Thanks for writing this post! Thanks too for sharing it in advance, and sorry I didn’t have time to review it. For the same reason, I won’t have time now to go into the detail that I’d love to on your specific claims. (It’s great to see such a vibrant discussion in the comments! I’d love to see more critical discussion of the evidence like this in the EA animal welfare space.) So I just wanted to share three high-level reflections.
First, I agree with you on the need for more evidence collection on the animal welfare outcomes of popular interventions. We’ve funded >$20M of such evidence collection work (e.g. the Welfare Footprint Institute, Rethink Priority’s review of evidence across multiple areas, the shrimp slaughter study you cite, a Guelph study on broiler genetics welfare outcomes, and a dozen other studies and meta-analyses). We’ve also done a ton of internal analysis on this, e.g. we have a complicated model of estimated rates of factory farm meat displaced by alt protein in various scenarios. And yet we need to do a lot more! I’m really excited that the likely inflow of more animal welfare funding will enable a lot more high-quality evidence generation. And I completely agree we should prioritize it.
Second, I think we need to be realistic about how much certainty that evidence collection will create—and how quickly. I think your cage-free example is a good one. There have been 50+ studies and large-scale data collection efforts on relative mortality in caged vs. cage-free housing systems and we still don’t have a clear answer on it. And yet mortality is just one of 20+ metrics we could look to as partial proxies for what we really care about: “what is the relative overall welfare of caged vs. cage-free birds?” I think we should also fund studies and commercial data collection on all those other metrics (or at least the ones current tech allows us to measure). But that will take many years and, even then, people will reasonably debate the relevant importance of each of those 20+ metrics to the welfare of birds.
(I should note that I really admire the work you’re doing to try to significantly accelerate the pace of this kind of research, starting with shrimp slaughter. I think I agree with you on everything you think should be funded to accelerate it further, and am confident we will fund that full agenda—please tell me if there’s something we’re not covering. And I hope that advances in AI can accelerate the evaluation and syntheses of existing evidence too.)
Third, I think we need to continue to act to alleviate suffering even in the face of significant uncertainty. I’m jealous of global health direct service provision (e.g. anti-malarial bednets, cash payments) where I think you can have perhaps the closest to total certainty of positive impact of any areas. But I think for basically any advocacy intervention in EA (whether in AI safety, bio, farm animal welfare, or even global aid advocacy) you have to accept significant uncertainty not just about the immediate impacts but also about second, third, etc. order effects. That’s not an excuse for ignoring the uncertainty. But I think when a cluster of evidence points to a high likelihood that something is robustly net positive—as I believe it does for cage-free (sorry I don’t have time to go into all the specifics here!) -- than we should move forward on it. I think the opportunity costs of waiting for a higher confidence level of evidence are too high.
Thanks again for writing this! One of the things I love most about EA is the application of critical thinking and evidence to disrupt commonly accepted wisdom, and I think this is a good example of this. I disagree on some of the specifics—wish I had the time to explain more—but I’m really glad you wrote and published this.
A few comments here coming from a global health background.
“I think your cage-free example is a good one. There have been 50+ studies and large-scale data collection efforts on relative mortality in caged vs. cage-free housing systems and we still don’t have a clear answer on it.
If there had been 50 studies which compared mortality between two global health intervention and overall results was unequivocal, we would probably conclude that there was no major difference between the two, rather than say we didn’t have a clear answer and needed more research. I would imagine this situation is more nuanced but I would like to understand that nuance.
Mortality in hens seems pretty easy and likely inexpensive to measure? All the hens are in a barn in one place with a 3 month lifespan. Compared to mortality in humans this measurement situation seems very easy. I would imagine farmers will be collecting this data for profitability reasons as well. I’m naive here so might be missing something important.
“But I think when a cluster of evidence points to a high likelihood that something is robustly net positive—as I believe it does for cage-free (sorry I don’t have time to go into all the specifics here!) -- than we should move forward on it.”
The specifics are the crux for me. Before this post I thought it was super obvious that cage free was way better and it was just a magnitude-of-good question. After this post, I would appreciate a post on the forum actually laying out why there is a “high likelihood of cage free bring robustly net positive”. This is a post with specifics, so I think it’s important to refute specifics as well as outline general principles. You’re right there are some good comments on these specifics though, thanks especially @Vasco Grilo🔸.
I think it would be worth it if someone in your kind of position (if not you) did take the time to disagree on the specifics here.
Thanks Nick. I’m really glad to see that Cynthia Shuck of the Welfare Footprint Project has just commented around the specifics on cage-free, so I’ll defer to her on that. I’ll just add a few quick thoughts on your comments here.
“If there had been 50 studies which compared mortality between two global health intervention and overall results was unequivocal, we would probably conclude that there was no major difference between the two … Mortality in hens seems pretty easy and likely inexpensive to measure.”
To clarify: the results are not unequivocal. Different studies point to very different results. This is both due to study design, but also due to lots of variation in actual conditions (lab vs on-farm, small farms vs. big farms, experienced farmers vs. inexperienced, healthy pullets vs. unhealthy, etc).
Mortality on-farm is indeed easy and cheap to measure, but very few farmers will allow researchers on-farm to measure this or publicly share their own results. So a lot of these studies end up being in unrepresentative lab conditions or on individual farms that may not be representative.
That said, I think the on-farm data that Cynthia cites (the “database from a breeder for countries around the world”) is probably the best data we have. And it does indeed conclude there isn’t a major difference between the two systems.
“Before this post I thought it was super obvious that cage free was way better and it was just a magnitude-of-good question. After this post, I would appreciate a post on the forum actually laying out why there is a “high likelihood of cage free bring robustly net positive”.”
I don’t think this post should be a major update for you on whether cage-free is better than caged. It’s just not clear that mortality is that good a proxy for total welfare. E.g. everyone agrees that mortality is highest in free-range and pasture-based farming, but few conclude from that that these systems are worse for total welfare than intensive confinement.
Given how hard it is to measure animals’ actual subjective wellbeing, I think we should look to lots of different sources of evidence and reasoning, not just the few indicators we can objectively measure. My personal view that cage-free is better is probably based on something like: ~40% priors that pretty much all animals like to move around and have more space, ~30% preference studies showing that hens really value the things they can only access in cage-free (nesting boxes, perches, dustbathing, etc), ~10% my sense that pretty much all independent animal welfare scientists agree it’s better, ~10% my experience with rescued battery cage hens who have a very strong preference to stay out of cages, ~10% that mortality is pretty much the only indicator suggesting it could be worse and actually that data is very messy. (TBC: not an official CG view, and it’s possible I’d change those numbers a bunch on reflection. I share them just to suggest that resolving the mortality debate wouldn’t be transformative for my views.)
~30% preference studies showing that hens really value the things they can only access in cage-free (nesting boxes, perches, dustbathing, etc)
The above is an argument against barren battery cages, but not against all types of cages? All caged chickens in the European Union (EU) must have “a nest”, “litter such that pecking and scratching are possible”, and “appropriate perches of at least 15 cm”. Relatedly, I estimate moving hens from battery to furnished cages increases the welfare of chickens 70.6 % as much as moving hens from battery cages to cage-free aviaries.
“If there had been 50 studies which compared mortality between two global health intervention and overall results was unequivocal, we would probably conclude that there was no major difference between the two, rather than say we didn’t have a clear answer and needed more research.”—True, but the goal of cage-free isn’t reducing mortality, it’s reducing suffering. Mortality is one possible (but deeply confounded) indicator of suffering we can look at. If, when doing so, we conclude that there is no major difference between mortality in caged and cage-free systems, this has little to no bearing on whether cage-free reduces suffering.
First I wasn’t making any big claims about what’s most important, I’m just responding to Lewis’s comment there which confused me a bit, and suggesting that perhaps more research in that in particular might not be so useful.
On your comment I would though expect mortality to not be a direct, ideal measure of suffering but still be important as one of the few objective measures we have. If chickens are dying early that could indicate health issues which might also cause suffering Some of the same things that would kill a chicken would be heavily correlated with what makes them suffer I imagine?
I agree it’s not going to be the most important metric but it is objective at least.
A quick comment jumping off the $>20M of evidence collection work...
I’ve always been curious how much money has been spent to-date on global health research. If we make an (unrealistic) assumption that we could repeat GiveWell for animals, then we’d also have to fund the research that came before. Getting some kind of number, even an ultra-lower bound, would help anchor discussions on evidence-generation in animal welfare.
A starting point could be working backwards from malaria nets. What are the studies that are cited in GiveWell’s spreadsheet model for malaria nets? How much did each of those studies cost? How much did it cost to train the researchers who conducted those studies? What’s the bottom-line number we get from adding up all this up?
Would love to hear if this exists / see someone research it
Well, back of the envelope, unvetted: global health medical R&D is $6B annually (so that’s, every year, 300x the $20M figure all-time figure 😬). But also … is cage vs. cage-free just a medical issue, or is it virtually everything salient about the environment? And would that make it more comparable to medical + economic + psychology + … where would we stop?
Neglectedness, for these sentient beings that do not have access to democratic, economic, or substantial portions of charitable resources is… high.
P.S. I skimmed your profile and was heartened to read this post. I shifted more fully into animal welfare work a few years ago now and have continually been drawn in by learning things like just how neglected the cause area is and hence how much potential for more impact exists, but also how much investment is warranted.
There have been 50+ studies and large-scale data collection efforts on relative mortality in caged vs. cage-free housing systems and we still don’t have a clear answer on it.
Do you think this is a case of too many studies with small amounts of funding and limited researcher ability/willingness to follow up, and limitations to doing meta-analysis on these? Do you think that larger-scale, more systematic, multi-year larger team collaborative studies and projects could be more effective at generating reliable evidence?
But I think when a cluster of evidence points to a high likelihood that something is robustly net positive—as I believe it does for cage-free (sorry I don’t have time to go into all the specifics here!).
I think cage-free egg campaigns may easily harm soil ants and termites more than they benefit chickens.
Thanks again for writing this! One of the things I love most about EA is the application of critical thinking and evidence to disrupt commonly accepted wisdom, and I think this is a good example of this.
Thanks for writing this post! Thanks too for sharing it in advance, and sorry I didn’t have time to review it. For the same reason, I won’t have time now to go into the detail that I’d love to on your specific claims. (It’s great to see such a vibrant discussion in the comments! I’d love to see more critical discussion of the evidence like this in the EA animal welfare space.) So I just wanted to share three high-level reflections.
First, I agree with you on the need for more evidence collection on the animal welfare outcomes of popular interventions. We’ve funded >$20M of such evidence collection work (e.g. the Welfare Footprint Institute, Rethink Priority’s review of evidence across multiple areas, the shrimp slaughter study you cite, a Guelph study on broiler genetics welfare outcomes, and a dozen other studies and meta-analyses). We’ve also done a ton of internal analysis on this, e.g. we have a complicated model of estimated rates of factory farm meat displaced by alt protein in various scenarios. And yet we need to do a lot more! I’m really excited that the likely inflow of more animal welfare funding will enable a lot more high-quality evidence generation. And I completely agree we should prioritize it.
Second, I think we need to be realistic about how much certainty that evidence collection will create—and how quickly. I think your cage-free example is a good one. There have been 50+ studies and large-scale data collection efforts on relative mortality in caged vs. cage-free housing systems and we still don’t have a clear answer on it. And yet mortality is just one of 20+ metrics we could look to as partial proxies for what we really care about: “what is the relative overall welfare of caged vs. cage-free birds?” I think we should also fund studies and commercial data collection on all those other metrics (or at least the ones current tech allows us to measure). But that will take many years and, even then, people will reasonably debate the relevant importance of each of those 20+ metrics to the welfare of birds.
(I should note that I really admire the work you’re doing to try to significantly accelerate the pace of this kind of research, starting with shrimp slaughter. I think I agree with you on everything you think should be funded to accelerate it further, and am confident we will fund that full agenda—please tell me if there’s something we’re not covering. And I hope that advances in AI can accelerate the evaluation and syntheses of existing evidence too.)
Third, I think we need to continue to act to alleviate suffering even in the face of significant uncertainty. I’m jealous of global health direct service provision (e.g. anti-malarial bednets, cash payments) where I think you can have perhaps the closest to total certainty of positive impact of any areas. But I think for basically any advocacy intervention in EA (whether in AI safety, bio, farm animal welfare, or even global aid advocacy) you have to accept significant uncertainty not just about the immediate impacts but also about second, third, etc. order effects. That’s not an excuse for ignoring the uncertainty. But I think when a cluster of evidence points to a high likelihood that something is robustly net positive—as I believe it does for cage-free (sorry I don’t have time to go into all the specifics here!) -- than we should move forward on it. I think the opportunity costs of waiting for a higher confidence level of evidence are too high.
Thanks again for writing this! One of the things I love most about EA is the application of critical thinking and evidence to disrupt commonly accepted wisdom, and I think this is a good example of this. I disagree on some of the specifics—wish I had the time to explain more—but I’m really glad you wrote and published this.
A few comments here coming from a global health background.
“I think your cage-free example is a good one. There have been 50+ studies and large-scale data collection efforts on relative mortality in caged vs. cage-free housing systems and we still don’t have a clear answer on it.
If there had been 50 studies which compared mortality between two global health intervention and overall results was unequivocal, we would probably conclude that there was no major difference between the two, rather than say we didn’t have a clear answer and needed more research. I would imagine this situation is more nuanced but I would like to understand that nuance.
Mortality in hens seems pretty easy and likely inexpensive to measure? All the hens are in a barn in one place with a 3 month lifespan. Compared to mortality in humans this measurement situation seems very easy. I would imagine farmers will be collecting this data for profitability reasons as well. I’m naive here so might be missing something important.
“But I think when a cluster of evidence points to a high likelihood that something is robustly net positive—as I believe it does for cage-free (sorry I don’t have time to go into all the specifics here!) -- than we should move forward on it.”
The specifics are the crux for me. Before this post I thought it was super obvious that cage free was way better and it was just a magnitude-of-good question. After this post, I would appreciate a post on the forum actually laying out why there is a “high likelihood of cage free bring robustly net positive”. This is a post with specifics, so I think it’s important to refute specifics as well as outline general principles. You’re right there are some good comments on these specifics though, thanks especially @Vasco Grilo🔸.
I think it would be worth it if someone in your kind of position (if not you) did take the time to disagree on the specifics here.
Thanks Nick. I’m really glad to see that Cynthia Shuck of the Welfare Footprint Project has just commented around the specifics on cage-free, so I’ll defer to her on that. I’ll just add a few quick thoughts on your comments here.
“If there had been 50 studies which compared mortality between two global health intervention and overall results was unequivocal, we would probably conclude that there was no major difference between the two … Mortality in hens seems pretty easy and likely inexpensive to measure.”
To clarify: the results are not unequivocal. Different studies point to very different results. This is both due to study design, but also due to lots of variation in actual conditions (lab vs on-farm, small farms vs. big farms, experienced farmers vs. inexperienced, healthy pullets vs. unhealthy, etc).
Mortality on-farm is indeed easy and cheap to measure, but very few farmers will allow researchers on-farm to measure this or publicly share their own results. So a lot of these studies end up being in unrepresentative lab conditions or on individual farms that may not be representative.
That said, I think the on-farm data that Cynthia cites (the “database from a breeder for countries around the world”) is probably the best data we have. And it does indeed conclude there isn’t a major difference between the two systems.
“Before this post I thought it was super obvious that cage free was way better and it was just a magnitude-of-good question. After this post, I would appreciate a post on the forum actually laying out why there is a “high likelihood of cage free bring robustly net positive”.”
I don’t think this post should be a major update for you on whether cage-free is better than caged. It’s just not clear that mortality is that good a proxy for total welfare. E.g. everyone agrees that mortality is highest in free-range and pasture-based farming, but few conclude from that that these systems are worse for total welfare than intensive confinement.
Given how hard it is to measure animals’ actual subjective wellbeing, I think we should look to lots of different sources of evidence and reasoning, not just the few indicators we can objectively measure. My personal view that cage-free is better is probably based on something like: ~40% priors that pretty much all animals like to move around and have more space, ~30% preference studies showing that hens really value the things they can only access in cage-free (nesting boxes, perches, dustbathing, etc), ~10% my sense that pretty much all independent animal welfare scientists agree it’s better, ~10% my experience with rescued battery cage hens who have a very strong preference to stay out of cages, ~10% that mortality is pretty much the only indicator suggesting it could be worse and actually that data is very messy. (TBC: not an official CG view, and it’s possible I’d change those numbers a bunch on reflection. I share them just to suggest that resolving the mortality debate wouldn’t be transformative for my views.)
The above is an argument against barren battery cages, but not against all types of cages? All caged chickens in the European Union (EU) must have “a nest”, “litter such that pecking and scratching are possible”, and “appropriate perches of at least 15 cm”. Relatedly, I estimate moving hens from battery to furnished cages increases the welfare of chickens 70.6 % as much as moving hens from battery cages to cage-free aviaries.
“If there had been 50 studies which compared mortality between two global health intervention and overall results was unequivocal, we would probably conclude that there was no major difference between the two, rather than say we didn’t have a clear answer and needed more research.”—True, but the goal of cage-free isn’t reducing mortality, it’s reducing suffering. Mortality is one possible (but deeply confounded) indicator of suffering we can look at. If, when doing so, we conclude that there is no major difference between mortality in caged and cage-free systems, this has little to no bearing on whether cage-free reduces suffering.
First I wasn’t making any big claims about what’s most important, I’m just responding to Lewis’s comment there which confused me a bit, and suggesting that perhaps more research in that in particular might not be so useful.
On your comment I would though expect mortality to not be a direct, ideal measure of suffering but still be important as one of the few objective measures we have. If chickens are dying early that could indicate health issues which might also cause suffering Some of the same things that would kill a chicken would be heavily correlated with what makes them suffer I imagine?
I agree it’s not going to be the most important metric but it is objective at least.
A quick comment jumping off the $>20M of evidence collection work...
I’ve always been curious how much money has been spent to-date on global health research. If we make an (unrealistic) assumption that we could repeat GiveWell for animals, then we’d also have to fund the research that came before. Getting some kind of number, even an ultra-lower bound, would help anchor discussions on evidence-generation in animal welfare.
A starting point could be working backwards from malaria nets. What are the studies that are cited in GiveWell’s spreadsheet model for malaria nets? How much did each of those studies cost? How much did it cost to train the researchers who conducted those studies? What’s the bottom-line number we get from adding up all this up?
Would love to hear if this exists / see someone research it
Well, back of the envelope, unvetted: global health medical R&D is $6B annually (so that’s, every year, 300x the $20M figure all-time figure 😬). But also … is cage vs. cage-free just a medical issue, or is it virtually everything salient about the environment? And would that make it more comparable to medical + economic + psychology + … where would we stop?
Neglectedness, for these sentient beings that do not have access to democratic, economic, or substantial portions of charitable resources is… high.
P.S. I skimmed your profile and was heartened to read this post. I shifted more fully into animal welfare work a few years ago now and have continually been drawn in by learning things like just how neglected the cause area is and hence how much potential for more impact exists, but also how much investment is warranted.
Do you think this is a case of too many studies with small amounts of funding and limited researcher ability/willingness to follow up, and limitations to doing meta-analysis on these? Do you think that larger-scale, more systematic, multi-year larger team collaborative studies and projects could be more effective at generating reliable evidence?
Hi Lewis.
I think cage-free egg campaigns may easily harm soil ants and termites more than they benefit chickens.
I very much agree.