Thanks for writing this! I’m generally supportive of more critical review of evidence and analyses like this and would like to see more of it done, as well as more/better data collection, as you point to. I’m also glad you’re working on new shrimp stunners and better validating them.
Re cage-free vs caged systems
My sense is that it’s reasonable to infer that in the long-run, we don’t know whether mortality rates are higher in caged or cage-free systems, and that the differences in average mortality rates are “small”, based just on the graphs in this post and WFI’s meta-analysis to which this post refers.
I agree that it’s “an overstatement to say that there is “no differences in mortality” given the actual data” (in recent years, reading the graphs here).
I think it’s still reasonable to treat them as if there’s no expected difference in mortality rates in the long-run, but I also think it’s reasonable to disagree with that, and this is a potentially important and fairly subjective judgement call, so should be flagged pretty explicitly. It could also mask differences in causes of mortality and associated harms by system, like the kind you point out, which could be important.
Cynthia Schuck-Paim from Welfare Footprint cited more US and EU data here, which show a very small difference in average mortality rates (3.75 in cage-free vs 3.64 in caged), much smaller than the standard deviation in mortality rates (2.62 and 2.34). I don’t know what the “Standard” column in the table means, though. (Thanks to @mvolz for flagging WFI’s responses.)
On the other hand, this could still allow that mortality rates increase substantially for several years as farms transition, and that might be quite bad, both in potentially extremely painful deaths and in indicating higher prevalences of other causes of suffering. I think it’s worth being upfront about that, because there could be reasonable disagreement about whether it’s worth it for the benefits of cage-free.
I think one trouble here is that WFI has to make a large number of judgement calls, given the available evidence. I think they are pretty transparent about them, but there can be a lot to check.
Some questions I have are:
If mortality rates between the systems do roughly converge on average in the long-run, but start higher early in the transition to cage-free, how long does the ~convergence take in practice across geographies, including in the Global South, especially for our marginal cage-free work now?
WFI’s currently published analysis estimates generally less expected suffering in cage-free systems across pain intensity categories. At what point in the transition period to cage-free are these estimates based on, what mortality rates do they reflect, and how representative would they be of transitions across geographies? @cynthiaschuck@Wladimir J. Alonso
How much do increased egg costs and the resulting reduced egg demand mitigate the potential harms of cage-free transitions? Could the reduction in number outweigh any potential increases in harms on average per hen?
(May be answered by 2 or 3.) Are we, on net, increasing or decreasing excruciating pain with cage-free transitions in expectation?
Are we just counterfactually moving forward these potentially painful cage-free transitions, if and because industry would (be forced to shift) eventually anyway, and so reaping the benefits earlier? Would egg replacements and other alt proteins or a global catastrophe (e.g. from TAI) mean we don’t get to reap the benefits after mortality rates would have converged?
Does our other work focused on excruciating pain (e.g. humane chicken slaughter) make up for potentially more excruciating pain in cage-free systems?
How are we making tradeoffs between excruciating and disabling pain? How should we make them? (Personally, I’m averse to increasing excruciating pain overall in my portfolio, with high uncertainty about how much worse it is than disabling pain, and would probably have a part of my portfolio dedicated to preventing excruciating pain.)
Does nest deprivation really cause (so much) disabling pain? The supporting evidence I’ve seen seems somewhat confounded, and I would assign a lower probability to disabling pain than in WFI’s published analysis, but would guess there’s still a decent chance of it. (I expect WFI to have updated estimates in their upcoming book.)
“How much do increased egg costs and the resulting reduced egg demand mitigate the potential harms of cage-free transitions? Could the reduction in number outweigh any potential increases in harms on average per hen?” — this is an important point. I’ve always seen part of the point of win-lose welfare reforms (unlike win-wins like FWI’s work) as increasing the price, thereby decreasing demand and increasing the competitiveness of substitutes. In a similar vein, I wonder how much potential increased mortality increases cost and therefore demand and how the reduction in demand nets out against the increased number of chicken-days are needed per egg because of mortality
“How much do increased egg costs and the resulting reduced egg demand mitigate the potential harms of cage-free transitions? Could the reduction in number outweigh any potential increases in harms on average per hen?”
This seems a weird, potentially epistemiclally dangerous situation. If a cage free system is mostly better for chickens just because it is more expensive and drives down demand, then that’s a dishonest play on our end. If we’re going for better hen welfare, I don’t think this should be part of our calculation.
Lots of interesting ideas. This one I didn’t understand “Does our other work focused on excruciating pain (e.g. humane chicken slaughter) make up for potentially more excruciating pain in cage-free systems?”
— if you’re willing, could you please explain this like I’m 5?
Suppose cage-free increases excruciating pain compared to caged.
Is the total increase in excruciating pain across all (the sum total of) cage-free work from our community smaller than the total reduction in excruciating pain from all of our other work, e.g. CO2 stunning for chickens, other humane slaughter work, other welfare work, across species?
If yes, and if there are no other increases in excruciating pain (or they’re small enough), then we could still say our community is preventing more excruciating pain than it’s causing, overall. Our portfolio could still be robustly positive across different views on pain intensity tradeoffs. I think I’d be pretty satisfied with that, even if it is causing some excruciating pain (that is outweighed by reductions).
(Alternatively, we could try to compensate the specific animals we expect to cause more excruciating pain to, but that seems much harder on worldviews according to which excruciating pain matters way more than disabling pain.)
Oh right got it. Thank you. But if (I emphasize: IF) we thought cage-free was negative we could choose to not do that bit right? The sign of the overall portfolio doesn’t seem relevant to that decision
Yes, we could just remove it if we thought it was net negative overall.
Cage-free could turn out to be one of the best things we can do to reduce disabling pain, but slightly bad for excruciating pain, so that it’s just unclear whether it’s net good or bad under wide uncertainty about pain intensity tradeoffs. If it looks very good on views where disabling-excruciating pain tradeoffs are more modest and only somewhat bad and in the end outweighed on views with much more weight to excruciating pain, removing it from the portfolio could be a mistake.
Got it, makes sense. I’m not sure it makes sense to think of these pain levels as discrete categories, but I think your point holds even if we’re just using them to gesture at rough areas on a spectrum
Thanks for writing this! I’m generally supportive of more critical review of evidence and analyses like this and would like to see more of it done, as well as more/better data collection, as you point to. I’m also glad you’re working on new shrimp stunners and better validating them.
Re cage-free vs caged systems
My sense is that it’s reasonable to infer that in the long-run, we don’t know whether mortality rates are higher in caged or cage-free systems, and that the differences in average mortality rates are “small”, based just on the graphs in this post and WFI’s meta-analysis to which this post refers.
I agree that it’s “an overstatement to say that there is “no differences in mortality” given the actual data” (in recent years, reading the graphs here).
I think it’s still reasonable to treat them as if there’s no expected difference in mortality rates in the long-run, but I also think it’s reasonable to disagree with that, and this is a potentially important and fairly subjective judgement call, so should be flagged pretty explicitly. It could also mask differences in causes of mortality and associated harms by system, like the kind you point out, which could be important.
Cynthia Schuck-Paim from Welfare Footprint cited more US and EU data here, which show a very small difference in average mortality rates (3.75 in cage-free vs 3.64 in caged), much smaller than the standard deviation in mortality rates (2.62 and 2.34). I don’t know what the “Standard” column in the table means, though. (Thanks to @mvolz for flagging WFI’s responses.)
On the other hand, this could still allow that mortality rates increase substantially for several years as farms transition, and that might be quite bad, both in potentially extremely painful deaths and in indicating higher prevalences of other causes of suffering. I think it’s worth being upfront about that, because there could be reasonable disagreement about whether it’s worth it for the benefits of cage-free.
I think one trouble here is that WFI has to make a large number of judgement calls, given the available evidence. I think they are pretty transparent about them, but there can be a lot to check.
Some questions I have are:
If mortality rates between the systems do roughly converge on average in the long-run, but start higher early in the transition to cage-free, how long does the ~convergence take in practice across geographies, including in the Global South, especially for our marginal cage-free work now?
WFI’s currently published analysis estimates generally less expected suffering in cage-free systems across pain intensity categories. At what point in the transition period to cage-free are these estimates based on, what mortality rates do they reflect, and how representative would they be of transitions across geographies? @cynthiaschuck @Wladimir J. Alonso
How much do increased egg costs and the resulting reduced egg demand mitigate the potential harms of cage-free transitions? Could the reduction in number outweigh any potential increases in harms on average per hen?
(May be answered by 2 or 3.) Are we, on net, increasing or decreasing excruciating pain with cage-free transitions in expectation?
Are we just counterfactually moving forward these potentially painful cage-free transitions, if and because industry would (be forced to shift) eventually anyway, and so reaping the benefits earlier? Would egg replacements and other alt proteins or a global catastrophe (e.g. from TAI) mean we don’t get to reap the benefits after mortality rates would have converged?
Does our other work focused on excruciating pain (e.g. humane chicken slaughter) make up for potentially more excruciating pain in cage-free systems?
How are we making tradeoffs between excruciating and disabling pain? How should we make them? (Personally, I’m averse to increasing excruciating pain overall in my portfolio, with high uncertainty about how much worse it is than disabling pain, and would probably have a part of my portfolio dedicated to preventing excruciating pain.)
Does nest deprivation really cause (so much) disabling pain? The supporting evidence I’ve seen seems somewhat confounded, and I would assign a lower probability to disabling pain than in WFI’s published analysis, but would guess there’s still a decent chance of it. (I expect WFI to have updated estimates in their upcoming book.)
“How much do increased egg costs and the resulting reduced egg demand mitigate the potential harms of cage-free transitions? Could the reduction in number outweigh any potential increases in harms on average per hen?” — this is an important point. I’ve always seen part of the point of win-lose welfare reforms (unlike win-wins like FWI’s work) as increasing the price, thereby decreasing demand and increasing the competitiveness of substitutes. In a similar vein, I wonder how much potential increased mortality increases cost and therefore demand and how the reduction in demand nets out against the increased number of chicken-days are needed per egg because of mortality
“How much do increased egg costs and the resulting reduced egg demand mitigate the potential harms of cage-free transitions? Could the reduction in number outweigh any potential increases in harms on average per hen?”
This seems a weird, potentially epistemiclally dangerous situation. If a cage free system is mostly better for chickens just because it is more expensive and drives down demand, then that’s a dishonest play on our end. If we’re going for better hen welfare, I don’t think this should be part of our calculation.
Lots of interesting ideas. This one I didn’t understand “Does our other work focused on excruciating pain (e.g. humane chicken slaughter) make up for potentially more excruciating pain in cage-free systems?” — if you’re willing, could you please explain this like I’m 5?
Suppose cage-free increases excruciating pain compared to caged.
Is the total increase in excruciating pain across all (the sum total of) cage-free work from our community smaller than the total reduction in excruciating pain from all of our other work, e.g. CO2 stunning for chickens, other humane slaughter work, other welfare work, across species?
If yes, and if there are no other increases in excruciating pain (or they’re small enough), then we could still say our community is preventing more excruciating pain than it’s causing, overall. Our portfolio could still be robustly positive across different views on pain intensity tradeoffs. I think I’d be pretty satisfied with that, even if it is causing some excruciating pain (that is outweighed by reductions).
(Alternatively, we could try to compensate the specific animals we expect to cause more excruciating pain to, but that seems much harder on worldviews according to which excruciating pain matters way more than disabling pain.)
Oh right got it. Thank you. But if (I emphasize: IF) we thought cage-free was negative we could choose to not do that bit right? The sign of the overall portfolio doesn’t seem relevant to that decision
Yes, we could just remove it if we thought it was net negative overall.
Cage-free could turn out to be one of the best things we can do to reduce disabling pain, but slightly bad for excruciating pain, so that it’s just unclear whether it’s net good or bad under wide uncertainty about pain intensity tradeoffs. If it looks very good on views where disabling-excruciating pain tradeoffs are more modest and only somewhat bad and in the end outweighed on views with much more weight to excruciating pain, removing it from the portfolio could be a mistake.
See also my related post Hedging against deep and moral uncertainty.
Got it, makes sense. I’m not sure it makes sense to think of these pain levels as discrete categories, but I think your point holds even if we’re just using them to gesture at rough areas on a spectrum