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Social Choice and Welfare
Published in: Social Choice and Welfare 3/2024

22-12-2023 | Original Paper

Animals and social welfare

Author: Romain Espinosa

Published in: Social Choice and Welfare | Issue 3/2024

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Abstract

I propose a framework to evaluate the social gains from policies regarding animals. The model considers both the welfare of animals and humans. The gains in animal welfare are estimated by considering the violations of the animals’ fundamental freedoms weighted for each species. I apply this framework to twenty policy proposals targeting wild, domestic, farmed, and laboratory animals. Although the policies benefit from widespread popular support in France (the annual willingnesses-to-pay range between 15 and 39 Euros per person per year), I show that they have very heterogeneous impacts on animal welfare (valued at between 0.013 and 3618 Euros per person per year). I further show that humans’ willingness-to-pay for policies improving animal welfare is a poor predictor of the effective impact on animal welfare of these policies. I conclude that it is essential to value animal welfare per se in cost-benefit analyses in order to determine the set of welfare-increasing policies.
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Appendix
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Footnotes
1
Source: Eurobarometer, 2016.
 
5
I assume here that term \(h(\omega )\) focuses on the selfish part of the utility of other humans to avoid interdependent utilities [see for instance the Love and Spaghetti puzzle (Bergstrom 1989)].
 
6
Fleurbaey and Leppanen (2021) also criticize the use of price mechanisms to elicit individual welfare in the case of human well-being. They invoke the argument of circularity: prices are both used as a variable to reach an equilibrium and as a valuation tool for utility. So, prices are both used to reflect utilities and to solve a market with conflicting utilities.
 
7
Fleurbaey and Leppanen (2021) further distinguish between the two concepts of harm and suffering. I here focus only on the inclusion of animal welfare in the SWF, and do not discuss the potential harm to non-sentient beings.
 
8
Wong (2016) further considers the duration of life as an element of the SWU. However, my framework here focuses on yearly costs and benefits, so that I will mostly overlook this part of the SWU function. I will briefly discuss longevity in Sect. 5.5 below.
 
10
See below for a discussion of the limitations of the Five Freedoms framework.
 
11
An important contribution is Teng et al. (2018) who use the Five Domain framework that I discuss in the Discussion section below. However, the model is developed for canine diseases only. The main issue for generalization is that the paper trade off quality and quantity of life, which is an important point, but which necessitates taking into account the lifespan of each species under consideration. It is however a major question for future works in the field.
 
12
Another limitation of Weathers et al. (2020) concerns the possible cognitive biases that might affect the answers to the survey. For instance, scope insensitivity can lead respondents to undervalue the welfare gains in situations with a large number of animals. For instance, the report welfare gains of saving 2000 animals would not be equal to twice the welfare gains of saving 1000 animals. It is therefore important to value animal welfare at the individual level.
 
13
For instance, two people may agree that the violation score is two points lower, but not on initial and final welfare. One may think that we have moved from moderate to no violation (2 violation points avoided), while the other that we have moved from severe to mild violation (again, 2 violation points avoided).
 
14
Assuming that death is equivalent to all violations being severe allows for welfare statuses to which death is preferable. This is also the case for QALYs. In Espinosa and Treich (2021), a majority of people consider that death is preferable to industrial farming for some animals.
 
15
Note that the lower bound depends on the specification of the equivalence of death, as this determines the reference point 0.
 
16
The question of sentience as a binary construct has recently been discussed in Birch (2018) and Lee (2020).
 
19
Survey by the polling institute IFOP on a representative sample of the French population, July 29th 2020.
 
20
Previous work has discussed how the hypothetical nature of WTP surveys may lead participants to overstate their WTP (Carlsson et al. 2007). While the literature has shown mixed evidence of this hypothetical bias (Carlsson and Martinsson 2001; Cameron et al. 2002; Johansson-Stenman and Svedsäter 2012; Lusk and Hudson 2004; Alfnes and Steine 2005), Clark et al. (2017) find in their meta-analysis that cheap-talk scripts help reduce stated WTPs, so that they can mitigate this potential bias.
 
21
The survey contained two elicitation formats (random assignment). More generally, the literature on contingent valuation method distinguishes four types of elicitation methods (Fonta et al. 2010). The open-ended approach, the bidding-game technique, the payment card approach, and the dichotomous choice format. The dichotomous choice format conveys very little information about the respondents’ WTP as they only answer whether they are willing to pay a given amount of money. The bidding-game technique is a succession of dichotomous choices. It yields more information but it is not implementable for a significant number of policies as we have here. The payment card approach allows participants to choose the preferred option in a list of choices. It has the advantage of helping participants choose by offering more context but it is sensitive to range bias, i.e., the cards that the researcher proposed (Heinzen and Bridges 2008). The open-ended technique does not influence respondents but gives less context to the participants. Some works find that the open-ended technique leads to more conservative estimates (Johannesson et al. 1991; Whynes et al. 2004) while others find the contrary (Heinzen and Bridges 2008).
 
24
The general motivation for the hybrid method is that several elicitation methods might aim to assess the same underlying phenomenon but might yield different results. When there is no objective way of discriminating which method yields the most accurate estimates, combining the results of different elicitation methods is expected to limit the risks associated with one specific method. In our case, while the payment card approach is likely to influence participants, the open-ended questionnaire leaves them unbiased. However, while the open-ended questionnaire gives little context to help participants report a WTP, the payment card system gives them a more structured framework.
 
25
I winsorize here data above 10 Euros to limit the influence of extreme values in the answers. For instance, some participants report indeed being willing to pay 1000 Euros yearly to have a single policy implemented. Overall, between 22.7 and 33.6% of the answers in the open-ended questionnaire are winsorized. I show below a robustness check in which I change the winsorizing threshold to 20 and 30 Euros. In the 30-Euro case, the shares of winsorized observations range from 13.5 to 21.5%.
 
26
I estimate a model with demographics and controls in the Supplementary Materials: see below.
 
27
Source: 2020—IFOP poll for OABA.
 
28
I use the French QALY figures as this is the country of application. Téhard et al. (2020) estimate a QALY to be worth between 147,093 and 201,398 Euros. I take a conservative value of 147,000 Euros.
 
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Metadata
Title
Animals and social welfare
Author
Romain Espinosa
Publication date
22-12-2023
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in
Social Choice and Welfare / Issue 3/2024
Print ISSN: 0176-1714
Electronic ISSN: 1432-217X
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-023-01495-x

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