How to Define Affective Experiences for Analysis: Striking the Right Level of Detail Cynthia Schuck-Paim & Wladimir Alonso The Welfare Footprint Framework (WFF) is designed to quantify the welfare impact … Continue reading Defining Affective Experiences
Confounding Factors in Welfare Comparisons of Animal Production Systems Wladimir J Alonso, Cynthia Schuck-Paim Controlled experiments—where variables are deliberately manipulated to establish cause-and-effect relationships—are the gold standard for drawing reliable … Continue reading Confounding Factors in Welfare Comparisons
Borrowing the Knowns and Unknowns Framework to Reveal Blind Spots in Animal Welfare Science Wladimir J Alonso, Cynthia Schuck-Paim There is always a risk of fixating on what we already … Continue reading Borrowing the Knowns and Unknowns Framework to Reveal Blind Spots in Animal Welfare Science
Using the Welfare Footprint Framework to Document Animal Welfare in Legal Settings The Welfare Footprint Framework (WFF) was originally developed to quantify and compare animal welfare impacts across different settings … Continue reading Using the Welfare Footprint Framework to document animal welfare in legal settings
Quantifying Animal Welfare: Our Scientific Director Discusses WFP’s Methodology on Hear This Idea Our Scientific Director, Cynthia, recently joined Fin Moorhouse on Episode 81 of the Hear This Idea podcast … Continue reading Our Scientific Director Discusses WFP’s Methodology on Hear This Idea
Bridging Neuroscience and Philosophy: Exploring Animal Emotions with the Neurophilosopher GPT Tool Wladimir J Alonso, Cynthia Schuck-Paim Understanding where emotions like love, happiness, pain, and suffering arise in the brain … Continue reading Bridging Neuroscience and Philosophy: Exploring Animal Emotions and Welfare with the Neurophilosopher GPT Tool
Opportunity: Consulting Work on Beef Cattle Welfare The Welfare Footprint Project is a scientific initiative aimed at quantifying animal welfare impacts using a meaningful, relatable, and comparable metric: time spent … Continue reading Consulting Opportunity: Beef Cattle Welfare Research
This article examines how AI, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), could soon enable tackling the enormous challenge of systematically quantifying the main sources of suffering across humans and animals.
Beyond Suffering: A Framework for Quantifying Positive Animal Welfare in Individuals and Populations Wladimir J Alonso, Cynthia Schuck-Paim Center for Welfare Metrics, Brazil Main Takeaways The Welfare Footprint Project has … Continue reading Quantifying Positive Animal Welfare in Individuals and Populations
Could Transparency International Be a Model to Improve Farm Animal Welfare? Cynthia Schuck-Paim, Wladimir J Alonso, In a recent article shared on the Effective Altruism Forum, we discuss a new … Continue reading Could Transparency International be a model for improved animal welfare?
Short agony or long ache: comparing sources of suffering that differ in duration and intensity Cynthia Schuck-Paim; Wladimir J. Alonso; Cian Hamilton Summary The Welfare Footprint framework quantifies the cumulative … Continue reading Short agony or long ache? Comparing intensity and duration of pain
Announcing Our New Virtual Office Hours Program We are thrilled to announce the launch of our new initiative, the Welfare Footprint Project’s Office Hours Program. This program is designed to … Continue reading Announcing Our New Virtual Office Hours Program
IASP’s definition of pain is overly human-centric and fails to fully encompass its evolutionary, cognitive, and affective dimensions. It overlooks key aspects of this sensory phenomenon, such as its inherent consciousness, its independence from learning, and its evolutionary role extending beyond mere tissue injury. In an effort to address these shortcomings, we propose the following alternative definition
As a part of our ongoing efforts to quantify animal welfare and enable its incorporation into policy-making, economic and environmental analyses, we have recently launched the first of a series of visualization tools: Pain-Compare. This tool, inspired by the Global Burden of Disease Compare tool, invites users to compare the estimated time in pain an individual endures as a result of welfare challenges experienced. The tool shows multiple challenges experienced under different circumstances, production conditions and by different species.
This article delves into the world of animal emotions, addressing traditional interpretations of ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ choices in judgment bias tests. It discusses whether these choices should be interpreted as directly reflecting an animal’s emotional state, as they may emerge from an animal’s tolerance for risk and propensity for exploration. It suggests that terms like ‘novelty-seeking’ or ‘risk-seeking’ are more appropriate (affectively neutral) descriptors of an animal’s seemingly optimistic choices.
Despite substantial progress over the last decades in the understanding of poultry welfare, critical research gaps still abound
Highlights from the European Symposium on Poultry Welfare 2023
Time is at the heart of how conscious organisms experience life
