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