1000x. But even if you assign chickens a welfare range like 0.001x that of humans, you’re still going to get a cost-effectiveness multiplier on the order of 10x.
Similarly, if you ignore Rethink’s research and instead derive a welfare range from neuron counts (to penalize chickens for their small brains), you still get cage-free campaigns outperforming GiveWell Top Charities by an order of magnitude.
All of this why I am quite confident that cage-free campaigns are indeed far more cost-effective than GiveWell-recommended charities.