EA - Prioritising animal welfare over global health and development? by Vasco Grilo

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Prioritising animal welfare over global health and development?, published by Vasco Grilo on May 13, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryCorporate campaigns for chicken welfare increase wellbeing way more cost-effectively than the best global health and development (GHD) interventions.In addition, the effects on farmed animals of such interventions can influence which countries they should target, and those on wild animals might determine whether they are beneficial or harmful.I encourage Charity Entrepreneurship (CE), Founders Pledge (FP), GiveWell (GW), Open Philanthropy (OP) and Rethink Priorities (RP) to:Increase their support of animal welfare interventions relative to those of GHD (at the margin).Account for effects on animals in the cost-effectiveness analyses of GHD interventions.Corporate campaigns for chicken welfare increase nearterm wellbeing way more cost-effectively than GiveWell’s top charitiesCorporate campaigns for chicken welfare are considered one of the most effective animal welfare interventions. A key supporter of these is The Humane League (THL), which is one of the 3 top charities of Animal Charity Evaluators.I calculated the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for broiler welfare in human-years per dollar from the product between:Chicken-years affected per dollar, which I set to 15 as estimated here by Saulius Simcikas.Improvement in welfare as a fraction of that of median welfare range when broilers go from a conventional to a reformed scenario, assuming:The time broilers experience each level of pain defined here (search for “definitions”) in a conventional and reformed scenario is given by these data (search for “pain-tracks”) from the Welfare Footprint Project (WFP).The welfare range is symmetric around the neutral point, and excruciating pain corresponds to the worst possible experience.Excruciating pain is 1 k times as bad as disabling pain.Disabling pain is 100 times as bad as hurtful pain.Hurtful pain is 10 times as bad as annoying pain.The lifespan of broilers is 42 days, in agreement with section “Conventional and Reformed Scenarios” of Chapter 1 of Quantifying pain in broiler chickens by Cynthia Schuck-Paim and Wladimir Alonso.Broilers sleep 8 h each day, and have a neutral experience during that time.Broilers being awake is as good as hurtful pain is bad. This means being awake with hurtful pain is neutral, thus accounting for positive experiences.Median welfare range of chickens, which I set to RP's median estimate of 0.332.Reciprocal of the intensity of the mean human experience, which I obtained supposing humans:Sleep 8 h each day, and have a neutral experience during that time.Being awake is as good as hurtful pain is bad. This means being awake with hurtful pain is neutral, thus accounting for positive experiences.I computed the cost-effectiveness in the same metric for the lowest cost to save a life among GW's top charities from the ratio between:Life expectancy at birth in Africa in 2021, which was 61.7 years according to these data from OWID.Lowest cost to save a life of 3.5 k$ (from Helen Keller International), as stated by GW here.The results are in the tables below. The data and calculations are here (see tab “Cost-effectiveness”).Intensity of the mean experience as a fraction of the median welfare rangeBroiler in a conventional scenarioBroiler in a reformed scenarioHuman5.7710^-62.5910^-53.3310^-6Broiler in a conventional scenario relative to a humanBroiler in a reformed scenario relative to a humanBroiler in a conventional scenario relative to a reformed scenario7.771.734.49Improvement in chicken welfare when broilers go from a conventional to a reformed scenario as a fraction of...The median welfare range of chickensThe intensity of the mean human experience2....