Farm Animal Lives

The fact that people commonly consume meat from pigs, cattle, chickens, and so on means that there are many more of these animals on earth than there otherwise would be. (The statistics from Sapiens repeated in the immediately prior post suggest populations consisting of "about a billion sheep, a billion pigs, more than a billion cattle, and more than 25 billion chickens.") This fact is sometimes presented as a sort of defense of factory farming and human consumption of animal products: the large effective demand for animals ensures more animals are given the opportunity to live. To be an effective defense of meat consumption, however, at a minimum the "life under current conditions is better than no life" claim would have to be true. For pigs that are kept in small crates all their lives, or for chickens crammed into unholy warehouses and subjected to anesthetic-free beak trimmings, the claim itself is at least doubtful.

But if we grant that, for farmed animals, "life under current conditions is better than no life," does that admission serve to justify the pain and torture and early deaths humans inflict upon them? We surely would not think so with human victims: who would endorse, for human children, a "husbandry regime" supposedly justified by the "logic" that "it is OK if we torture you and kill you at a young age, as long as the life that we subject you to is marginally better than not having been born"? [In the background (or foreground) of many discussions of animal welfare is the question, is it morally OK to treat non-human animals with less consideration than we provide to our conspecifics? In arguing "yes," sometimes the points raised are, like the positive-value-of-life claim, surely unacceptable when applied to humans. These points are textbook examples of "begging the question," supporting unequal consideration for non-human animals with logic that would not be convincing when applied to humans: such logic can only be convincing in the case of non-human animals if you already accept that they do not merit equal consideration.]

Another point is that humans don't seem to put any moral stock in trying to maximize the number of positive-net-value lives brought into being. People with substantial resources don't feel compelled to have tons of children, even though additional children would be likely to have good lives; nor do they continually breed their pets to bring more lives into being. Is such reluctance to produce more beings capable of worthwhile lives itself immoral? If not, then is there anything immoral about the reduction of the number of farm animals on earth that would come with diminished demand for animal products?

A variation on this theme is sometimes called "the logic of the larder"; I hope to return to larder-logic in the future...

On _Sapiens_ by Yuval Noah Harari

I was a latecomer to Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, a long-running bestseller, but better late than never. One of the surprises of the book for me was the inclusion of significant material about the mistreatment of non-human animals.

In discussing the domestication of animals, Harari (page 92) provides current population counts: "about a billion sheep, a billion pigs, more than a billion cattle, and more than 25 billion chickens." But the process of domestication was cruel and these animals suffer from profound misery (page 93): "...it's hard to avoid the impression that for the vast majority of domesticated animals, the Agricultural Revolution was a terrible catastrophe [pages 96-97]."

The Industrial Revolution doubled down on the horrors. Harari (pages 342-346) provides some of the details of factory farm practices for hens and pigs. Here's one sentence on milk production: "Many dairy cows live almost all of their allotted years inside a small enclosure; standing, sitting and sleeping in their own urine and excrement [page 342]." Those "allotted years" are quite short relative to natural lifespans, too, though perhaps that is a blessing under the human-dictated circumstances.

Harari notes animal welfare again in the brief afterword. Here's the penultimate sentence: "We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction [page 444]."

My copy of Sapiens includes a short Q&A with Harari at the end. He is asked how he was personally affected by writing Sapiens. His answer is about non-human animals, referencing his research into the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. "I was so horrified by what I learned that I decided to limit, as far as possible, my personal involvement with the meat, dairy, and egg industries."

The Sapiens website contains a section entitled "Ecology" which collects many of Harari's thoughts on non-human animals. Here's one telling paragraph:

"The disappearance of wildlife is a calamity of unprecedented magnitude, but the plight of the planet’s majority population—the farm animals—is cause for equal concern. In recent years there is growing awareness of the conditions under which these animals live and die, and their fate may well turn out to be the greatest crime in human history. If you measure crimes by the sheer amount of pain and misery they inflict on sentient beings, this radical claim is not implausible."

The conditions for domesticated farm animals that Harari describes are related in much greater detail in books and articles devoted to animal welfare. But Harari's extremely popular book includes these descriptions, almost in a matter-of-fact manner, when it could have passed them over entirely. Politics and policy can undergo profound changes when something that everyone "sort of knows" transmutes into "common knowledge," something undeniable, where everyone knows it and everyone knows that every one knows it (and so on, ad infinitum). Sapiens both reflects and, I hope, promotes this transformation in the animal welfare arena.