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Release mode
The default view reads the frozen 2026-05-31.atlas.2 release contract. Live overlay mode may query public upstream sources at interaction time and keeps those values outside the immutable release rows.
Uses static release files, checksums, schemas, coverage status, and cached local boundary assets. No World Bank, OWID, geoBoundaries, or WorldPop request is started for rankings in this mode.
May load current public rows from World Bank, OWID, geoBoundaries, and WorldPop for exploration. These browser-time values are labeled as overlays and are not release measurements.
Snapshot mode is active. The atlas is using immutable release artifacts and local static assets.
Release coverage
World plus 239 country boundary features are listed in the release place index.
Brazil and India currently have canonical country measurement profiles.
Direct welfare evidence is not yet represented as frozen country or ADM1 measurements.
Release manifests, checksums, schemas, and coverage JSON identify this snapshot.
Atlas place search
Start with a country or loaded ADM1 region. The equal-area atlas view is the default, and the search field plus tables provide the complete non-map path.
Loading country boundaries...
Equal Earth thematic map with country boundaries and optional ADM1 province or state boundaries. Switch to the globe only when rotation helps exploration. Selecting a place updates the ranked issue cards and the data table beside the map. The search field and data tables are the complete non-map path.
Explore by Event
These visualizations foreground current Welfare Footprint Institute research on time spent in different pain categories. The current charts focus on the best-developed event-level literature, especially laying hens, broilers, broiler breeders, and poultry slaughter. They do not claim a perfect human-animal conversion; they use the Institute’s own human-facing pain definitions as anchors.
Human anchors
Long pain loads
Different rows cover different time windows. Each label states whether the estimate is for one bird’s life, one hen’s laying period, or one breeder’s life.
Acute agony at slaughter
These rows compare common broiler stunning systems from the moment of placement in the system until loss of consciousness.
What to keep in mind
The Welfare Footprint method measures cumulative negative affective states in time units. It is useful for comparing harms, but it is not a claim that one hour of chicken pain is morally identical to one hour of human pain. At the moment, the strongest event-level visualization layer is still poultry-heavy rather than a full cross-species atlas.
Methods and Glossary
These country cards are informed by the Moral Weight Project, but they are not full moral-weight or DALY-equivalent calculations. They are country-level suffering-pressure proxies built to be usable on a static site.
What this is
PainMap visualizes public research estimates and burden proxies so readers can compare events, source claims, and place context without treating the map as a final moral ranking.
What this is not
This public site does not collect symptom reports, patient records, clinician accounts, or regulated health data. Any future workflow like that should live behind a separate compliant service boundary.
Glossary
ADM1 means first-level administrative regions such as states or provinces. Welfare range is an uncertain estimate of possible welfare capacity. Burden proxies are directional estimates, not settled DALY-equivalent outputs.
The most important practical update from these sources is restraint: do not treat neuron counts as the whole story, do not multiply octopuses by nine minds, and do not dismiss animal-heavy conclusions merely because they feel uncomfortable.
Data and Sources
The source layer is grouped by purpose so a reader can trace a claim to the relevant dataset, research project, or methodological note without scanning one undifferentiated link dump.
Welfare Footprint
The main visualizations use Welfare Footprint Institute estimates of time spent in annoying, hurtful, disabling, and excruciating pain across specific production systems and slaughter methods.
Moral Weight
Rethink Priorities and the Moral Weight Project are used to frame uncertainty about sentience, welfare range, and why simpler animals should not automatically be assumed to feel only faint pain.
Place atlas
Human issues combine recurring EA priorities with broader World Bank country indicators. Animal issues now aggregate live country inputs into three buckets: factory-farmed animals, non-insect wild animals, and insects. Those buckets use Our World in Data and Fishcount country proxies, World Bank land and agricultural-land data, and a Wild Animal Initiative insect benchmark instead of invented regional prose.
Geography
Natural Earth and geoBoundaries keep the secondary map geographically accurate down to country and ADM1 boundaries instead of relying on hand-drawn regional blobs.
Exports
Public static exports include canonical place measurements, a provenance registry, release manifests, canonical place GeoJSON, DCAT metadata, and an OpenAPI 3.1 contract for read-only reuse.
About and Policies
Privacy Policy
PainMap is a public, static research visualization. It does not ask for names, emails, health symptoms, accounts, or payment information. First-party telemetry is limited to route, dataset, place-selection, and performance events listed in the public analytics vocabulary.
Terms
Content is provided for public research, education, and advocacy analysis. It is not medical, veterinary, legal, investment, or policy advice, and the numbers should be read with the stated assumptions and uncertainty.
Accessibility Statement
Core charts and ranking views include table equivalents, native controls, visible labels, keyboard search paths, status updates, and source text. Remaining accessibility issues should be reported through the contact link.
Editorial Policy
Method notes should identify the source, model assumption, last meaningful update, and whether a value is measured directly or inferred from a proxy. Major model changes should be reflected in the changelog.
Contact
Send corrections, source updates, accessibility reports, or governance questions through the public project issue tracker before reusing sensitive claims in public materials.
Changelog
Added start paths, explicit policy surfaces, metadata, glossary framing, keyboard/search parity notes, and table equivalents for primary charts and rankings.