> For the most part, animal welfare scientists aren't interested in scoring welfare on a cardinal scale, so it's an oddity when they try.
Just to confirm, you and Rethink Priorities are using a cardinal scale for your welfare ranges, right? So when you say that a cow has a welfare range of 0.5, you implicitly mean that there is some universal scale where a cow's minimal welfare is -0.25 and maximum is +0.25 (or shifted if we don't assume symmetry).
I guess I’m confused on why there isn’t more work on estimating the average realized values of welfare, both from Rethink and from other animal welfare scientists. Those values are necessary for foundational claims like “eating 1000 calories of beef creates demand for X units of suffering”, or "moving cows to a pasture will increase welfare by Y units".
Bob, do you have any recommendations for where I could find estimates of the welfare of common farmed animals, ideally including chickens, pigs, cows, and shrimp? I found some "Life Quality" scores in the Supplementary Materials of Scherer (2018), but it often scores farmed cows as having a much lower life quality than farmed pigs, which seems implausible to me.
If it makes things easier, you can copy the Google Slides source to tweak the illustration https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1LuSpONztS9Tl0OSn-YeyWJG7B6UIYtff49p1WREPPgA/edit#slide=id.p
As a rough approximation, you can get the welfare an QALYs mutiplying the welfare in AQALYs by Rethink Priorities' median welfare ranges
I might be misunderstanding something, but I'm not sure that's right, even with your footnote. My understanding is that animal AQALYs per years and human QALYs per year both range from +1 at the top, to some species-specific negative value at the bottom. The same is true of the Rethink welfare units, but with a different scale. If so, shouldn't the formula be as described below?
Hi Vasco, I'm not sure Food Impacts is calculating things correctly. They start off by calculating the number of animal hours lived to create 2,000 calories, which is reasonable. The next step should be to multiply that number by the average welfare of an animal, since that should tell you how many negative welfare units would be averted by not creating the demand for 2,000 calories.
But instead, they multiply by the welfare range of the animal.
This doesn't make sense to me. If a farmed cow's actual welfare is -0.1, why does it matter that its welfare range is -0.25 to 0.25? To figure out how much negative welfare I can avert, I care about the -0.1!
Am I thinking about this correctly?
And if so, is there a good resource for actual welfare values for farmed animals, rather than the theoretical ranges?
Good post, but I’m not sure I agree with the implications around bioengineered viruses. While I agree we might build defenses that keep overall death rate low, biological and psychological constraints make these defenses pretty unappealing.
You mentioned that while biotech makes it easier for people to develop viruses, it also makes it easier to develop vaccines. But if the ability to create viruses becomes easy for bad actors, we might need to create *hundreds* of different vaccines for the hundreds of new viruses. Even if this works, taking hundreds of vaccines doesn’t sound appealing, and there are immunological constraints on how well broad spectrum vaccines will ever work.
In the face of hundreds of new viruses and the inability to vaccinate against all of them, we’ll need to fall back to isolation or some sort of sterilizing tech like ubiquitous UV. I don’t like isolation, and I don’t like how ubiquitous UV might create weird autoimmune issues or make us especially vulnerable to breakthrough transmissions.
Thanks Bob, much appreciated.
> For the most part, animal welfare scientists aren't interested in scoring welfare on a cardinal scale, so it's an oddity when they try.
Just to confirm, you and Rethink Priorities are using a cardinal scale for your welfare ranges, right? So when you say that a cow has a welfare range of 0.5, you implicitly mean that there is some universal scale where a cow's minimal welfare is -0.25 and maximum is +0.25 (or shifted if we don't assume symmetry).
I guess I’m confused on why there isn’t more work on estimating the average realized values of welfare, both from Rethink and from other animal welfare scientists. Those values are necessary for foundational claims like “eating 1000 calories of beef creates demand for X units of suffering”, or "moving cows to a pasture will increase welfare by Y units".
Got it, thanks. For those following along at home, I misread your footnote and the graphs I made do not reflect the condition in the footnote.
Bob, do you have any recommendations for where I could find estimates of the welfare of common farmed animals, ideally including chickens, pigs, cows, and shrimp? I found some "Life Quality" scores in the Supplementary Materials of Scherer (2018), but it often scores farmed cows as having a much lower life quality than farmed pigs, which seems implausible to me.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-017-1420-x
If it makes things easier, you can copy the Google Slides source to tweak the illustration https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1LuSpONztS9Tl0OSn-YeyWJG7B6UIYtff49p1WREPPgA/edit#slide=id.p
Thanks Vasco,
I might be misunderstanding something, but I'm not sure that's right, even with your footnote. My understanding is that animal AQALYs per years and human QALYs per year both range from +1 at the top, to some species-specific negative value at the bottom. The same is true of the Rethink welfare units, but with a different scale. If so, shouldn't the formula be as described below?
Hi Vasco, I'm not sure Food Impacts is calculating things correctly. They start off by calculating the number of animal hours lived to create 2,000 calories, which is reasonable. The next step should be to multiply that number by the average welfare of an animal, since that should tell you how many negative welfare units would be averted by not creating the demand for 2,000 calories.
But instead, they multiply by the welfare range of the animal.
This doesn't make sense to me. If a farmed cow's actual welfare is -0.1, why does it matter that its welfare range is -0.25 to 0.25? To figure out how much negative welfare I can avert, I care about the -0.1!
Am I thinking about this correctly?
And if so, is there a good resource for actual welfare values for farmed animals, rather than the theoretical ranges?
Good post, but I’m not sure I agree with the implications around bioengineered viruses. While I agree we might build defenses that keep overall death rate low, biological and psychological constraints make these defenses pretty unappealing.
You mentioned that while biotech makes it easier for people to develop viruses, it also makes it easier to develop vaccines. But if the ability to create viruses becomes easy for bad actors, we might need to create *hundreds* of different vaccines for the hundreds of new viruses. Even if this works, taking hundreds of vaccines doesn’t sound appealing, and there are immunological constraints on how well broad spectrum vaccines will ever work.
In the face of hundreds of new viruses and the inability to vaccinate against all of them, we’ll need to fall back to isolation or some sort of sterilizing tech like ubiquitous UV. I don’t like isolation, and I don’t like how ubiquitous UV might create weird autoimmune issues or make us especially vulnerable to breakthrough transmissions.