Week 4: Animal Welfare

Importance/Scale

Acknowledging high uncertainty for moral consideration, sentience & weight

• Past Moral Patienthood mistakes e.g,. Gladiatorial combat, public executions, witch hunts, human sacrifice, slavery

Clarifying Moral Consideration

• Moral Democracy

  • Due to moral uncertainty, it is recommended to listen to other moral views and their stance on e.g., nonhuman animal

  • Kant, Contractarianism, Rights-based, Capabilities, Virtue, Person Affecting, Common Sense

• If it promotes wellbeing

  • Hedonic i.e., pleasure and unpleasant subjective experience

  • Preference i.e., subjective experience of fulfilling a preference

  • Objective list i.e., subjecitve experience of achieving of 'objective good' experiences e.g., friendship, love, wisdom

Clarifying Sentience i.e., capacity for wellbeing

• Similarity with Humans (who are sentient)

• Neurobiological features e.g., brain, centralized nervous system

• Behavior e.g., avoidance, wound guarding, play, language use

Clarifying Moral Weight

• Neuron Count

• Welfare Range

  • Quantity i.e., life span

  • Quality i.e., capacity for welfare in each moment

    • Neuron Count, Brain mass to body mass ratio, number of nociceptor spikes per second

Tentative Conclusion: Majority of factory farmed animals are morally significant, sentience and are most likely above 1% of moral weight compared to a human being

Suffering within Factory Animal Welfare

• Poor methods for pre-slaughter stunning, and for slaughter itself

  • e.g., boiled alive, cut throat

  • e.g., Fish

    • Leaving fish in air to slowly suffocate to death over the course of several minutes

    • Putting fish in baths of ice slurry where they gradually lose

• Extremely crowded and dirty living conditions

  • caged laying hens e.g., 0.07m2 of space

• High rates of disease and injury

  • Sheep & Goats e.g., elastic ring around the scrotum, restricting blood flow while the scrotum gradually dies and then falls off

  • Pre-Slaughter Death

    • 15–20% of lambs die on farms before slaughter — for example, from disease, extreme hot or cold temperatures, or starvation

    • 15 billion and one trillion fish die in farms before reaching slaughter age

• Particularly poor conditions during transport

• Occasional withdrawals of food and water for extended periods

• High rates of painful procedures, often carried out without anaesthetic

  • removal of beaks to avoid them harming each other

• Food Source

  • Fish need fish to eat

• Social

  • Removal of Family members

  • Overcrowded

Numbers of Factory Farmed Animals

• Vertebrates

  • ~150 bn vertebrates farmed at any given time

  • 400 bn - 3 trn vertebrates killed / year

• Invertebrates

  • 1.6-4.5 trn killed/year

  • 350-700bn farmed at any given time

• Not including 'wild animal welfare' i.e., not farmed in bad conditions

Potential Changes in Factory Farming

• Gender Scanning i.e., only hatch female chickens and prevent male chicken death

• Aquaculture & insect farming technology will facilicate scaling them

• Gene-editing to enhance either welfare or productivity

• AI management of farms

• Cultivated animal produce

Urgency

• Future is dictated by present values

• Animal Consumption increases strongly in the nearterm & might stabilize in the long-term per human being

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Tractability/Solvability

• Moral Food Alternatives

  • Plant-based

    • Solely using plant ingredients

  • Fermentation methods

    • Microorganisms to create proteins usually found in animals

  • Cultivated/Lab grown

    • Cellularly identical to animal meat through cultivating animal cells directly

• Societal Variables for Willingness to change towards a Vegan Diet

  • Social Norms, Compassion, Food Safety, Religion

• Good Criteria for Solutions

  • Pleasure via Price-Taste-Convenience

    • convenience e.g., Cooks like animal products e.g., frying pan

  • Don’t forget about technological advances

    • e.g., alternative proteins

    • AI e.g., Grows Economy which grows meat-eaters; improve R&D for alternative proteins; Increase number of animals farmed due to increased efficiency; Decrease violations against law and disease due to improved surveillance

  • Find interventions that offer more leverage.

    • e.g., corporate campaigns, government policies

  • Find interventions that the animal agriculture industry won’t fight.

    • e.g., gender scanning improves welfare and might reduce costs

  • Don’t cause harm.

    • e.g,. reducing beef consumption might increase chicken consumption i.e., more suffering due to more individual chickens needed to satisfy demand compared to a cow

    • e.g., improving gender scanning for chickens decreases price which increases demand

  • Work in neglected areas to avoid diminishing return

Neglect

• ~$400 million / year on farmed animal welfare

  • Climate change $60 bn, Global Development $70bn

• 3,000 People working on reducing harms form factory farming

Personal Reflections

• Invitation to not only focus on the relief of pain, but as well on the potential increase of happiness

Based on Four Assumptions

• Utilitarianism, according to which you ought to maximize (expected) utility.

• Hedonism, according to which welfare is determined wholly by positively and negatively valenced experiences (roughly, experiences that feel good and bad to the subject).

• Valence symmetry, according to which positively and negatively valenced experiences of equal intensities have symmetrical impacts on welfare.

• Unitarianism, according to which equal amounts of welfare count equally, regardless of whose welfare it is.

Variables

• Moral Weight of an Animal = Animal's Capacity for Welfare

  • The total amount of welfare the animal could realize

• Capacity for Welfare = welfare range (the difference between the best and worst welfare states the individual can realize at a time) × lifespan.

  • Two Components

    • Welfare Range

      • capacity for welfare at a time

    • Life Span

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Comparing different interventions via DALY (Disability Adjusted Life Years)

• What?

  • Avoiding 1 DALY = Avoiding the loss of 1 human life at full health

    • Full health does not mean peak, just average quality of life of humans at full health

  • Two Components

    • Years of human life lost

      • How much the condition shortens a human's life

    • Years of human life lost to disability

      • Health impact of living with a condition in terms of years of life lost

• Why?

  • Given welfare ranges, we can convert welfare improvements into DALY-equivalents averted, making cross-species cost-effectiveness analyses possible.

Example Chicken vs Human

1. Chickens’ welfare range is 10% of human’s welfare range.

2. Assuming symmetry around the neutral point, the negative portion of chickens’ welfare range is 5% of human’s positive welfare range.

   1. e.g., humans’ welfare range is 100 and chickens’ welfare range is 10

      1. Chickens range from -5 to 5 (the negative portion of that is 5% of humans’ welfare range.)

3. Given our assumptions about the welfare impacts of the two production systems, the move from conventional cages to aviary systems averts an amount of welfare equivalent to 25% of the average chicken’s negative welfare range. (Continuing with the numbers mentioned in the previous step, it moves chickens from -2.5 to -1.25).

4. So, assuming symmetry around the neutral point, 25% of chickens’ negative welfare range is equivalent to 1.25% (5% × 25%) of humans’ positive welfare range.

5. By definition, averting a DALY averts the loss of an amount of welfare equivalent to the positive portion of humans’ welfare range for a year.

6. So, assuming symmetry around the neutral point, the move from conventional cages to aviary systems averts the equivalent of 0.0125 DALYs per chicken per year on average.

3 main theories about the function of valenced experiences

• Fitness: This is good / bad

• Decision-making: A is better than B

• Updating: If X then A

Hedonic Capacities

• e.g., Reward based learning, Anxiety-behavior, Parental care, disgust behavior, relief learning, guilt, concept of death

Cognitive Proxies

• e.g., Communication, Navigation strategies, Motivational trade-off, Social Learning, physical reasoning, tool use, body awareness, memory bias, theory of mind

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