I read this article about the amounts and intensities of egg laying chicken suffering in farms and comparing it to human suffering. Is he right or is he just making stuff up?What’s the most painful thing that ever happened to you? Seriously take a moment and contemplate it, try, in as much detail as you can, to remember what it was like. Maybe, for a few of you it was childbirth, an experience which, when it takes place without anesthesia, is temporarily completely debilitating. Nothing other than the pain occupies the mind of the sufferer.Perhaps it was getting a tattoo. Someone on Quora summarized the pain of getting a tattoo in the following way:>They hurt.>There are between one and 20 needles being poked through your skin hundreds of thousands of time in a single session. The number of needles will determine the type and intensity of pain. So expect it. The real question is how much will it hurt.I’ve been quite lucky and never experienced any particularly severe pain. I can remember quite a few times I’ve had pretty intense pain, barely eating for two days, having a doctor press down on my infected finger until it popped when I was 8, having a very severe stomach ache, falling out of a treehouse (though remaining in the tree) and banging my chin on the side of it, but nothing has been that bad. I’d guess the worst experience of my life is a lot less painful than a wrist tattoo.The most painful experience that most of us have ever had is classified as disabling pain. This is the sort of pain that’s bad enough that during it you can’t enjoy doing anything else, you can’t, for instance, enjoy a game of chess while giving birth, and that makes it impossible to focus on anything other than the pain. Examples of this kind of pain include a very painful fall, breaking a bone, burning yourself, giving birth, severe dog bites, getting a tattoo, kidney stones, and hemorrhoids.
>>17061506It's just made up nonsense. I only got trough half of your post and can say yours is too so I think what ever the "article" stated will probably work just fine with you lmao
>>17061506While we often forget about these later, when they’re happening, they feel like the most significant thing in the world. They’re extremely bad, if you offered me $1,000 to get severely bitten by a dog, its teeth ripping off a chunk of my flesh, or have needles pierce my skin hundreds of times, I wouldn’t take the deal. Certainly I wouldn’t undergo childbirth for 1,000 dollars, especially if it was without anestheticSadly, on average, the animals that we eat endure hundreds of hours of this kind of debilitating agony over the course of their life. They endure somewhere on the order of an hour a day of this pain.I’ll just discuss one such case, the case of the egg-laying hen, with the facts gathered from this report. https://welfarefootprint.org/laying-hens/ >>17061509you haven’t even seen the research yet
>>17061511Productivity gains in the egg industry have stemmed predominantly from the selection of highly productive breeds, along with the manufacturing of highly specialized diets and additives designed to maximize feed conversion. Commercial layer lines now lay about 320 eggs over a period of 70-80 weeks, compared to about 80 eggs per year in 1900. The industry’s goal goes further, as it aims to reach an average production of 500 eggs per laying hen in about 100 weeks.In addition to massive increases in output per animal within a few decades, major shifts in raising methods included the confinement of animals at high densities in closed and barren environments. In the case of laying hens, confinement has reached extreme levels through the adoption of cage systems (also known as battery cages). This system restricts hens’ space provided to approximately 430 to 450 cm2 per bird, an area smaller than an A4 sheet of paper. As of 2021, most laying hens still spend their entire lives in these cages.Extreme confinement and over-selection for early, elevated and extended egg production takes a heavy toll on the health of laying hens, with a high incidence of metabolic and bone disorders, among other physical and psychological challenges associated with acute and chronic pain.In this project, we apply our analytical framework https://welfarefootprint.org/analytical-approach/ to quantify the welfare impact of cage-free reforms, as measured by the cumulative time in pain (i.e. affective states of negative valence) potentially averted for every laying hen raised in an aviary instead of a cage.
>>17061512Our analysis focuses on conventional cages, furnished cages and indoor aviary systems (single-tier and multi-tier), considered by the industry as the preferred cage-free alternative for large scale egg production. For each housing system, we estimated the total time an average laying hen spends in different categories of pain intensity based on the intensity and duration of the pain endured from key welfare harms and their typical prevalence in commercial flocks. In all cases, the analysis is focused on the laying phase, which was assumed to last 40 to 60 weeks (hence the assumed lifespan, considering a pre-laying phase of about 20 weeks, is approximately 60 to 80 weeks for all systems). Instead of considering an exhaustive list of every possible harm affecting commercial layers, we examined key sources of physical and psychological pain arising from the most serious welfare problems, particularly those likely to be affected by the transition from cages to cage-free aviaries. Among these are keel bone fractures, injurious pecking (e.g. skin wounds, vent wounds, cannibalism), the deprivation of a number of highly motivated behaviors and egg peritonitis syndrome (the most common production disease in modern breeds of laying hens and the leading cause of mortality). We also quantify the cumulative time in pain resulting from the process of depopulation and transport, as it remains one of the most serious welfare problems in the poultry industry. Estimates of time in pain should be therefore viewed as the minimum time in pain endured by laying hens, during the laying phase, in the different systems analysed.
>>17061513DEFINITIONSANNOYING PAINExperiences of pain perceived as aversive, but not intense enough to disrupt the animal’s routine in a way that alters adaptive functioning or affects the behaviors that animals are motivated to perform. Similarly, Annoying pain should not deter individuals from enjoying pleasant experiences with no short-term function (e.g., play) and positive social interactions. Sufferers can ignore this sensation most of the time. Performance of cognitive tasks demanding attention are either not affected or only mildly affected. Physiological departures from expected baseline values are not expected to be present. Vocalizations and other overt expressions of pain should not be observed.
>>17061515HURTFUL PAINExperiences of pain in this category disrupt the ability of individuals to function optimally. Different from Annoying pain, the ability to draw attention away from the sensation of pain is reduced: awareness of pain is likely to be present most of the time, interspersed by brief periods during which pain can be ignored depending on the level of distraction provided by other activities. Individuals can still conduct routine activities that are important in the short-term (e.g. eating, foraging) and perform cognitively demanding tasks, but an impairment in their ability or motivation to do so is likely to be observed. Although animals may still engage in behaviors they are strongly motivated to perform (i.e., exploratory, comfort, sexual, and maintenance behaviors), their frequency or duration is likely to be reduced. Engagement in positive activities with no immediate benefits (e.g., play in piglets, dustbathing in chickens) is not expected. Reduced alertness and inattention to ongoing stimuli may be present. The effect of (effective) drugs (e.g., analgesics if the pain is physical, psychotropic drugs in the case of psychological pain) in the alleviation of symptoms is expected.
>>17061511>you haven’t even seen the research yetWhy would I need to see something that someone made up? Schizo rambling isn't going to change reality. I don't need to see someone post 200 page PDF with proofs how gravity isn't real and pigs can actually fly.
>>17061517DISABLING PAINPain at this level takes priority over most bids for behavioral execution and prevents all forms of enjoyment or positive welfare. Pain is continuously distressing. Individuals affected by harms in this category often change their activity levels drastically (the degree of disruption in the ability of an organism to function optimally should not be confused with the overt expression of pain behaviors, which is less likely in prey species). Inattention and unresponsiveness to ongoing stimuli and surroundings are likely to be observed. Relief often requires higher drug dosages or more powerful drugs. The term Disabling refers to the disability caused by ‘pain’, not to any structural disability.
>>17061520EXCRUCIATING PAINAll conditions and events associated with extreme levels of pain that are not normally tolerated even if only for a few seconds. In humans, it would mark the threshold of pain under which many people choose to take their lives rather than endure the pain. This is the case, for example, of scalding and severe burning events. Behavioral patterns associated with experiences in this category may include loud screaming, involuntary shaking, extreme muscle tension, or extreme restlessness. Another criterion is the manifestation of behaviors that individuals would strongly refrain from displaying under normal circumstances, as they threaten body integrity (e.g. running into hazardous areas or exposing oneself to sources of danger, such as predators, as a result of pain or of attempts to alleviate it). The attribution of conditions to this level must therefore be done cautiously. Concealment of pain is not possible.
>>17061521AVERAGE LAYING HENAlthough pain inherently concerns individuals, we operationally accept that the collective welfare of the members of a population can also be determined. Measuring cumulative pain at the population level is also necessary to account for the heterogeneity in the exposure of population members to different challenges. For example, while lameness is experienced by a large fraction of broiler chickens, fatal cases of ascites are only experienced by a few. Therefore, measurement efforts must consider the prevalence of each welfare challenge, so that pain is determined for the average member of the population (which may not necessarily correspond to any real organism). At the population level, the time spent at each level of pain intensity as a result of each challenge is determined by multiplying it by its prevalence. For example, if a condition causes 10 hours of Disabling pain and 70% of the population are affected, then the average member of this population could be said to experience 7 hours of Disabling pain due to the condition. Measurements at the population level enable comparing the impact of different practices and conditions across demographics, geographies, and time.
>>17061522MAIN FINDINGSCage-free aviaries were found to be clearly superior to conventional cages and furnished cages even soon after a transition to cage-free environments. Overall, an average of at least 275 hours of disabling pain, 2,313 hours of hurtful pain and 4,645 hours of annoying pain are prevented for each hen kept in an aviary instead of CC during her laying life, and 1,410 hours of hurtful pain and 4,065 hours of annoying pain prevented for each hen kept in an aviary instead of a FC during her laying life.The longer time in pain in caged systems stems predominantly from the deprivation of highly motivated behaviors;Most pain endured in cage-free production results from ailments associated with intense breeding for productivity;Keel bone fractures are the most important welfare concern in cage-free aviaries;The time in pain due to the direct physical consequences of injurious pecking (skin and vent wounds, cannibalism, pain from feather removal) was substantially lower than that resulting from other challenges (the analysis, however, does not consider potentially higher levels of fearfulness as a consequences of injurious pecking or the discomfort from plumage damage);Approximately 2,000 hours of excruciating pain are expected for every flock of 50,000 laying hens (1-3 hours per individual affected)Egg peritonitis syndrome, a production disease kept out of the research scope, was the main source of intense pain in all systems given its possible evolution to sepsis and the chronic nature of the pain endured by many of those hens surviving the disease
>>17061523WHY ESTIMATES OF THE BENEFITS OF CAGE-FREE AVIARIES ARE CONSERVATIVEThe analysis primarily aimed to estimate the minimum welfare improvement associated with transitioning to cage-free housing. In this sense, we preferred to err on the side of caution than potentially overestimated reform benefits in any particular aspect. Thus, it is reasonable to anticipate that the actual benefits of this transition may surpass the estimates. This expectation is supported by the following factorsThe analyses assume the same lifespan for all systems, but hens in cages have a potentially longer lifecycle, with the last weeks of life being particularly challenging. For example, in many countries outside Europe producers may still subject hens to a practice known as “induced molting” to extend their productive life. This is achieved by withdrawing their feed for several days (e.g., in the US 60–80% of caged layers are molted compared to <15% in cage-free production)The estimates are based on the prevalence of key welfare conditions during laying as reported for commercial settings. They reflect a situation where the technological, genetic and managerial maturity of cage-free housing is not yet on par with that already achieved by caged systems; as producers acquire more experience and genetics are optimized to cage-free environments, the welfare benefits are expected to be even higher;
>>17061524We did not consider the welfare impacts of the perception of lack of control in cages. A sense of control over adverse conditions has been shown to be one of the most critical components of mental well-being, both in humans and animals. Animals unable to escape aversive conditions are known to develop severe emotional distress in the form of helplessness, a depressive-like state. Caged hens are virtually prohibited from expressing any form of agency, motivated behaviors, to distance themselves from cage mates, resolve conflicts or adopt postures needed for comfort and thermoregulation. Often, they are kept in extremely low light intensity, compounding this effectLack of control can also potentiate fear. Fear can be extremely damaging if intense or persistent. Confinement in cages can generate a sustained state of fear as a result of helplessness and deprivation. Where differences are present, hens have been shown to be more fearful in cages.Positive states, other than eating and drinking, are very much limited in cages, hence preventing any type of compensation for the negative states enduredWe did not analyze the rearing phase. Should caged hens be reared in cages too, the challenges emerging from confinement at this younger age would add to the estimated time in pain in cages;We have considered a higher prevalence of keel bone fractures in cage-free systems. However, studies of the prevalence of keel fractures in cage-free settings using more precise methods (dissection) that typically lead to a higher prevalence. Additionally, a recent review highlights that the link between housing system and keel bone fracture prevalence may not be supported.
>>17061525PAIN-TRACKS AND SENSITIVITY OF THE ESTIMATESAll parameter values used for the analysis (estimates of duration, intensity, number of occurrences and the prevalence of each welfare offense) are justified in the book “Quantifying Pain in Laying Hens” (see below). https://welfarefootprint.org/book-laying-hens/ However, we invite the reader to examine the extent to which the estimates presented here are sensitive to our choices and assumptions, at the platform https://pain-track.org/hens In this web application, all parameter values can be altered, with the immediate update of all estimates.
>>17061527RESEARCH GAPS The need to quantify the intensity and duration of the pain emerging from multiple injuries, diseases, and deprivations has highlighted different research areas where knowledge is still lacking, detailed in the book. Surprisingly little research has been dedicated to the understanding of the impact of different welfare challenges at the individual level (where suffering occurs). Little is known about clinical evolution of the various welfare issues affecting commercial layers (e.g. healing times, duration of exposure), the likelihood of different clinical outcomes, rates of recurrence, and how adversely welfare harms are perceived by the individuals affected. Similarly, knowledge on case-fatality rates, comorbidity patterns and the prevalence of different conditions over the laying cycle is scant.Longitudinal studies targeting individual birds in commercial conditions are very much needed. They can help understand (1) the extent to which each welfare harm disrupts the routine and behavior of the individuals affected, hence helping establish the degree to which conditions are perceived as aversive; (2) the recurrence of harms (how many wounds, attacks, fractures, or disease episodes an individual animal endures over the laying cycle); (3) the temporal evolution of each harm, including fatal conditions; (4) the rates of spontaneous healing in the case of injuries and diseases; (5) patterns of comorbidity and (6) the extent to which behavioral opportunities are realized in cage-free settings, and how this changes over time.
Table of ContentsAll chapters freely available in PDF format:Chapter 1. The Comparative Measurement of Animal Welfare: the Cumulative Pain Framework. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dg7emvh4EAOS9h9Yij-pH6-U_aVGieLO/view?usp=sharing
>>17061532Chapter 2. The Life of Commercial Laying Hens https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zeTH9bEK_s9JmO2W_bKO_BL9A81p05Ny/view?usp=sharing Chapter 3. The Burden of Pain due to Keel Bone Fractures in Laying Hens https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yI7z9_rOoPJzfiodkkwq8l95fOIViejP/view?usp=sharingChapter 4. Welfare Implications of Injurious Pecking in Laying Hens https://drive.google.com/file/d/152XLpZDegfXFrBlpD1ZniPUyQwg7QCb-/view?usp=sharingChapter 5. Egg Peritonitis Syndrome, a Painful and Prevalent Disease in Commercial Layers https://drive.google.com/file/d/18x315ZWco448FF5T_FqGBz-UNhKFlDVd/view?usp=sharingChapter 6. The Burden of Psychological Pain in Laying Hens: behavioral deprivation https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JWZElTIe3PtkJaISZU9Sj_MUzjWl1Nf6/view?usp=sharingChapter 7. The Last Day of a Hen’s Life: depopulation and transport https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mo49dbeLEa-YRdV2sCDcnzP4JIhfJZSL/view?usp=sharingChapter 8. Prevalence of Welfare Harms affecting Commercial Layers in Different Housing Systems https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bHNUYGcBNzPJNLzIIPNSKzKs3Uz9fiuE/view?usp=sharingChapter 9. Impact of the Transition from Caged to Cage-free Housing on the Welfare of Laying Hens https://drive.google.com/file/d/1he5hQ_2VmLKUdsBqEPU5yeneOTCbGoAs/view?usp=sharingAcknowledgments https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Orw_ung5cmxaVHncJJWzSr-_oRFUt_R3/view?usp=sharing
Rollin BE. The Ethical Imperative to Control Pain and Suffering in Farm Animals. In: Benson GJ, Rollin BE, editors. The Well-Being of Farm Animals. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing; 2004. pp. 1–19.Duncan IJH. The changing concept of animal sentience. Appl Anim Behav Sci. 2006;100: 11–19.Broom DM. A history of animal welfare science. Acta Biotheor. 2011;59: 121–137.Duncan IJH. The Philosophical and Biological Evolution of Feelings in Well-being. In: McMillan FD, editor. CAB International; 2020. p. 21.Fraser D, Duncan IJH, Edwards SA, Grandin T, Gregory NG, Guyonnet V, et al. General Principles for the welfare of animals in production systems: the underlying science and its application. Vet J. 2013;198: 19–27.
>>17061518Doing research and publishing isn’t the same as writing a fiction book like lord of the rings.
>>17061538>>17061518>>17061509
>>17061541
>>17061538Look buddy, it took me less than 20 seconds to identify your research as bunk and you quite literally vindicated me by starting to autistically spam. I don't know what else to say besides maybe delete the thread and start from scratch if you want to advertise this junk here.
>>17061543You’ve done no such thing. The only person in this thread who looks like a fool is you. “LMAO no that’s cringe” is not compelling.
>>17061511Egg-laying hens in conventional farms endure about 400 hours (!!!!!) of this kind of disabling agony. Remember, this is agony about as bad as the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, unless you’ve had an experience as bad as being severely tortured. This is the agony that makes it impossible to think of anything else. The hens endure about an hour of a day of this extremely intense agony.This intense pain comes from many sources including (this list is non-exhaustive):Bone fractures.The majority of hens experience a bone fracture over the course of their life. On average, they have three. Imagine if you broke the same bone three times This is, and I can’t emphasize this enough, what most hens deal with the industry that produces our eggs is so cruel that it breaks the bones of most hens multiple times.In fact, the situation is much worse for hens than it would be for us because the area around their keel bone, which is the most common kind of fracture, has a huge number of nerves. While such experiences in humans usually produce disabling pain for about a day, for chickens, such pain lasts about a weekOften the bone doesn’t heal properly, leading to constant intense agony
>>17061546Injurious pecking.In a hen's natural environment, she’ll spend most of her time pecking the ground looking for food. In a modern farm, hens can’t do that, so they spend a lot of their time pecking other hens, often leading to severe injury (just imagine that you were being bitten all the time by people surrounding you). It’s not terribly uncommon for hens to be pecked to death (seriously imagine what it would be like for that to happen) or for pecking to affect a hen’s body part known as the vent which is particularly sensitive (in this case, for the males reading this, imagine someone biting your balls). Often this becomes infected.Every one of a hen’s natural behaviors are thoroughly squashed in the farms. Hens cannot make a nest prior to laying an egg, which causes them quite severe distress. Hens are willing to undergo strong electric shocks in order to get a suitable nest, about as strong as the electric shocks they’ll endure in order to get food after being starved for 28 hours (!!!!!). Remember, hens lay an egg roughly daily! This may not seem like a big deal, but only because we don’t appreciate the experience of being a nesting hen; an alien wouldn’t understand why we care about sex so much. Konrad Lorenz, a nobel prize winner summarized:>“The worst torture to which a battery hen is exposed is the inability to retire somewhere for the laying act. For the person who knows something about animals it is truly heart-rending to watch how a chicken tries again and again to crawl beneath her fellow-cage mates to search there in vain for cover”
>>17061547Whenever you purchase a few cartons of eggs, you are consigning a chicken to living in these horrifying, excruciating conditions. Before you next purchase eggs, or chicken, or most any other animal product, though eggs are likely the worst, remember what the worst experience of your life is like, and vividly consider the fact that your purchase will likely cause others to endure many hours of an experience just as bad.Tragically, the true scenario is much worse than that. Even worse than these scenarios of intense yet bearable pain are experiences that the authors of the report call excruciating pain. This is the sort of pain experienced when a person is brutally tortured or slowly eaten alive or burned to death for minutes; the sorts of pain that, if you’re really brave, you can read about in some detail here. https://www.simonknutsson.com/the-seriousness-of-suffering-supplement They’re horrible enough to take on an almost qualitatively different dimension, something most of us wouldn’t trade for many decades of happy life. This kind of pain is literally inconceivable, it’s so bad that many people who experience it attempt suicide. A hen might experience this right as she’s being trampled and pecked to death.Hens experience, on average, about two and a half minutes of this horrifying agony. The hundreds of hens that the average person eats over the course of their life (and yes, your consumption of eggs does cause more hens to be brought into existence, mistreated, and killed) mean that the average person is probably causing several hours of this unfathomable agony, the sort of agony one experiences in the minutes that they die from burning, boiling, being eaten alive, or suffocating to death; the kind of agony worse than being mauled by a dog, worse than childbirth, worse by orders of magnitude than anything you’ve ever experienced.
>>17061548The kind of experience that, to take a contemporary example, George Floyd probably experienced for the minutes that he was suffocating. (Fentanyl)The average meat eater causes hours of that!This is why factory farming is such a great moral emergency. It’s the cause of agony beyond what we could hope to imagine. Amounts we cannot fathom of agony that we cannot fathom. It’s not just egg-laying hens that experience this; it’s ubiquitous in the entire factory farming industry. As Ren says in an https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xtcgsLA2G8bn8vj99/reminding-myself-just-how-awful-pain-can-get-plus-an#Miscellaneous_thoughts_and_takeaways article that’s very worth reading, describing her own experience with fairly intense pain:A single broiler chicken experiences fifty hoursofhttps://www.pain-track.org/broilers[disabiling] pain during their lifespan, which lasts 4-6 weeks. There are 69 billion broilersslaughtered each year. That is so many hours of pain that if you divided those hours among humanity, each human would experience about 400 hours (2.5 weeks) of disabling pain every year. Can you imagine if instead of getting, say, your regular fortnight vacation from work or study, you experienced disabling-level pain for a whole 2.5 weeks? And if every human on the planet - me, you, my friends and family and colleagues and the people living in every single country - had that same experience every year?How hard would I work in order to avert suffering that urgent?
It’s not the pain, pain is forgotten. Chickens are like the Goldfish Standard of Forgetting.What kills you is the anticipation of the pain. The dread, the fear, the terror, the singular mania.Chicken don’t do that crazy-ass monkey feelings shit. Chickens peck, cluck, and don’t give a fuck.
>>17061591Sorry for the late reply I got totally distracted and forgot Would you say the same thing about a human baby or like 1 year old? The view you are expressing doesn’t sound original to you and I’m fairly certain it’s been addressed by philosophers. Idk about scientists. I need to look into it and think about it but I’m very skeptical
>>17061591the no monkey feelings framing conflates no self narrative which may be true of hens with no capacity for dread or sustained fear which is almost certainly false of hens, and the report I cited explicitly shows evidence of learned helplessness like states in hens and elevated fear responses in caged hens, which is exactly the anticipatory stress machinery under discussion. You don't need language or an inner monologue for a nervous system to associate a cue with threat and mount a chronic stress response just the right circuitry and chickens have that circuitry.
>>17061636>learned helplessnessThey figured out they were egg laying hens with the sole purpose of being egg laying hens and no hope of becoming anything other than egg laying hens and they dealt with the issue just fine and got over it. They do not appear unhappy.Which is more that can be said about you.>>17061608>it’s a chicken-egg problemWho’s unoriginal now, biatch!
>>17061608Yes humans forget pain. Babies, adults, toddlers, and pre-teens. Young adults and the elderly too.Your point?
>>17061642>>17061645these replies suck
Learned helplessness Before: she's still fighting it, trying to squeeze under cagemates for cover to lay, pushing at the bars, reacting when pecked. During: that stops. She just sits there getting pecked without moving, stress hormones stay chronically elevated instead of spiking and coming back down. After: even when you move her somewhere she can escape or explore, she doesn't bother, same passivity carries over, because "trying does nothing" got wired in and doesn't reset just because the cage did. Same pattern as the old dog learned-helplessness studies, not just people projecting feelings onto her.
