ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
1
2
This spreadsheet is part of ACE's 2024 evaluation of Çiftlik Hayvanlarını Koruma Derneği. It includes our cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) of one of their programs. Given the important limitations of these analyses, we advise caution when interpreting the data. If readers have any questions or comments, please contact ACE's Evaluations Manager, Vincent Mak: vincent.mak@animalcharityevaluators.org

We aimed to estimate Suffering-Adjusted Days (SADs) per dollar for all our cost-effectiveness assessments. To do this, we used Ambitious Impact’s new internal SADs system for making quantitative decisions on animal welfare ideas. This roughly represents the number of days of intense pain felt by each animal. It is essentially a measure of days in pain with various adjustments for:
- Intensity of pain
- Sentience
- Welfare range (i.e., their relative capacity to experience pain and pleasure, in accordance with Rethink Priorities’ ‘Welfare Ranges’ report)

SADs are adjusted to “disabling” levels of pain on the Welfare Footprint pain scale, so one day spent in disabling pain for one human would be equal to one SAD.

This involved various degrees of speculation on the part of our team. Where we felt we could make reasonable and justifiable guesses, we included them in our analysis. Where we felt we were making less justifiable guesses that would have resulted in wildly different outputs, we did not include them and did not continue trying to estimate SADs per dollar as the final unit of our analysis. The reason for taking this approach is that one of ACE’s guiding principles is ​​to follow a rigorous process and use logical reasoning and empirical evidence to make decisions, so while in some circumstances it can be a useful thought experiment to make guesses, we were unwilling to base our assessment of charities on cost-effectiveness analyses that were so highly speculative.

We attempted to independently verify many of the values in this spreadsheet, especially when estimates were provided by the charity. Where it felt reasonable to do so, in cases where we sourced differing opinions on values we opted to adjust the value to fall between the upper and lower values we sourced.

According to AIM’s benchmark, a program with less than 10 SADs averted per dollar has low cost effectiveness, 10-30 SADs averted per dollar has moderate cost effectiveness, 30-100 SADs averted per dollar has moderate-high cost effectiveness, and greater than 100 SADs averted per dollar has very high cost effectiveness.

The SADs estimate only quantifies the direct effects of the cage-free commitments on laying hens, excluding indirect effects such as increased public awareness or decreased consumption of animal products because of campaign actions.

What we provide may be an underestimate for several reasons. First, although we took the average of the upper and lower bounds, the “# years commitments brought forward” value may be closer to the upper bound in Türkiye, where a full cage ban is expected to be further in the future relative to many European countries. Second, ÇHKD has started targeting larger companies now that they have more expertise and confidence in campaigning, so future commitments they win have the potential to be much larger. For example, winning their ongoing Migros campaign would affect five million hens per year, which is an order of magnitude larger than their past wins.
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100