Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare

by F. Bailey Norwood, Jayson Lusk

For much of human history, most of the population lived and worked on farms but today, information about livestock is more likely to come from children's books than hands-on experience. When romanticized notions of an agrarian lifestyle meet with the realities of the modern industrial farm, the result is often a plea for a return to antiquated production methods. The result is a brewing controversy between animal activist groups, farmers, and consumers that is currently being played out in ballot boxes, courtrooms, and in the grocery store. Where is one to turn for advice when deciding whether to pay double the price for cage-free eggs, or in determining how to vote on ballot initiates seeking to ban practices such as the use of gestation crates in pork production or battery cage egg production? At present, there is no clear answer. What is missing from the animal welfare debate is an objective approach that can integrate the writings of biologists and philosophers, while
providing a sound and logical basis for determining the consequences of farm animal welfare policies. What is missing in the debate? Economics.

This book journeys from the earliest days of animal domestication to modern industrial farms. Delving into questions of ethics and animal sentience, the authors use data from ingenious consumers' experiments conducted with real food, real money, and real animals to compare the costs and benefits of improving animal care. They show how the economic approach to animal welfare raises new questions and ethical conundrums, as well as providing unique and counter-intuitive results.

Genres: Economics, Philosophy, Animals, Vegan

424 pages, Hardcover

First published April 28, 2011

Reviews

[Connor Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a foundational text in the economics of animal welfare, and it would do anyone interested in the topic well to give it a read. I found it a rich source of information on modern animal agriculture practice, consumer preferences over animal welfare (in the grocery store and at the ballot box), and the relevant considerations for diet and legislative change. I will admit I disagree with quite a lot in this book, but I think the framing is useful. At the very least, the book helped me more clearly articulate my own views. The authors are careful to frame any of the conclusions as tentative and accept that others might reach different conclusions. I am going to highlight my points of disagreement so that I have a reference when people ask me about the book.

First, why is returning to older methods of production a relevant counterfactual? Why are the cost premiums for, e.g., cage-free production static? Technological change is largely responsible for the current equilibrium, so why would we exclude it in prospective work? Further, technological change consists of both a rate and a direction. I think the latter fact is underrated. Admittedly, the short-run analyses of the book yield important consideration for the political economy of diet change and regulation. However, I suspect any consequent shifts in the direction and rate of technological change will prove far more important in the long-run.

I think the authors are a little too quick to hold everything to a total utilitarian standard that treats happiness and suffering symmetrically (I am sure that I am butchering terms here). I am most amenable to this view, but I think it's misleading to focus on the implications of this view alone. For example, on p. 356, a negative utilitarian could reasonably reach different conclusions than a positive utilitarian on the question of bringing happy animals into existence. The negative utilitarian's argument is not illogical, contrary to the authors' suggestion. Rather, it's applying a different standard. On p. 237, the authors seems to be judging people who take a rights-based approach by their preferred utilitarian standard. Again, I actually agree with the authors' standard, but I think reasonable people can and do disagree. Why judge them with a yardstick their worldview rejects?

On p. 234, the authors seem to imply that the total amount of time an animal lives is relevant only, or at least primarily, for habituation, i.e., changing the average quality of life while alive. If you're taking the total utilitarian approach, why reject (by omission) that lifespan matters? Life-years seem like the relevant unit, rather than lifetimes. Extending misery or extending bliss matter for aggregate welfare.

"To require that we must care about every human or other sentient being would likely mean that we would meaningfully care about no one" (p. 187). I reject this claim wholeheartedly. I do not think my care for someone on the other side of the world or a nonhuman animal in any way detracts from my care of those around me. If anything, I suspect it improves this care. I suspect I am taking Lusk and Norwood out of context unfairly here, so I don't want to dwell on this point.

Lastly, I think the discussion of labelling (around p. 329) was a bit incomplete. First, you must consider some unintended consequences of a private labelling scheme. Given that acquiring information on production practice is costly for consumers, labelling without enforcement (so that labelling is simply cheap talk) can lead to a babbling equilibrium. Brands find labels that sell well but require little disruption to production practice. In my experience in consumer foods, brands seem to trade off these production cost changes and sales impacts with an eye towards maximizing profit. I don't know why we'd expect them to behave any differently. Further, the gasoline and computer analogies are inappropriate, as consumers will learn about the quality of these products through experience (and then share this information with others). When it is more difficult to learn about the relevant attribute, how can you develop a reputation for quality?

[Ike Sharpless · Rating 2 out of 5]

So I haven't read most of this yet, but I can already tell it's going to be frustrating. It does a good job of clearing up a lot of the misconceptions about 'factory farming' bred from an incompletely theorized world-view favoring primitivism against the new or the merely technological. And there's a lot of useful data on actual treatment of animals, and on consumers willingness to pay (WTP) for various material and nonmaterial goods. But at root this ag econ view is just too uninterested in taking the deeply problematic implications of nonhuman animal sentience seriously. This is closely related to my academic research, so I'll come back to this one (yay for year-long library checkouts!), but it makes for frustrating reading. For me, at least. If you're a speciesist or strict cognitivist who's interested in restricting this debate to human preferences and to assuming a largely neoliberal conception about the role of markets and the state, this might just be your cup of tea.

[Daniel Hageman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book takes one of the most seemingly impartial and objective looks at the issue of farm animal welfare I've yet to come across, particularly as an issue in practice rather than mere principle. While the justifications for the relevant market-elasticity calculations did seem limited in for a given individual diet, the authors also went on to state within the same 'Chapter 8: Your Eating Ethics', on p. 224, that "When it comes to the well-being of animals, it is the total consumption of the food products that matters, not any one person's particular choices."

This was claimed just after outlining the extent to which total production of a product falls given an individual's willingness to forgo 1lb of said product, and just prior to p. 233, where the number of animals associated with production of said food was outlined. Hence, it was not clear to me where the authors stood on this matter.

They need to clarify whether or not, with respect to animal well-being, an individual's purchase of a given product does indeed percolate down to have tractable effects on an animal that may/may not be brought into existence. Or, are the numbers calculated here based off the assumption that each individual's consumption has an effect proportional the total consumption, which as a whole has an obviously tractable effect? An apt analogy might be a situation where it's said that the voter of a winning candidate is 0.00X responsible for the victory, as proportional to the number of votes said candidate won by, even though their vote, had it not been cast, would have still left the same candidate as the resultant victor. This sort of consideration is more serious for the issue at hand, rather than issues like recycling and climate change, since the latter is based on scaled effects, and the former two scenarios are based on binary outcomes, i.e. animal brought into existence/candidate winning an election.

I'm hoping to reach out to the authors about this inquiry, as their textbook titled 'Agricultural Marketing and Price Analysis' also does not seem to address the issue clearly..and will update this review if/when I hear back from then.

Aside from this, their history of animal agriculture, studies to evaluate human value of farm animals, and even their touching on the philosophy of it all, was very thorough. I think the 'happy cow' argument gets taken a bit too far, and presupposes the non-agent centered view of morality/well-being, but I certainly can't fault them for avoid a discussion of antinatalism, if that's what they were doing.

All in all, great coverage of a multitude of issues, for anyone who wants to seriously get into the weeds on this topic.

[Jacob Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I appreciated this book for two main reasons:

1. It provides validation for an important assumption made by many vegetarians/vegans: that our individual purchasing decisions affect how animals are treated.

2. It gives a better defense of current animal agriculture practices than I’ve encountered before.

1. Does it matter what you buy?

Assume, for the moment, that you believe the way animals are currently treated in our food production system is severely immoral. Does this imply you should avoid buying animal food products? Would that actually help the animals, or be a purely symbolic gesture? You might doubt that an industry which slaughters billions of chickens each year is going to slaughter any fewer just because little old you decides to abstain from the nuggies.

Bailey and Norwood are economists specializing in animal agriculture, so they seem like the right people to address this question. And they seem confident:

a permanent decision to reduce meant consumption (1) does ultimately reduce the number of animals on the farm and the amount of meat produced (2), but it has less than a 1-to-1 effect on the amount of meat produced.[1]

The degree of effect varies because “the magnitude of the demand and supply elasticities—the degree of which consumers and producers are sensitive to price changes”[2] varies for different food items. (Consumer price sensitivity matters because when enough people refrain from buying a product, the price will go down, and the new lower price point may make other people willing to buy more of it. The more price-sensitive other consumers are, the more an abstinence on your part will be offset by an increased indulgence on their part.)

Bailey and Norwood use elasticity estimates to calculate the net effect of an individual buying less of various animal products; I’ve copied the table below from the book.[3] Notice that even in the case where the ratio of production-decrease to consumption-decrease is lowest (milk, 56%) it’s still more than half. My takeaway is that individual choices do have a large impact.



2. How badly are animals treated?

When I first read about animal welfare issues several years ago, I was shocked by some of the horrible practices that were described. I was also surprised at how difficult it was to find a serious rebuttal to those descriptions—I couldn’t really find anyone who seemed informed who was saying no, it’s not actually like that.

These authors do seem informed, and they have a more nuanced take. They discuss a number of considerations for each type of animal in detail, which I’m not going to try to summarize here, but here’s the ten-thousand-foot view from the end of the book:

Although animal well-being can be enhanced in most typical animal production systems, we are quite certain that the overall level of animal welfare is higher in the broiler, dairy, and beef industries than the egg, pork, and veal industries. Beef cattle in particular experience high levels of well-being. A movement to improve the lives of egg-laying hens or sows would substantially reduce animal suffering, whereas an improvement in the beef industry would only make happy animals happier—both are praiseworthy, of course.[4]

The following table from the book[5] puts numbers on one of the author’s judgments—the other author “is more likely … to believe that chickens and hogs in conventional systems are better off alive than dead”[6]. Negative numbers indicate a belief that the “[a]nimal is better off dead, not being born and raised for food”[7]. (Note that the book provides this mainly as an example; they want readers to make their own assessments about what the appropriate scores are.)



The high score for beef fits with my expectations, but I’m surprised by the relatively positive assessment of chicken and dairy production. For broiler chickens, the book mentions that painful issues related to the birds’ legs are widespread (“About 28 percent of birds were assigned a gait score of 3 or higher”; in an experiment, “Birds with a gait score of 3 or higher consumed the food with pain relievers at a significantly higher rate”[8]). And “between 14 percent and 25 percent of all dairy cows suffer from some form of lameness”[9]. I remain skeptical that the animals’ lives are overall good in light of these and other issues, but I’m much less confident than I was before and need to research this more.

One thing the book intentionally avoids discussing (I’m not sure whether it was factored into the scores in the table above or not—the table is from a later chapter) is what happens at the end of animals’ lives:

In this chapter, we tended to focus primarily on the everyday life of farm animals. Animal advocacy groups will often mention a myriad other issues such as the transportation and slaughter of livestock. These issues, while important, are temporary experiences for the animal. We sought to describe the everyday life of farm animals, not the single worst days.[10]

I feel this underestimates the ethical importance of what happens on those “worst days”. Consider the following from this Humane League article:

Animals can be held captive in transport trucks for long periods of time. In the US, truck drivers are only required to stop animal transport trucks once every 28 hours, and this law is seldom enforced. In order to cut costs and maximize the amount of animals that can be transported at once, animals are often deprived of food and water for the entirety of their journey—up to 48 hours at a time—pushing them to the limits of how much starvation and dehydration they can endure. Can you imagine the stress of traveling for two days without stopping for food or water?

And the following from another article:

Given how many animals are stunned the wrong way, leaving them conscious through the worst moments of their lives, it’s safe to say that thousands upon thousands do feel pain, not only before the slaughter but during it. When their throats are slashed. When their bodies are boiled. When their limbs are severed.

3. Labels

Does buying “organic” help the animals? Bailey and Norwood give a qualified yes:

Animals produced under organic systems probably experience higher levels of well-being than animals in non-organic systems, but the difference might not be as marked as many believe.[11]

Some of the factors that keep organic from being purely positive include:

Organic production prohibits the use of antibiotics (both therapeutic and subtherapeutic), which almost certainly lowers well-being as more animals become sick without access to antibiotic treatment. Animals that become sick on organic farms are either allowed to remain sick and potentially die or are segregated, given antibiotics, and are sold at a lower price in the non-organic market. Too many sick animals, we believe, do not receive proper treatment because the farmers fear the loss in income they will experience in having to sell the animal on the non-organic market.[12]

And:

…organic producers have a difficult time meeting their animals’ dietary needs, and the animals suffer. A number of animal scientists in the US feel organic production is cruel for this reason.[13]

If “organic” isn’t a great indicator of welfare, is there another label that is? The authors speak very highly of Animal Welfare Approved .

There’s also the question of whether producers actually adhere to the requirements of a label, or merely claim to. Bailey and Norwood indicate that in their experience the labels can indeed be trusted:

A final comment about the organic, AWA, and other such labels is warranted relating to consumer skepticism over the possibility of producers “cutting corners” by using practices that lower costs while still looking to sell at a premium under a brand. This skepticism is not entirely unfair. We have visited hog farms selling under a brand claiming to sell antibiotic-free pork, but the farmers told us plainly that antibiotics are used. We have visited hog farms claiming to produce under standards dictated by one of the humane labels but it was transparent the operation did not meet the standards… However, these are just a few exceptions to the many farms we have visited that are in compliance with the standards. Both the AWA and organic standards require routine farm inspections, which does help to minimize non-compliance.[14]

[1] F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson Lusk, Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 222–23, bold added but italics in original.

[2] Ibid., 222.

[3] Ibid., 223. I’m pretty confident “0.91 Lbs” was a typo, so I corrected it in pen in my copy.

[4] Ibid., 354.

[5] Ibid., 229.

[6] Ibid., 227.

[7] Ibid., 225.

[8] Ibid., 131.

[9] Ibid., 148.

[10] Ibid., 165.

[11] Ibid., 158.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., 160.

(crosspost)

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a strange book.
I used to be a vegetarian, but in 2015 started eating ethically raised meat. My thinking was that if the world became vegetarian (either through moral choice or maybe if it becomes cheap enough to grow artificial meat in vats), then most farm animals will cease to exist. While that isn't necessarily a bad thing, neither do I think it's morally laudable; it's just kind of a gray area. So I came around to thinking that if an animal lives a life worth living, it's not wrong to eat it (although it's not a moral duty either). My demand for its meat brings it into an existence it wouldn't otherwise have, and if that existence is good, then it's not wrong to eat meat.

This book takes this view very seriously. Indeed, it presents arguments that are even stronger. For example, if life in the wild is miserable, "it is possible that the only way animals can enter this world and to experience more happiness than suffering is for them to be under the stewardship of humans." Whoa.

It's also a great wealth of information on nearly everything under the sun on this issue: How do we raise animals? Why? What does is mean for non-humans to be happy? Are animals sentient? What alternative ways of raising animals is best for their welfare? What do philosophers think about all this? What do consumers think? What about consumers who have been educated on the topic? What should the government do? What has it done?

But in other ways, it's a self-parody of how you expect economists to approach this issue. They quantify everything!
Are animals sentient? Here's a 5-question checklist to help solve that issue. (Answer: probably a bit)
Which production method is best for animal welfare? Here is one of the author's scoring, ranging from -10 to 10 (anything negative is a life not worth living!).
Should I stop eating cage eggs? Here is an algorithm to calculate the moral value of that decision!
How much do consumers care about animal welfare? The average American would pay $341.53 to move all chickens in the US from a cage to cage-free system.

Because I'm an economist, I found this kind of charming. Hey, you can sit around and debate all day, but at some point you have to make a decision and these guys are just being explicit about how they weigh competing claims. But I wonder if non-economists would find this whole approach batty.

[Adom · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was pretty unimpressed with this book. There was a lot of what came across as sloppy thinking, and overall the content was surprisingly basic for what looked to be a book by and for specialists. Much of the early chapters consisted of a catalogue of the relevant philosophical and economic questions of the sort that anyone interested in the topic could generate, with vague stabs at answers that were similarly weak.

In the end I skimmed some chapters that didn't look interesting to me.

I did appreciate the exploration of how individual consumers affect demand, which was what originally drew me to the book, though I notice now that I still don't have a very clear sense of how they came up with their numbers.

Anyway, I did come away with a few thoughts. Like how, even though it is cheaper in land/etc. to eat vegetables than to feed them to animals and eat the animals, that doesn't mean this is true of realistic veg diets vs meat diets, which may include certain crops that are especially resource intensive. This doesn't seem like a crux, but it was silly not to think of it.

Also, I ended up annoyed when they assumed with little evidence that, for example, crate free pork creates happy positive sum pigs, which I think is unlikely, (and then chastised animal rights activists for illogically coming to different conclusion). However, this conclusion on their part did cause me to take more seriously the value (this should be high priority) of figuring out whether they are positive value or not). Hmm, I realize while writing this that I'm not actually confident in my disagreement with them. I'll have to look into that.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read on animal welfare. It wasn't exactly a fun and exciting read (I had to force myself through it), but I learned a lot. Loved that there was a fairly deep analysis. I loved that there were metrics, and that the authors got information from a lot of different people. This book had a very different style than most books about animal rights, welfare, or advocacy, which are far too often strong on passion and weak on scientific/academic rigor. I wish that everyone involved in animal advocacy read this book.

[Cullen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, balanced look at the farmed animal welfare debate. I think anyone on any side of this issue can gain from reading this. While I disagree with some of the authors' assessments about overall happiness of farmed animals, I have no doubt they are better informed than me and are also sincere in their attempt to be objective. The book also implicitly shows the shortcomings of economic analysis of this issue.

[Geoffrey Yip · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cool application of consumer valuation for improving animal welfare that's weighed down by textbook-style explanations of economics and hit-or-miss side treks into philosophy and biology. Definitely something to skim.

[Trey Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I were to teach a book on farm animal welfare, this would be the on the required reading list. Granted, thinking like an economist can offend some, but this book makes a compelling case for thinking about tradeoffs in the context of farm animals.