Thanks for your suggestion. I have limited capacity so apologies if I don’t answer promptly. Thanks for your suggestion on how to present CEAs, we’ll think about this further.
Note: I am certainly not an animal welfare expert, and there may be very different views on this that I am not covering.
I am not sure marginal research money should be spent on pain scaling questions, I am also not bullish on most pain scaling surveys.
I prefer having stronger research on the quantification of pain in different production systems (i.e., funding welfare science that aligns to existing proposed frameworks) and exploration of other research questions.
I believe this because:
I think that existing disagregated (non scaled) metrics already allow us to make reasonable guesses for what is cost effective to help animals.
I am not confident that we will ever gain lots of clarity on scaling, as there are lots of known unknowns and reasonable disagreements on questions up and downstream from how to scale things (sentience, range, etc.)
TTO surveys are super interesting and informative. As per the above I’d personally spend money on other research questions instead.
If someone were to go ahead with this. I’d be curious to try to predict what the learnings from such a survey could tangibly influence, as I expect they’d get tangled in a bunch of questions about validity anyways. Given the subjective nature of pain, I am not convinced a survey sampling from such a specific group is particularly externally valid (I also don’t know that any survey of humans will ever be externally valid to how we’d scale pain across other animals).
Thanks for your suggestion on how to present CEAs, we’ll think about this further.
Great.
I think that existing disagregated (non scaled) metrics already allow us to make reasonable guesses for what is cost effective to help animals.
A greater spread of pain intensities would update me (at the margin) towards prioritising very painful welfare issues happening over a short time (in particular, just before slaughter) over less painful ones affecting the whole life of animals
I also wonder whether there are cases where the time in less intense pain is decreased cost-effectively, but the time in more intense pain is increased. In such cases, one would have to rely on views about pain intensities to determine whether there is a reduction in pain. The Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI) estimates that cage-free layers experience less annoying and hurtful pain than ones in furnished cages, but that it is unclear whether they experience more or less disabling and excruciating pain. “The analysis primarily aimed to estimate the minimum welfare improvement associated with transitioning to cage-free housing”. So it could be that cage-free layers also experience less disabling and excruciating pain. However, if this remains unclear accounting for all welfare issues as accurately as possible, and one believes disabling and excruciating pain are much more intense than annoying and hurtful pain, it could be unclear whether cage-free egg campaigns decrease or increase pain.
I am not confident that we will ever gain lots of clarity on scaling, as there are lots of known unknowns and reasonable disagreements on questions up and downstream from how to scale things (sentience, range, etc.)
I am also not confident. However, I think there is high value of information in making at least one good attempt to quantify the intensity of excruciating pain.
Given the subjective nature of pain, I am not convinced a survey sampling from such a specific group is particularly externally valid (I also don’t know that any survey of humans will ever be externally valid to how we’d scale pain across other animals).
I agree comparisons across different pain intensities and species will remain very uncertain.
People could then change the pain intensity ratios, and sentience-adjusted welfare range to get their own estimates if they want.
Here is a comment from Bob Fischer with context about the uncertainty in the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges Rethink Priorities (RP) initially presented, and the similar ones in Bob’s related book which I understand inform your own estimates a lot.
Hi Vasco,
Thanks for your suggestion. I have limited capacity so apologies if I don’t answer promptly. Thanks for your suggestion on how to present CEAs, we’ll think about this further.
Note: I am certainly not an animal welfare expert, and there may be very different views on this that I am not covering.
I am not sure marginal research money should be spent on pain scaling questions, I am also not bullish on most pain scaling surveys.
I prefer having stronger research on the quantification of pain in different production systems (i.e., funding welfare science that aligns to existing proposed frameworks) and exploration of other research questions.
I believe this because:
I think that existing disagregated (non scaled) metrics already allow us to make reasonable guesses for what is cost effective to help animals.
I am not confident that we will ever gain lots of clarity on scaling, as there are lots of known unknowns and reasonable disagreements on questions up and downstream from how to scale things (sentience, range, etc.)
TTO surveys are super interesting and informative. As per the above I’d personally spend money on other research questions instead.
If someone were to go ahead with this. I’d be curious to try to predict what the learnings from such a survey could tangibly influence, as I expect they’d get tangled in a bunch of questions about validity anyways. Given the subjective nature of pain, I am not convinced a survey sampling from such a specific group is particularly externally valid (I also don’t know that any survey of humans will ever be externally valid to how we’d scale pain across other animals).
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Great.
A greater spread of pain intensities would update me (at the margin) towards prioritising very painful welfare issues happening over a short time (in particular, just before slaughter) over less painful ones affecting the whole life of animals
I also wonder whether there are cases where the time in less intense pain is decreased cost-effectively, but the time in more intense pain is increased. In such cases, one would have to rely on views about pain intensities to determine whether there is a reduction in pain. The Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI) estimates that cage-free layers experience less annoying and hurtful pain than ones in furnished cages, but that it is unclear whether they experience more or less disabling and excruciating pain. “The analysis primarily aimed to estimate the minimum welfare improvement associated with transitioning to cage-free housing”. So it could be that cage-free layers also experience less disabling and excruciating pain. However, if this remains unclear accounting for all welfare issues as accurately as possible, and one believes disabling and excruciating pain are much more intense than annoying and hurtful pain, it could be unclear whether cage-free egg campaigns decrease or increase pain.
I am also not confident. However, I think there is high value of information in making at least one good attempt to quantify the intensity of excruciating pain.
I agree comparisons across different pain intensities and species will remain very uncertain.
Here is a comment from Bob Fischer with context about the uncertainty in the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges Rethink Priorities (RP) initially presented, and the similar ones in Bob’s related book which I understand inform your own estimates a lot.