Quantifying Animal Welfare: A Framework For Comparing Interventions

Animal Ask, an organization focused on identifying promising goals and strategies for animal advocacy, has developed a framework to quantify and compare the subjective experiences of animals across different species and interventions. This approach aims to help prioritize campaigns that could potentially have a greater impact than current leading initiatives, such as cage-free campaigns.

The framework builds upon the existing Cumulative Pain metric developed by researchers Wladimir J. Alonso and Cynthia Schuck-Paim. It considers both the intensity and duration of animals’ experiences, including both positive and negative states. The model allows for adjustments based on different moral weightings of these experiences and incorporates the inherent uncertainties around these complex ethical questions.

Key features of this framework include:

1. Consideration of total time in pain prevented and pleasure created for animals as a result of a campaign
2. Categorization of pain and pleasure into four intensity levels each
   1. Pain: Annoying, Hurtful, Disabling, and Excruciating
   2. Pleasure: Agreeable, Heartening, Delightful, and Ecstatic
3. Multiplication of the effects of an intervention by the number of animals reached, estimating the total hours of pain prevented or pleasure created
4. Application of different moral weightings to pain/pleasure categories based on various ethical worldviews
5. Incorporation of qualitative factors such as scalability and tractability in different worldviews

To illustrate the framework’s application, the report provides a fictional example comparing two campaigns: improving water quality for trilobites and enhancing welfare for farmed dodos. It is briefly outlined below.

Time affected per animal:

• Trilobites: 4,000 hours of Annoying pain, 30 hours of Hurtful pain, and 1 hour each of Disabling and Excruciating pain prevented
• Dodos: 2,000 hours of Annoying pain, 50 hours of Hurtful pain, 1.5 hours of Disabling pain prevented; plus 200 hours of Agreeable pleasure, 10 hours of Heartening pleasure, and 0.5 hours of Delightful pleasure created

Campaign reach:

• Trilobites: Estimated to affect 300 million animals per year
• Dodos: Estimated to affect 800 million animals per year

Total impact (in billions of hours):

• Trilobites: 1,200 Annoying, 9 Hurtful, 0.3 Disabling, 0.3 Excruciating pain hours prevented
• Dodos: 1,600 Annoying, 40 Hurtful, 1.2 Disabling pain hours prevented; 160 Agreeable, 8 Heartening, 0.4 Delightful pleasure hours created

The example applies various moral weightings representing different ethical perspectives. Some worldviews favored the trilobite campaign, while others favored the dodo campaign. After all the calculations were finished, the authors found that the trilobites campaign was preferred 65% of the time, while the dodo campaign was preferred 35% of the time. This example demonstrates how the framework can be used to quantitatively compare very different interventions across species.

The authors recognize significant limitations of this framework, including challenges in accurately quantifying subjective experiences, and difficulties in comparing welfare across vastly different species. They also acknowledge uncertainty in moral weightings of different intensities of pain and pleasure, along with the complexity of accounting for indirect or long-term effects of interventions.

While the framework is presented as a way to think quantitatively about complex issues, while recognizing the serious limitations in our current knowledge, the authors stress the importance of considering qualitative factors as well when evaluating interventions.

This framework highlights the ongoing challenges in quantifying and comparing welfare across species and interventions. It also demonstrates efforts to develop more systematic approaches to prioritizing campaigns, while acknowledging the significant uncertainties involved. The framework provides a tool for advocates to more rigorously compare different strategies, but they should be used cautiously and in conjunction with other decision-making methods. As research in this area progresses, Animal Ask encourages others to critique and build upon their approach, incorporating new developments in science and ethics related to animal welfare.