Cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare

By Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-11-29T16:22 (+58)

The views expressed here are my own, not those of my employers or people who provided feedback.

Summary

Introduction

I have previously estimated the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare. In this post, I improve on my last estimate:

Methods

Overview

I estimate the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare in disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) per $ multiplying:

I also express the cost-effectiveness of the campaigns as a fraction of my estimate:

Chicken-years improved per $

I set the chicken-years improved per $ for broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns to 3.00 (= 15*1/5) and 10.8 chicken-year/$ (= 54*1/5), which are the product between:

Ideally, one would rerun Saulius’ analysis to get updated estimates.

Increase in AQALYs per chicken-year improved

I calculate the increase in AQALYs per chicken-year improved for:

I compute the welfare per living time adding that from pain and pleasure.

I determine the (negative) welfare from pain from the negative of the sum of the contributions of the 4 categories of pain defined by the Welfare Footprint Project (WFP), annoying, hurtful, disabling and excruciating pain. I determine each of the contributions in AQALYs from the product between:

For the pain intensities, I suppose:

My assumptions for the pain intensities imply each of the following individually neutralise 1 day of a practically maximally happy life:

For the time in pain and living time, I use WFP’s data on broilers and hens. Cynthia Schuck-Paim, WFP’s research director, clarified the time in pain reported by WFP excludes 11 welfare issues of broilers and their breeders, and 17 of layers and their breeders. In addition, Cynthia noted accounting for the neglected welfare issues would increase the time in pain in the baseline conditions more than in the improved conditions. WFP produced their current estimates with the main goal of ensuring the welfare reforms are beneficial, not quantifying the time in pain as accurately as possible. This accurate quantification is the subject of 2 books WFP is working on. Cynthia said WFP’s current estimates are likely to account for most of the suffering. I speculate their estimates for the baseline conditions encompass 2/3 of the time in pain, so I multiply them by 1.5 (= 1/(2/3)), and those of the improved conditions by 1.25 (= (1 + 1.5)/2).

I set the welfare from pleasure to the product between:

Supply of animal products per living time in the improved conditions as a fraction of that in the original conditions

I use the following supply of animal products per living time in the improved conditions as a fraction of that in the original conditions:

Benefits of 1 AQALY in averted DALYs

I stipulate an increase of 1 AQALY in chickens is as good as averting 0.332 DALYs, given Rethink Priorities’ median welfare range of chickens of 0.332.

Results

Welfare per living time

AnimalBroiler in a conventional scenarioBroiler in a reformed scenarioHen in a conventional cageHen in a cage-free aviary
Welfare per living time (AQALY/year)-2.27-0.161-1.69-0.333
Benefits of 1 year less of living time in averted DALYs0.7540.05350.5630.111

Cost-effectiveness

Corporate campaignsBroiler welfareCage-free
Chicken-years improved per $3.0010.8
Increase in welfare per chicken-year improved (AQALY)2.111.36
Increase in welfare per chicken-year improved in averted DALYs0.7000.452
Relative increase in welfare per chicken-year improved92.9 %80.4 %
Supply of animal products per living time in the improved conditions as a fraction of that in the original conditions79.5 %94.0 %
Cost-effectiveness (DALY/$)1.674.59
Cost-effectiveness as a fraction of my last estimate of the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare11.1 %30.6 %
Cost-effectiveness as a fraction of that of GiveWell's top charities168462
Cost-effectiveness as a fraction of that of Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative0.261 %0.718 %

Discussion

Welfare per living time

I estimate broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns increase welfare per living time by 92.9 % and 80.4 %, which are not far from the increase of 100 % that would be obtained for improved conditions respecting neutral lives. Again:

Cost-effectiveness

I conclude broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns are:

According to my results, cage-free campaigns are 2.75 times as cost-effective as broiler welfare campaigns, which I believe is less than commonly imagined. I imagine alternative reasonable assumptions could lead to cage-free campaigns being less cost-effective than broiler welfare campaigns, as many of the inputs are very uncertain.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Cynthia Schuck-Paim, Martin Gould, Michael St. Jules, and Saulius Ĺ imÄŤikas for feedback on some of the inputs[3]. Thanks to Saulius for feedback on the draft.

  1. ^

     The welfare per time of the practically maximally happy life is much lower than that of the maximally happy instant. I think the welfare of a practically maximally happy life is only slightly larger than that of a fully healthy life.

  2. ^

     I estimated this by multiplying by 10 the intensity of disabling pain.

  3. ^

     I ordered the names alphabetically.