Individuation is a Key Challenge in Animal Welfare Technology

By Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-05-29T17:06 (+10)

This is a linkpost to https://optimistsbarn.substack.com/p/individuation-is-a-key-challenge

This is a crosspost for Individuation is a Key Challenge in Animal Welfare Technology by Robert Yaman, which was originally published on The Optimist's Barn on 25 May 2025. I am not affiliated with Innovate Animal Ag.

Technologies in animal agriculture (not just around welfare) can be separated into two broad categories: ones that operate at the level of individual animals, and ones that operate at the group level. Examples of group-level technologies include things like a barn’s ventilation, lighting, and heating systems; incubators in a hatchery which distribute heat evenly throughout a chamber with many eggs; or controlled atmosphere stunning machines that process animals in batches. Examples of individual-level technologies include captive bolt guns which stun one cow at a time, or in-ovo sexing machines which sex each embryo individually.

The more animals there are, the more the economics favor group-level technologies. Their fixed costs are shared across many animals, whereas individual systems scale more linearly with head count. For many use cases, group-level technologies work perfectly well, but ultimately the outcomes that farmers care about are traits of individuals, whether better welfare or higher productivity. Group-level technology necessarily targets proxies or aggregates of these traits, which often limits their effectiveness. In these cases, a frequent challenge is developing an individual-level technology that is more effective. I call this “individuation.”

Individual-level technologies are usually more complicated and expensive than group-level ones, but they’re often critical to fully solving challenges in animal agriculture. This is especially true for smaller animals, which are present in far higher numbers on farms.

In this post, we’ll discuss two examples of this phenomenon from aquaculture and poultry production.

Fish Stunning

One of the major animal welfare priorities in aquaculture right now is humane slaughter, the goal of which is to render animals unconscious and insensible to pain before they are killed. Humane slaughter for fish is particularly complicated, given how many different species we farm, each with a distinct size and biology. Today, many aquaculture operations still kill fish while they are conscious, either by suffocation or chilling in an ice bath. In the last few years, however, the aquaculture industry has begun adopting new humane slaughter technologies that are installed onboard harvesting vessels or directly in aquaculture facilities.

One of the most common humane slaughter methods for fish is electrical stunning. In this method, fish are pumped from their holding pens into stunning machines that deliver an electric shock designed to render them unconscious. In "in-water" stunning, fish move through a tube with submerged electrodes, completing an electric circuit that shocks them unconscious. In an alternative method, "dry" stunning, fish are deposited onto a waterless conveyor belt where electrodes positioned above and below the belt deliver the shock directly.

Electrical stunning is a group-level technology, since fish move through the tube or along the conveyor belt in a continuous mass. This means that salmon weighing up to 8 kg each can be stunned in a similar process to shrimps weighing 10 grams each.

However, recent scientific evidence suggests that electrical stunning may not reliably render certain species of fish unconscious. For shrimp and some smaller species, electrical stunning works effectively, often killing them instantly. But for larger fish, such as salmon and trout, there's a problematic tradeoff. If the electrical current is set too high, fillet quality suffers due to internal bruising, spinal fractures, or hemorrhages. Set too low, the shock may merely immobilize rather than truly stun the fish, leaving them potentially conscious before slaughter. It can be difficult to find an electrical intensity that reliably achieves humane stunning without compromising product quality.

A different technology, called percussive stunning, could work better. Instead of electrocution, fish are instead fed into individual channels where they are precisely struck on the head with a mechanical bolt, instantly rendering them unconscious. This is similar to captive-bolt stunning techniques commonly practiced for cattle, but adapted into a highly automated system capable of much higher throughput. Percussive stunning thus represents an individualized approach to humane fish slaughter.

Individually processing each fish also unlocks additional benefits. For instance, fish stunned percussively are often immediately bled in the same processing channel, greatly reducing residual blood in fillets. Immediate bleeding can improve freshness, shelf life, and overall fillet quality. Such product-quality benefits have already made percussive stunning common practice for high-value species like salmon and trout. But medium-sized fish like carp and sea bass, which historically have only been handled in bulk, have never before had access to these individualized processing advantages. Percussive stunning thus opens up entirely new quality opportunities for producers of these species.

However, it may be some time before we see percussive stunning used for these medium-sized fish. The cost of percussive stunning scales roughly in relationship to the number of fish processed, whereas electrical stunning scales in relation to the volume of fish, irrespective of the total number of individuals. Consequently, the smaller the species, the greater the cost advantages of electrical stunning over percussive stunning. Some technological innovation will therefore be necessary before percussive stunning can become economically viable for these smaller, lower-value species.

Precision Livestock Farming

This tension between welfare, economics, and individuation isn't limited to fish stunning; a similar dynamic occurs in Precision Livestock Farming (PLF), a set of technologies designed to closely track animal productivity, health, and welfare. The exact technologies employed for PLF vary substantially depending on the species involved.

For larger and more economically valuable animals like cows or pigs, PLF usually involves highly individualized methods. For example, many dairy farms now place RFID ear-tags or rumen boluses on cows. These individual-level devices track each animal’s body temperature, rumination patterns, and activity levels, quickly alerting the farmer if an animal is ill, stressed, or ready for breeding. The farmer can then intervene specifically with that animal, treating it individually based on its unique needs.

The economics of individuation are relatively straightforward in these cases: a single dairy cow might produce thousands of dollars of milk annually, making it easily worthwhile to invest $20–$40 in an ear-tag sensor to maintain optimal productivity and welfare. But the economic calculus changes for smaller animals, especially poultry. Chickens might be worth only a few dollars at harvest, meaning individualized technologies need to be incredibly cheap to be economically feasible. At such low per-animal margins, individual RFID tags or wearable sensors are financially out of reach.

Instead, PLF for poultry tends to be more group-oriented, relying on tools like overhead cameras, environmental sensors, and microphones installed throughout barns. These group-level technologies continuously monitor conditions such as temperature, humidity, air quality, bird distribution, and flock noise patterns. They then aggregate this information into barn-wide metrics, alerting farmers if conditions deviate significantly from expected patterns.

Such approaches have been moderately successful at flagging issues like disease outbreaks, temperature stress, or feed problems, but fundamentally have a lower value proposition than PLF technologies for larger animals. This is why PLF is significantly more common for cows than for chickens.

In order for PLF to become widespread for chickens, it must be individualized in an extremely cheap way, on the order of one cent or less per bird. At this price level, anything involving hardware for individual chickens likely becomes infeasible. Instead, the most likely way PLF establishes a significant value proposition for poultry producers is if individual tracking and monitoring can be done completely via computer vision and software. It’s clearly within current AI capabilities to track individuals within a large barn, and if a single system can monitor thousands or even millions of birds at once, the cost of PLF techniques could fall substantially.^[1]

Technology Over Pastoralism

Individualized technologies usually rely on heavy automation, mechanization, and economies of scale—features that contrast sharply with the pastoral ideals traditionally associated with humane agriculture. Modern visions of humane farming often evoke a lone herdsman and a small flock on open pasture. These ideals emphasize the farmer’s direct involvement in husbandry, the animal’s role in regenerating the land, and the importance of a naturalistic environment.

This pastoral approach works up to a point because a single farmer can keep track of a few hundred or even thousands of animals. Scale it to fifty-thousand broilers or five-million tilapia, however, and the arithmetic collapses. The only way to guarantee positive welfare at these numbers is by using technology to scale the capabilities of individualized husbandry.

The emphasis on pastoral methods has emerged because society tends to focus on big, high-value mammals. Beef and dairy are much larger industries than poultry or seafood, and account for an outsized share of the climate impacts of animal protein production. Also, the cattle rancher holds a special place in the American psyche and self-conception.

But smaller low-margin animals make up an overwhelming majority of animals that we consume. There are fewer than 100 million cows in the US, but almost 10 billion chickens—two orders of magnitude more. On top of that, most of the growth in animal protein consumption is coming from chicken and fish.

Therefore, if we want to meet the growing demand for animal protein while building an agricultural system aligned with our values, we can’t simply apply the pastoral logic that works for grass-fed beef or smallholder dairies across all of animal agriculture. We need a new technocratic vision of humane farming that leans into automation, engineering, robotics, and economies of scale to guarantee positive welfare for billions of individual animals at once.

Individuation around live chickens is generally challenging because their movements and behaviors are inherently chaotic and difficult to automate around. One type of solution to this is to move upstream and focus on fertilized eggs rather than live birds. At the hatchery, fertilized eggs are stationary, easily handled individually, and highly amenable to automation. As a result, hatchery technologies like in-ovo sexing and in-ovo vaccination tend to work at the individual level. Because of the advantages of individualized technologies, I anticipate a future shift toward performing more processing at the hatchery stage, driven by both welfare and productivity benefits.

1. ^{^}

   Individuation around live chickens is generally challenging because their movements and behaviors are inherently chaotic and difficult to automate around. One type of solution to this is to move upstream and focus on fertilized eggs rather than live birds. At the hatchery, fertilized eggs are stationary, easily handled individually, and highly amenable to automation. As a result, hatchery technologies like in-ovo sexing and in-ovo vaccination tend to work at the individual level. Because of the advantages of individualized technologies, I anticipate a future shift toward performing more processing at the hatchery stage, driven by both welfare and productivity benefits.