Adopting slower-growing breeds can prevent between 15 and 100 hours of “intense pain” in chickens, according to experts writing for the journal Nature Food. They also estimate that this transition costs just US$1 (74p) per kilogram of meat.
In fact, preventing an hour of intense pain in chickens costs less than a hundredth of a cent. “These are not abstract values,” explained Kate Hartcher, senior researcher at the Welfare Footprint Institute in the US and one of the paper’s authors. “They allow us to put animal welfare on the same footing as other policy priorities,” she added.
The calculations were made using the Welfare Footprint Framework (WFF), which “allows animal welfare to be quantified meaningfully and communicated in familiar and comparable units: time spent in negative (operationally referred to as ‘pain’) and positive (‘pleasure’) affective states of varying intensities (‘cumulative pain’ and ‘cumulative pleasure’, respectively).”
Much like a life cycle assessment (LCA), WFF sets analytical boundaries — geography, time period, production system, life phases and living ‘circumstances’ (for example, housing, space and nutrition). ‘Biological outcomes’ (for example, diseases, injuries and physiological imbalances) endured by animals within those boundaries are also mapped, as well as the duration and intensity of each experience. The approach, again much like an LCA, relies on comprehensive reviews of existing knowledge and proxy indicators to estimate how long each “affective experience” lasts and how intense it is likely to be, whether positive or negative.
The experts used WFF to assess the European Chicken Commitment, which includes various targets for food business signatories including the switch to slower-growing bird breeds. Foodservice companies have struggled to meet their commitments under the ECC (also known as the Better Chicken Commitment), especially in relation to the use of slower-growing breeds, with many citing cost pressures.
However, the new research revealed “substantial welfare benefits” from implementing the ECC. For example, slower-growing birds were found to experience at least 33 fewer hours of very intense (disabling plus excruciating) pain than fast-growing birds (per bird) over their lifetime. This is a conservative estimate, the authors noted.
Food companies and the intensive poultry sector also point to studies showing the higher emissions created from rearing slower growing breeds. However, valued at the European Union carbon-allowance price (around €80 per tonne of CO2), this ‘externality’ would cost society roughly an extra US$0.09 per kilogram, or just US$0.00003-0.00005 for each hour of intense pain prevented (equivalent to the emissions from driving a standard car for approximately 15 metres).
In other words, the authors explained, “for the carbon costs of the ECC switch to outweigh the animal-welfare gains, each hour of intense pain experienced by a chicken would need to be valued at only US$0.00003–0.00005. Even at much higher carbon-allowance prices than those considered here, these findings illustrate how alleviating pain in chickens remains exceptionally cheap”.
More broadly, they said their results “challenge the notion that the intensification of animal production, including faster growth rates, can be justified by environmental considerations alone, given the disproportionate and severe animal welfare harms and only minimal variations in environmental indicators”.
They hope that WFF can help “transform the discourse around animal welfare in food system improvements from abstract ethical considerations to empirically grounded comparisons of interventions and their multiple impacts”.
