I don’t think this assumption Vasco made is reasonable, and it substantially overestimates the pleasure conventional broilers are likely to experience:
Broilers being awake is as good as hurtful pain is bad. This means being awake with hurtful pain is neutral, thus accounting for positive experiences.
There are a few issues with this:
While in disabling pain, they shouldn’t be experiencing any pleasure, by WFP’s definition, so you should subtract the time spent in disabling pain.
While suffering from behavioural deprivation, they probably shouldn’t experience any significant pleasure, either, so you should subtract that time, too. They’re suffering from behavioural deprivation because they’re prevented from being active. They probably don’t find just sitting around very pleasurable, although it could be mildly pleasurable (annoying pain intensity). (WFP’s estimates assume they don’t suffer from behavioural deprivation while eating.)
It would be surprising if all of their leftover time was pleasurable of intensity similar to hurtful pain, rather than just annoying pain. Per day on average, they spend around 3.2 hours eating, 0.25 to 3 hours foraging/exploring (in the 3rd week of life and after, but more in the first two weeks) and at most 0.25 hours dustbathing, based on WFP’s estimates. Some of this could be pleasurable of intensity similar to hurtful pain and generously all of it could be. They don’t generally have enough space to play, and even if they did, they’d probably do it during their foraging hours already accounted for. The rest of the time is presumably basically inactive, e.g. resting, which could be pleasurable, but it seems unlikely to have intensity (much) greater than annoying pain, so should probably roughly match annoying pain. This inactive time could also easily be unpleasant instead, too, because of the high stocking densities (from social stress, heat, feces, air quality).
I’d expect that Vasco overestimated the amount of pleasure they experience at least 2 times with this assumption. We get at least around 2x too much just from point 3, assuming the inactive hours aren’t very pleasurable.
Note that some pains WFP estimated overlap in time, so you don’t want to double or triple subtract times spent in pain, and this makes actually calculating the time left for pleasure trickier. Even WFP’s pain estimates attributed to lameness is made up of 3 types of pains that may overlap in time for the most severe cases of lameness: the direct pain of the condition in the legs, hunger from not eating enough because it’s painful to get food, and thirst for the same reason. Also, pains are probably subadditive, but WFP treated them as additive, so may have overestimated pain this way.
The math is easier for egg-laying hens in conventional cages because the only particularly pleasurable activities they might engage in are eating, around 2-4 hours/day. They don’t get to dustbathe, forage, explore, walk around or even stretch their wings in conventional cages. Even in furnished cages, they quickly run out of litter to forage.
Thanks for the input Michael—your estimates seem reasonable / defensible to me. On the other hand, it also seems reasonable / defensible to argue that time spent just sitting around is fairly highly pleasurable for chickens (relative to their maximum): many humans prefer doing nothing to active foraging (NB I’m being serious), and chickens (like all prey) are evolved to be wary of predators and at risk of dying at any moment. My sense is that the default welfare state for all living beings is nontrivially positive (we see this in human survey data, and it makes sense evolutionarily), so a chicken that is both alive and not at risk of being eaten or starving might be in very good shape in chicken terms. I simply don’t know, which leads to...
However the broader point, which all three of us seem to agree on, is that all of these estimates are wildly uncertain and should be taken with many large grains of salt and (imo) not used to draw any firm conclusions about what should happen (except that we can agree less pain is better than more pain). Reasonable people can and do disagree about what it’s like to be a chicken in captivity.
I appreciate you pointing out these possibilities. You might indeed be right, and I think it’s a position new evidence could end up supporting. However, I don’t think you or really anyone would be warranted in believing the average broiler welfare overall to be positive in expectation if they were well-informed about their conditions and the current state of evidence. Maybe we should just withhold judgement. However, using Welfare Footprint Project’s analysis, and being, like them, careful in the attribution of welfare states and more careful the more intense, there would be more expected pain than expected pleasure.
I do think it’s plausible the default (e.g. most common) welfare state for wild red jungle fowls, i.e. the chicken’s wild progenitor and counterpart, is positive, or at least that positive is more common than negative. I might even lean somewhat towards that, but it depends on how common the threat of predators is and how long-lasting the negative effects of predator exposure are. But this and comparisons to humans (which ones?) are quite weak priors from which to conclude broilers frequently experience pleasure of intensity similar to hurtful pain just from sitting/resting, and there are multiple reasons to be skeptical or even expect negative welfare instead. Conventionally farmed chickens are in very unnatural, monotonous and limiting environments, often have painful and limiting health conditions and face multiple chronic stressors their wild counterparts don’t face. Their environments are especially not conducive to high baseline moods or much good to attend to when they’re not active, and they also contain substantial bad.[1]
On comparisons to wild animals, as foragers, I don’t imagine red jungle fowls would often be at risk of starvation in the wild, and in fact a decent share of broilers (or hours of broiler life) suffer from hunger and thirst, according to WFP: broiler breeders in particular are chronically hungry and food-deprived, and other severely lame broilers also seem to suffer significantly from hunger. I agree that the absence of predators should make a difference (although I’m very uncertain about how much). A condition-informed survey of expert opinion found the welfare of conventional broilers below the cutoff for “acceptable welfare” (although this doesn’t imply net negative in particular) and far below the welfare for nature, which was the second highest rated after only backyard flocks. Ratings of nature had relatively high variance, with 3 of the 27 experts even putting it below the acceptability cutoff.
Also, if sitting around is pleasurable at hurtful intensity, and disabling pain is only 10x as intense as hurtful pain, things like fresh large bone breaks (e.g. leg in humans, keel in chickens), the pain of birth without painkillers or anaesthesia, panic attacks, the part of a tattoo experience where it felt “Like someone slicing into my leg with a hot, sharp live wire” (assuming they are disabling and not excruciating) would only be about 10x as bad as just sitting around is good per minute. I personally find that counterintuitive. Maybe you don’t, but it’s worth pointing out what the conjunction of views you’re defending implies.
Maybe just sitting is comfortable, but it could be uncomfortable due to poor litter quality (e.g. ammonia buildup) and contact burns/dermatitis, leg pain or heat (although I think the most intense of these are largely already accounted for by WFP). Maybe watching other chickens is interesting, but it could be stressful, given high stocking densities and social dominance. Maybe their inactive non-highly pained moods are based on some kind of mean of their active and pained welfares, like if you have fun often and don’t suffer often, you’ll still be in a good mood when you’re not having fun, and if you’re in pain often, but don’t have much fun, you’ll be in a bad mood even when you’re not in much pain.
Broilers being awake is as good as hurtful pain is bad. This means being awake with hurtful pain is neutral, thus accounting for positive experiences.
I agree there are a few issues with this. However (I have added what follows in a footnote):
This [the above] assumption affects the (signed) intensity of the mean experience of broilers, but not the improvement in their welfare when they go from a conventional to a reformed scenario, because the lifespan of broilers and value of them being alive is the same in both scenarios. As a consequence, the assumption does not impact the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for broiler welfare.
If the WFP is capturing most of the painful experiences (weighted by intensity), and pleasurable experiences are negligible, then my assumption will not influence the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns. It can potentially change whether chickens have good or bad lives, and therefore impact whether consuming less animals is good/bad, but I think this is pretty unclear anyway for other reasons (e.g. effects on wild animals).
I’d expect that Vasco overestimated the amount of pleasure they experience at least 2 times with this assumption. We get at least around 2x too much just from point 3, assuming the inactive hours aren’t very pleasurable.
If I assume all the time not classified by the WFP is neutral, I get the lives of broilers in a conventional and reformed scenario are, per unit time, 3.08 and 1.07 times as bad as human lives are good. So the lives of broilers in a conventional and reformed scenario would become worse by a factor of 1.19 (= 3.08/2.58) and 1.86 (= 1.07/0.574).
I don’t think this assumption Vasco made is reasonable, and it substantially overestimates the pleasure conventional broilers are likely to experience:
There are a few issues with this:
While in disabling pain, they shouldn’t be experiencing any pleasure, by WFP’s definition, so you should subtract the time spent in disabling pain.
While suffering from behavioural deprivation, they probably shouldn’t experience any significant pleasure, either, so you should subtract that time, too. They’re suffering from behavioural deprivation because they’re prevented from being active. They probably don’t find just sitting around very pleasurable, although it could be mildly pleasurable (annoying pain intensity). (WFP’s estimates assume they don’t suffer from behavioural deprivation while eating.)
It would be surprising if all of their leftover time was pleasurable of intensity similar to hurtful pain, rather than just annoying pain. Per day on average, they spend around 3.2 hours eating, 0.25 to 3 hours foraging/exploring (in the 3rd week of life and after, but more in the first two weeks) and at most 0.25 hours dustbathing, based on WFP’s estimates. Some of this could be pleasurable of intensity similar to hurtful pain and generously all of it could be. They don’t generally have enough space to play, and even if they did, they’d probably do it during their foraging hours already accounted for. The rest of the time is presumably basically inactive, e.g. resting, which could be pleasurable, but it seems unlikely to have intensity (much) greater than annoying pain, so should probably roughly match annoying pain. This inactive time could also easily be unpleasant instead, too, because of the high stocking densities (from social stress, heat, feces, air quality).
I’d expect that Vasco overestimated the amount of pleasure they experience at least 2 times with this assumption. We get at least around 2x too much just from point 3, assuming the inactive hours aren’t very pleasurable.
Note that some pains WFP estimated overlap in time, so you don’t want to double or triple subtract times spent in pain, and this makes actually calculating the time left for pleasure trickier. Even WFP’s pain estimates attributed to lameness is made up of 3 types of pains that may overlap in time for the most severe cases of lameness: the direct pain of the condition in the legs, hunger from not eating enough because it’s painful to get food, and thirst for the same reason. Also, pains are probably subadditive, but WFP treated them as additive, so may have overestimated pain this way.
The math is easier for egg-laying hens in conventional cages because the only particularly pleasurable activities they might engage in are eating, around 2-4 hours/day. They don’t get to dustbathe, forage, explore, walk around or even stretch their wings in conventional cages. Even in furnished cages, they quickly run out of litter to forage.
Thanks for the input Michael—your estimates seem reasonable / defensible to me. On the other hand, it also seems reasonable / defensible to argue that time spent just sitting around is fairly highly pleasurable for chickens (relative to their maximum): many humans prefer doing nothing to active foraging (NB I’m being serious), and chickens (like all prey) are evolved to be wary of predators and at risk of dying at any moment. My sense is that the default welfare state for all living beings is nontrivially positive (we see this in human survey data, and it makes sense evolutionarily), so a chicken that is both alive and not at risk of being eaten or starving might be in very good shape in chicken terms. I simply don’t know, which leads to...
However the broader point, which all three of us seem to agree on, is that all of these estimates are wildly uncertain and should be taken with many large grains of salt and (imo) not used to draw any firm conclusions about what should happen (except that we can agree less pain is better than more pain). Reasonable people can and do disagree about what it’s like to be a chicken in captivity.
I appreciate you pointing out these possibilities. You might indeed be right, and I think it’s a position new evidence could end up supporting. However, I don’t think you or really anyone would be warranted in believing the average broiler welfare overall to be positive in expectation if they were well-informed about their conditions and the current state of evidence. Maybe we should just withhold judgement. However, using Welfare Footprint Project’s analysis, and being, like them, careful in the attribution of welfare states and more careful the more intense, there would be more expected pain than expected pleasure.
I do think it’s plausible the default (e.g. most common) welfare state for wild red jungle fowls, i.e. the chicken’s wild progenitor and counterpart, is positive, or at least that positive is more common than negative. I might even lean somewhat towards that, but it depends on how common the threat of predators is and how long-lasting the negative effects of predator exposure are. But this and comparisons to humans (which ones?) are quite weak priors from which to conclude broilers frequently experience pleasure of intensity similar to hurtful pain just from sitting/resting, and there are multiple reasons to be skeptical or even expect negative welfare instead. Conventionally farmed chickens are in very unnatural, monotonous and limiting environments, often have painful and limiting health conditions and face multiple chronic stressors their wild counterparts don’t face. Their environments are especially not conducive to high baseline moods or much good to attend to when they’re not active, and they also contain substantial bad.[1]
On comparisons to wild animals, as foragers, I don’t imagine red jungle fowls would often be at risk of starvation in the wild, and in fact a decent share of broilers (or hours of broiler life) suffer from hunger and thirst, according to WFP: broiler breeders in particular are chronically hungry and food-deprived, and other severely lame broilers also seem to suffer significantly from hunger. I agree that the absence of predators should make a difference (although I’m very uncertain about how much). A condition-informed survey of expert opinion found the welfare of conventional broilers below the cutoff for “acceptable welfare” (although this doesn’t imply net negative in particular) and far below the welfare for nature, which was the second highest rated after only backyard flocks. Ratings of nature had relatively high variance, with 3 of the 27 experts even putting it below the acceptability cutoff.
Also, if sitting around is pleasurable at hurtful intensity, and disabling pain is only 10x as intense as hurtful pain, things like fresh large bone breaks (e.g. leg in humans, keel in chickens), the pain of birth without painkillers or anaesthesia, panic attacks, the part of a tattoo experience where it felt “Like someone slicing into my leg with a hot, sharp live wire” (assuming they are disabling and not excruciating) would only be about 10x as bad as just sitting around is good per minute. I personally find that counterintuitive. Maybe you don’t, but it’s worth pointing out what the conjunction of views you’re defending implies.
Maybe just sitting is comfortable, but it could be uncomfortable due to poor litter quality (e.g. ammonia buildup) and contact burns/dermatitis, leg pain or heat (although I think the most intense of these are largely already accounted for by WFP). Maybe watching other chickens is interesting, but it could be stressful, given high stocking densities and social dominance. Maybe their inactive non-highly pained moods are based on some kind of mean of their active and pained welfares, like if you have fun often and don’t suffer often, you’ll still be in a good mood when you’re not having fun, and if you’re in pain often, but don’t have much fun, you’ll be in a bad mood even when you’re not in much pain.
Thanks for commenting, Michael!
I agree there are a few issues with this. However (I have added what follows in a footnote):
If the WFP is capturing most of the painful experiences (weighted by intensity), and pleasurable experiences are negligible, then my assumption will not influence the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns. It can potentially change whether chickens have good or bad lives, and therefore impact whether consuming less animals is good/bad, but I think this is pretty unclear anyway for other reasons (e.g. effects on wild animals).
If I assume all the time not classified by the WFP is neutral, I get the lives of broilers in a conventional and reformed scenario are, per unit time, 3.08 and 1.07 times as bad as human lives are good. So the lives of broilers in a conventional and reformed scenario would become worse by a factor of 1.19 (= 3.08/2.58) and 1.86 (= 1.07/0.574).