With the French branch of Anima International, we also made similar estimates to evaluate our work with school and university canteens in France. We plan to make a post about this analysis. The results made us decide to look for more effective interventions.
A few points about your post:
Another good example of the difference between the number of animals killed and the number of animals alive at any point in time is with shrimps and insects. This report (Shrimp: The animals most commonly used and killed for food production, see figures 1 and 2) from Rethink Priorities estimated that in 2020 :
(Note that the number of insects farmed may have increased since 2020)
Thanks @William McAuliffe for pointing that out to me.
@Laura Duffy @Bob Fischer
A question about your methodology : If I understand correctly, your placeholders are probability-of-sentience-adjusted, but your key takeaways are not (since they are "conditional on sentience").
Why having adjusted for sentience in your placeholders but not in your key takeaways ?
I think that my message was poorly written. I'm really not a specialist on this question so I don't know if there exists an egg brand that doesn't produce net suffering.
I just wanted to say that the beginning of your post ("I'm not a vegan, but I've long felt troubled by the fact that eggs have such a high suffering-to-calorie ratio — higher, by some calculations, than beef") seemed inaccurate.
I'm french so I have nothing to say directly about your question, but I would like to emphasize that most types of eggs are almost certainly way worse than beef and pig when considering animal suffering.
Using Faunalytics estimates, eating these different dishes creates this quantity of suffering :
And it doesn't account for the relative badness of being a broiler vs a laying hen vs a pig vs a beef.
Also, the Welfare Footprint project estimates that cage-free hens live better lifes than caged hens, but still painful lifes.
Thanks Michael! I was asking myself exactly these questions when reading the article.