[Question] New EA cause area: Breeding really dumb chickens

[Sam Enright]

A friend at dinner asked me why EAs aren’t working on breeding chickens (and other farm animals) to be less intelligent as a way to reduce the suffering caused by factory farming. I was embarrassed that I didn’t have a good response for him. Some questions I had about this idea:

1. Is selective breeding capable of meaningfully changing an animal’s capacity to suffer? Domestic animals have brains that are 15-35% smaller than their wild counterparts, so there is some interaction between domestication and intelligence.

2. Is anyone working on genetic engineering or gene drives to make farm animals less able to suffer?

3. Is this a hedge against clean meat? This strategy would be unnecessary if clean meat is successful, but it may be more tractable. Also, a small proportion of people may refuse to switch to clean meat even when it is widely available, and we can minimise their negative impact by breeding farm animals with minimal capacity to suffer.

Has anyone looked into this? Am I going crazy?

[Pablo]

Based on the content of your question, it seems that you are asking about ways to make farmed animals less capable of suffering, rather than (as the title suggests) to make chickens less intelligent. This has been discussed before; see e.g.

• Shriver, Adam (2009) Knocking out pain in livestock: Can technology succeed where morality has stalled?, Neuroethics, vol. 2, pp. 115–124.

• Shriver, Adam & Emilie McConnachie (2018) Genetically modifying livestock for improved welfare: a path forward, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, vol. 31, pp. 161–180.

• Shulman, Carl (2012) Breeding happier livestock: no futuristic tech required, Overcoming Bias, December 6.

[Vgvt]

I’ve never heard anyone claim an association of congenital analgesia and reduced intelligence, it seems to me this entire idea is based in the ableist Idea that someones moral worth is tied to there intelligence rather than there capacity for suffering or pleasure

[NunoSempere]

You are factually correct, but

• I don’t think the OP is too far off, in that, e.g., capacity for pain and intelligence can both be caused by a common factor. So e.g., lobotomizing chickens (or breeding them to be essentially lobotomized from birth) would presumably reduce both intelligence and capacity to feel pain.

• The OP did the right thing here by being confused/​encountering an interesting idea, and presenting that idea in the forum for further consideration.

[Stefan_Schubert]

I agree. It seems unfair to me to say it’s ableist.

[Anthony DiGiovanni]

I think the core idea of your comment—that intelligence is not equal to capacity to suffer, and the OP imprecisely conflates the two—is true and important. I had that same thought while reading the OP. But I suspect your comment would have received less (strong) disapproval if you had stated your point in a less adversarial/​politically charged way.

[Charles He]

I’m not sure this was intended but the ideas of “congenital analgesia” and “lobotomy” that are presented in this comment chain seem difficult to implement for practical reasons.

Also, analgesia, just the inability to feel physical pain, probably isn’t enough to guarantee welfare. This is because animals probably suffer in other ways (lack of access to well understood needs such as perches or nest boxes, avoiding aggression, movement, intense boredom or frustration).

It is possible that solutions that could work does look like reduced intelligence, and that might motivate the title the of the post. The idea is that someone who is doped up on painkillers will have both dulled senses and reduced executive function.

[NunoSempere]

Yes, “lobotomy” was just meant to be an illustrative example.

[Charles He]

I think your post and each of these three questions is really thoughtful and it is good to be informed about this.

This comment is pretty long and tries to give context.

A friend at dinner asked me why EAs aren’t working on breeding chickens (and other farm animals) to be less intelligent as a way to reduce the suffering caused by factory farming. I was embarrassed that I didn’t have a good response for him.

I don’t think there has been direct scientific work on creating new breeds yet^[2].

Basically, this is because breeding genetics is a major part of the farm industry, and is hard to change.

To try to explain this further, Pablo mentioned a post by Carl Shuman, where Shuman suggests it’s technologically feasible to improve welfare, basically with a simple iterative process.

In that post, Gaverick Matheny, founder of CSET, explains this is hard:

Laying out what Gaverick is saying:

• There’s intensive, continual breeding to get higher producing genetic lines (many decades after this breeding started).

• There’s multiple broiler breeding companies, and the industry has some depth.

• Despite sophistication, breed development only allows for small incremental gains, and welfare improvements take up a lot of this (if they actually tried). This suggests that entering the industry and exploring the space of space of welfare tradeoffs is hard.

• There are opportunities to improve genetics in welfare, even ones that improve costs, but the industry is uninterested.

• There are breeds already better in welfare, but people are not commercially interested at all.

Also, I think this might give a sense of how far pushed and unnatural the animals are.

So the industry seems hard to get into and customers (the industry producers) have historically put no weight on animal welfare.

But your post and your ideas might be important right now.

Gaverick’s information is 20 years old now, and does not reflect more pressure for welfare demands because of the farm animal movement.

Also, I heard an idea from someone that there is a need for some sort of central org or JPAL that communicates with scientists and could support various animal welfare work like this. This seems important to be built and well executed.

1. ^

   These are two examples of grants that fund research into evaluating breeds.

2. ^

   Another interpretation (that sort of supercedes this whole question and answer) is that everyone knows what breeds and practices have much higher welfare, and are completely ignoring them.

[Charles He]

1. Is selective breeding capable of meaningfully changing an animal’s capacity to suffer? Domestic animals have brains that are 15-35% smaller than their wild counterparts, so there is some interaction between domestication and intelligence.

2. Is anyone working on genetic engineering or gene drives to make farm animals less able to suffer?

It doesn’t seem likely someone is working on this right now.

Just as an aside, as you can see Gatheny mention, there might be concrete conditions (ascites and tibial dyschondroplasia) that are well understood and feasible to improve, but haven’t been focused on (at time of writing).

I’m completely not a subject matter expert and very uncertain, but it seems possible that changing capacity to suffer with genetics might be more complicated than other ways of improving welfare through genetics.

With the level of breeding involved, it’s possible that the animals’ brains and nervous systems have been “co opted” for productivity.

To give an example, modern laying hens need a certain level of light . More or less light and they don’t lay as much. Also, massive broiler growth is probably supported by an unnatural appetite that is probably related to hormones and aggressiveness. Both of these seem like they involve some behavior pathway.

So it’s possible that trying to modify their brains might really harm production, or not work at all. This is not just because this is hard in regular animals, but also because of how pushed the animals genetics have been.

I think the above is somewhat informative speculation, but I am not sure about this.

[Linch]

I thought a bunch about this and a number of other strategies for “outtakes” of the cultured meat forecasting project, for some drafts that I likely will never end up publishing. My independent impression is that I’m personally pretty optimistic about this but I know almost nobody else in the space (of people who think about technological solutions to animal welfare in detail) is, so my all-things-considered view is that this is likely much less promising than it naively looks (at least to my own naïveté).