Yeah, I didn’t write an answer earlier but my first thought was that it’s a classical case of confusing easier/simpler with “I can find a one sentence handle”. Not that far from “The gods did it” in terms of hiding the simplicity in language.
The thing is once you decide what suffering means to a chicken—meaning you need to either learn their neuroscience or find a way to determine it from body language—the problem is at least solvable. You would do it the way foxes were tamed—selective breeding with some element of speeding it up by modifying genetics. (Measure if your selection is putting pressure on specific alleles and create gmo chickens with full sets of the alleles)
It’s solvable. While asking people to act against their own personal interests isn’t.
There’s such a thing as goodhards law. Even if you can determine chicken happiness from body language currently, if you optimize for changes in the body language there’s a good chance that the result won’t be what you really want.
I agree it’s difficult. My point is at least it’s possible. Expecting people to collectively take actions against their own personal interests and that of their children (not eating eggs except expensive offset ones) is close to impossible.
CO2 offsetting does show that there’s generally a market for offsetting. It won’t be done by everyone but it still creates good. Expecting some people to engage in the action seems like a good model.
It won’t change the behavior of everyone but as more people move to such eggs politically it becomes easier to increase general standards for treating chickens by law.
As a side note, wouldn’t the easiest fix for this be to genetically modify chickens so they don’t mind being crowded?
How would you want to do that? What genes do you want to change? How do you decide that it’s working?
Yeah, I didn’t write an answer earlier but my first thought was that it’s a classical case of confusing easier/simpler with “I can find a one sentence handle”. Not that far from “The gods did it” in terms of hiding the simplicity in language.
The thing is once you decide what suffering means to a chicken—meaning you need to either learn their neuroscience or find a way to determine it from body language—the problem is at least solvable. You would do it the way foxes were tamed—selective breeding with some element of speeding it up by modifying genetics. (Measure if your selection is putting pressure on specific alleles and create gmo chickens with full sets of the alleles)
It’s solvable. While asking people to act against their own personal interests isn’t.
There’s such a thing as goodhards law. Even if you can determine chicken happiness from body language currently, if you optimize for changes in the body language there’s a good chance that the result won’t be what you really want.
I agree it’s difficult. My point is at least it’s possible. Expecting people to collectively take actions against their own personal interests and that of their children (not eating eggs except expensive offset ones) is close to impossible.
CO2 offsetting does show that there’s generally a market for offsetting. It won’t be done by everyone but it still creates good. Expecting some people to engage in the action seems like a good model.
It won’t change the behavior of everyone but as more people move to such eggs politically it becomes easier to increase general standards for treating chickens by law.
Do you have evidence that co2 offsetting moves the needle in a useful way? I mean are we talking 1 year less warning in 2100?
This is voluntary offsetting where individuals have a cheaper alternative. I drive a prius for the reliability
Carl Shulman wrote a related post here.
I’m sure it’s way easier to produce whatever animal product you want in a lab than to genetically modify the animal to not suffer.