Who Can Feel Pain

Country Context

Secondary layer: real country and ADM1 boundaries for viewing where larger human and animal suffering burdens are concentrated.

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Secondary context

Country-level context.

The primary focus of this site is the pain-research visualization. This globe is a secondary context tool: click a country to inspect broader suffering or death burdens by place.

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Boundary source Natural Earth Admin 0, 1:50m

ADM1 source geoBoundaries ADM1 will load on click

Issue sources Secondary context: WDI + OWID + RP + WAI proxies.

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Country Context Globe

This globe is a secondary context layer for comparing country-level suffering or death burdens alongside the animal pain research visualizations.

Order Causes By

These controls only affect the country-context layer. The main purpose of the site remains the pain research visualized above.

Whole-world top 10 across humans and animals

Farmed and wild animal suffering

This panel is secondary to the event-level pain visualization. Human-country rankings combine recurring EA priorities with broader World Bank burden indicators. Animal cards use country slaughter, aquaculture, land-area wild estimates, and a Wild Animal Initiative direct insect benchmark plus Rethink Priorities sentience and welfare-range distributions as burden proxies rather than full moral-weight outputs.

Current Animal Pain Research

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.

Human anchors

If a human felt pain at this intensity

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.

Moral Weight Notes

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.

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.

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.

Country context

Secondary burden map

Human issues combine recurring EA priorities with broader World Bank country indicators. Animal and insect issues use Our World in Data country proxies, World Bank land and agricultural-land data, and a Wild Animal Initiative insect benchmark instead of invented regional prose, while Bentham’s Bulldog is used to frame the current animal per-being numbers as conservative.

Geography

Secondary globe 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.