I saw the following quote from Bill Gates in an interview that he recently did with Dylan Scott from Vox:
“The idea of these chickens that lay a lot of eggs or cows that make a lot of milk, the beauty of that is once you improve the genetics of the African cows, that’s a gift that keeps on giving. That’s a teaching a man to fish type thing where, as we mix the super productivity of Western dairy cows together with the heat and disease tolerance that African cows have, you can get something that’s 75 percent as productive as a [dairy cow], which is four times the milk productivity of the cows that are in Africa today.
It’ll take five years before, say, half the cows in Africa get that, but that’s a gigantic thing because that’s income for women, that’s milk for the kids where malnutrition, vitamin deficiency, and protein deficiency are gigantic. Cheap eggs, cheap chickens, and cheap milk are a big part of this.
We’ve already cut the cost of eggs in Ethiopia in half. We see the poorest households actually using twice as many eggs as they used before because they’ve become a lot more affordable. Those egg factories and milk factories, getting those into Africa in the hands of the smallholder farmers, that’s pretty powerful.”
This seems like a worrying and salient example of the meat-eater problem. It also seems like there are lots of cost-effective Global Health & Development interventions that don’t involve this trade-off with animal welfare that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation could be pursuing.
The chickens don’t end up weighing more at the point that they go to slaughter—the faster growth rate is so that they get to the same slaughter weight in a shorter space of time, which uses less feed. Chickens with faster growth rates therefore aren’t replacing more than one slower-growing chicken.
The slower-growing breeds live for longer, which would be bad if it was extending the same pain intensity over a longer period of time, but this seems like it isn’t what happens: https://welfarefootprint.org/broilers/