Thank you to Yuki Takahashi (Animal Rights Center Japan) and Maho Cavalier (The Humane League Japan) for proofreading and corrections. Any and all mistakes my own.

Contents

TL;DR

  • Farm animal welfare is considered a high-priority cause area by the Effective Altruism community due to the sheer scale, neglectedness and tractability of the problem.
  • Layer hens are one of the most farmed animals both globally and in Japan (excluding fish).
  • Battery cages are plausibly extremely bad; some sources have evaluated a life in a battery cage to provide the lowest levels of welfare across all farmed land animals.
  • Over 99% of layer hens in Japan are raised in battery cages, subject to the same terrible conditions as hens overseas.
  • Campaigning for corporations to source eggs from cage-free producers has been historically successful, plausibly affecting 310-570 million layer hens per year globally.
  • A dollar spent on corporate cage-free campaigns can potentially affect between 12-160 years of chicken life.
  • There are organizations still working on generating cage-free pledges from corporations that still have room for further funding; you could potentially have a big impact by donating.

What is Effective Altruism (EA)?

The world has many problems, many different ways of solving these problems, and only limited resources.

The Effective Altruism movement seeks to figure out, of all the possible uses of these resources, which uses produce the most good, impartially considered.1

Why focus on farm animal welfare?

As an input to prioritize cause areas for which resources could be used, EA adopts the following “INT” framework:

Importance: How many people (and sentient beings) are affected by an issue and by how much?

An estimated 50 billion chickens a year (as of 2014) are slaughtered for food – excluding male chicks and unproductive hens killed in egg production. In comparison, each year ~1.5 billion pigs, ~500m sheep, ~440m goats and ~300m cattle (excluding dairy) are slaughtered.23

Intuitively, depriving an animal of basic needs (i.e. keeping a chicken in a cage) could cause immense suffering. There have been some efforts to understand the scale of animal suffering on factory farms:

Neglectedness: What degree of resources are already focused on resolving an issue?

While the scale is immense, the amount of resources dedicated to reducing suffering on factory farms is relatively small. According to Animal Charity Evaluators, 99.6% of animals used and killed in the US exist on farms, but just 0.8% of donations go to charities working on farm animal welfare.4

Comparing donations to animal charities

Tractability: How easy is it to make progress resolving an issue?

With successes seen in the promotion of alternative protein, political advocacy and corporate campaigning among others, there are some plausible ways to make progress.

The focus on battery hens

Number of battery hens - Global

This study suggests that the global population of layer hens is between 6.1 billion (International Egg Commission) and 7.6 billion (FAOSTAT), close to the total human population.

The proportion of layer hens in battery cages depends on location; RSPCA Australia suggests that around 66% of layer hens live in battery cages, while the proportion of layer hens in battery cages in the US has decreased from 94% in 2014 to 80% in 2019.5

Number of battery hens - Japan

According to Animal Rights Center, around 176 million layer hens are raised in Japan. Of these, over 99% of are raised in battery cages6 - equating to over 170 million layer hens.

Welfare of battery hens - Global

Largely referencing Cause Area Report: Corporate Campaigns for Animal Welfare (Pages 20-23)

A life in a battery cage is plausibly extremely bad. Hens are kept in tiny spaces, live on wire racks, are unable to move around, and are kept from engaging in natural behaviours such as foraging, dust-bathing, and socialising.7

There have been attempts to estimate layer hen welfare in battery cages:

  • Charity Entrepreneurship’s weighted animal welfare index gives battery caged hens a -57 out of a scale from -100 to +100, the joint worst score on their scale along with factory farmed turkeys.8 This scale factors in criteria such as death rate/reason, human preference (from behind the veil of ignorance), disease/injury among other factors.9
  • In “Compassion, by the Pound”, F. Bailey Norwood gives caged egg-laying hens a welfare score of -8 (again, the worst score on his scale) and cage-free egg-laying hens a score of +2 (see Table 8.2 on p. 229).10

Welfare of battery hens - Japan

In short, a battery cage in Japan is no different to battery cages elsewhere.

A survey on the state of layer hen farming by the Agriculture and Livestock Industries Corporation yielded the following key points (n=398 farms, 55% response rate):

  • 8.1% of farms raise over 500,000 hens at any one time, 0.5% raise more than 3 million.
  • Of the poultry houses managed across all respondents, 60.2% were open and the remaining 39.8% were windowless.
  • Across all 3,094 poultry houses with cages, just 12 (0.3%) used enriched cages.
  • 240 houses used no cage (free-range or open11)

A breeding space of 430-555 square cm is recommended per poultry by the Japan Livestock Technology Association (2016)12, although it depends on conditions such as the line of the breeding poultry.

The recommended temperature inside a poultry house should be between 20-30 degrees Celsius13, but this depends on whether the structure is a windless poultry house or open poultry house. Another recommendation is to observe the state of the poultry at least once per day14, but there are cases in which many cages are stacked on top of each other (in some cases as many as 14) which would make it very difficult to check the state and temperature of each poultry in each corner.

Challenges specific to Japan

The following was written after chatting with Maho Cavalier (The Humane League Japan).

Farm animal welfare awareness, education and expertise are all lacking in Japan relative to the state of the movement in the West. This is mirrored in Japanese policy-making; in 2020, the Animal Protection Index gave Japan a “G” (the lowest possible) rating for “Protecting Animals used in Farming”.15

Japanese business culture creates some barriers to progress, including a low tolerance for risk and the requirement for group consensus in decision making (see a take on this by McKinsey here).

Elsewhere, neither the Japanese government nor banks/trading houses offer financial incentives to go cage-free. From a practical standpoint, cage-free eggs can also be difficult to obtain and supply to far-out locations.

What can be done to improve the lives of layer hens?

Abolitionism vs Incrementalism

Some approaches to improving animal welfare can be described as abolitionist, based on an understanding that any use of animals is unjustified and should be abandoned entirely.

While we can adopt an abolitionist standpoint as an individual (i.e. by going vegan), it would be extraordinarily difficult to adopt this as a society (i.e. by outlawing meat consumption entirely) given its current state.

An incrementalist approach takes into account the current state and structure of the world, taking a step in the direction of improvement. Such approaches can be applied on a personal level (i.e. flexitarianism), or a society level (i.e. improving the lives of farmed animals). While incrementalist approaches may have to concede that they aren’t completely morally justified since animals are still exploited to some degree16, their likelihood of success means that outcomes could be much better in expectation.

Corporate cage-free campaigns

Animal welfare groups including The Humane League have been engaging in campaigns to request corporations to pledge that, by a specified time, they will source their eggs from layer hens that have not been raised in any type of cage.

Such campaigns have historically been very successful, the graph below showing how many corporations have made pledges to transition to cage-free in the US and internationally.17

Cage-free pledges

The Humane League has played a major role in getting corporations to undertake cage-free pledges and is currently recommended as a top charity by Animal Charity Evaluators.

While very approximate, Lewis Bollard of Open Philanthropy Project gave his subjective 90% confidence intervals for the number of animals impacted by cage-free pledges:18

  • 210–270 million hens used by companies that made cage-free commitments in the U.S.19
  • 100–300 million hens used by companies that made cage-free commitments in other countries.

What is the alternative to battery cages?

Open Philanthropy Project (OPP) believes that most US egg producers will switch to indoor multi-tier aviary systems if they transition away from battery cages.20 After investigating the difference in welfare between battery cages and aviary systems in this article, OPP appears to believe tentatively that aviary systems are better for layer hens for the following reasons:

  • Each hen will be provided with 1.6 to 2.1 times as much space, as well as some degree of ability to perch, forage, dustbathe, and nest (none of which are possible in a battery cage, and all of which appear to be valuable according to hens’ revealed preferences).
  • Although increased mortality rates were seen in aviary systems, producers have a financial incentive to reduce mortality on their own.
  • Only a fraction of layer hens are affected by higher mortality rates, while all receive the behavioural benefits.

How cost effective are cage-free campaigns?

There are two excellent posts on the Effective Altruism forum with relation to this question that are definitely worth reading:

This post from EA-affiliated research organisation Rethink Priorities suggests that each dollar spent on corporate cage-free campaigns (including their supporting activities) plausibly affects 12 to 160 years of chicken life.

It is important to acknowledge difficulty and uncertainty when comparing the effectiveness of organisations working on the welfare of humans vs animals. Quoting from the post below:

“In this model, in most of the most plausible scenarios, THL appears better than AMF. The difference in cost-effectiveness is usually within 1 or 2 orders of magnitude. Under some sets of reasonable assumptions, AMF looks better than THL. Because we have so much uncertainty, one could reasonably believe that AMF is more cost-effective than THL or one could reasonably believe that THL is more cost-effective than AMF.”

Potential for more funding

As of November 2020, Animal Charity Evaluators estimates that The Humane League has room for an additional $0.66 million in 2021 before reaching diminishing returns, and that additional funds would be used to expand the team in Japan.21

Further Information

If the above has sparked or rekindled an interest in improving the lives of layer hens or farmed animals in general, I recommend the following resources:

Animal Charity Evaluators, who aspire to find and promote the most effective ways to help animals.

Open Philanthropy Project, who have done extensive research on farm animal welfare as a cause area and have provided grants to various projects.

Footnotes

  1. Condensed from a paper by Will MacAskill on “The Definition of Effective Altruism”. ↩

  2. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/chart-of-the-day-this-is-how-many-animals-we-eat-each-year/ ↩

  3. Fish are not included in this list and could plausibly be farmed in much higher numbers and in worse conditions. For more information, see: https://www.fishwelfareinitiative.org/ ↩

  4. https://animalcharityevaluators.org/donation-advice/why-farmed-animals/ ↩

  5. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/will-companies-make-good-cage-free-pledges ↩

  6. https://www.hopeforanimals.org/eggs/235/ ↩

  7. https://founderspledge.com/research/fp-animal-welfare Page 20-23 ↩

  8. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dWzh0Se0nhbPxe2Ye3o-tr3BoOBtdiCbMkpPuw2rBFE/edit#gid=14772511 ↩

  9. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VYfWgqCQFmGNrtTyroXYRhrWaTaqFcf4pRHctl6URlw/edit ↩

  10. Relying on information provided by the “How good is The Humane League compared to the Against Malaria Foundation?” blog post. ↩

  11. 平飼い (free-range), 放し飼い (open) - These terms are used in the survey but are not well-defined. ↩

  12. http://jlta.lin.gr.jp/report/animalwelfare/shishin/layers_28.9.pdf ↩

  13. http://jlta.lin.gr.jp/report/animalwelfare/shishin/layers_28.9.pdf ↩

  14. http://jlta.lin.gr.jp/report/animalwelfare/shishin/layers_28.9.pdf ↩

  15. https://api.worldanimalprotection.org/country/japan ↩

  16. If animals are given net positive lives, there could plausibly be a moral case in favour of animal product consumption. In this case, failure to bring into existence billions of animals with good lives would also constitute a huge loss of potential welfare. I note this with extreme uncertainty since I haven’t explored some fundamental questions in depth (i.e. can animals realistically be given good lives at scale/in this economic system? is killing an animal still justified after it has been given a good experience? etc.) ↩

  17. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uNo7qLBn5ErjYwBmd/lewis-bollard-lessons-learned-in-farm-animal-welfare ↩

  18. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/L5EZjjXKdNgcm253H/corporate-campaigns-affect-9-to-120-years-of-chicken-life ↩

  19. The confidence interval is relatively narrow, partly because USDA has independently arrived at similar estimates, probably using a similar methodology. According to a 2018 USDA report, 230 companies that pledged to go cage-free in the U.S. together use about 225 million hens every year, which is nearly 70% of the U.S. flock. ↩

  20. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal-welfare/how-will-hen-welfare-be-impacted-transition-cage-free-housing ↩

  21. https://animalcharityevaluators.org/charity-review/the-humane-league/ ↩