Week 3: Farmed Birds
“Quantifying levels of pain in other animals is extremely difficult. It often relies on drawing lessons from various disciplines, including evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and pharmacology… but it is not just the total hours of pain that matters. The intensity is just as – if not more – important. Many of us would rather spend 5 hours in mild pain than 1 hour in intense pain.”
- Hannah Ritchie, Our World in Data
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The Hidden Dimension of Animal Suffering: How Time Flows Differently Across Species (10 min)
“In today's post, we’re revisiting our research on the rate of subjective experience, which may have implications for our understanding of animal welfare and prioritization of welfare-based interventions. We hope you’ll enjoy this mind-bending conundrum and find inspiration to incorporate it into your thinking.”
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SADs (Suffering-Adjusted Days): An improved animal welfare measurement tool (10 minutes)
Describes a system called Suffering-Adjusted Days or SADs. “It roughly represents the number of days of intense pain felt by each animal. This system is a work-in-progress that we are sharing to provide value to other animal welfare researchers, advocates, and those interested in work in this space.”
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Adopting slower-growing breeds of chicken would reduce animal suffering significantly - Our World in Data (20 min)
Our measures of animal suffering become more accurate when we quantify the causes of, amount of time spent, and severity of suffering animals experience (even down to seconds). This case study looks at these aspects of the lives of fast- and slow-growing chickens. Closely studying animals’ life trends can help us identify the highest priorities both between species and within individuals’ lives.
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