Human anchors
Start here
Choose the shortest path into the atlas
Place first
Search a country or province
Use the non-map search path to update the atlas layers, issue cards, and synchronized data table.
Atlas guide
Browse the layer model
See which layers are direct, modeled, proxy, or boundary data before comparing places.
Researchers
Audit and export data
Open JSON, CSV, GeoJSON, DCAT, OpenAPI, license, uncertainty, and source-vintage records.
Scope Public research visualization, not medical or veterinary advice
Data posture Static public data and runtime public APIs; no personal health data collection
Updated May 31, 2026
Atlas place search
What drives pain here?
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.
Equal-area atlas view
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
How much pain do animals feel from different events?
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.
Long pain loads
Hours or days of pain added by a system
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
Seconds before loss of consciousness
These rows compare common broiler stunning systems from the moment of placement in the system until loss of consciousness.
What to keep in mind
Why the numbers matter
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
How to read the animal numbers
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
Research synthesis and exploration
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
No personal-data product
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
Key terms
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
Source groups and provenance
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
Event-level pain research
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
How to interpret pain across animals
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
Place atlas burden layers
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
Atlas boundary layer
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
Dataset and API contract
Public static exports include place measurements, a provenance registry, representative GeoJSON, DCAT metadata, and an OpenAPI 3.1 contract for read-only reuse.
About and Policies
Trust, governance, and boundaries
Privacy Policy
No personal data collection on this static site
PainMap is a public, static research visualization. It does not ask for names, emails, health symptoms, accounts, or payment information. If privacy-first analytics are added later, they should be disclosed here before launch.
Terms
Research context, not advice
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
Visuals have text and table equivalents
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
Sources, caveats, and update discipline
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
Corrections and source questions
Send corrections, source updates, accessibility reports, or governance questions through the public project issue tracker before reusing sensitive claims in public materials.
Changelog
May 31, 2026
Added start paths, explicit policy surfaces, metadata, glossary framing, keyboard/search parity notes, and table equivalents for primary charts and rankings.