The Impossible Burger

Burger King has made the plant-based Impossible Whopper available at all its US locations, prompting me to visit a Burger King for the first time (and then, shortly after, the second time) in memory. White Castle and Red Robin are other establishments in which I have sampled Impossible-based burger-like creations. I am among those who wouldn't be able to tell, if I did not know, whether the Impossible versions are meat-based or not. Recently, I had a lunch at an old-school American-style diner that included a plant-based Beyond Burger on its menu, while also emphasizing (via a large sign) that its vegetable soup was vegetarian. Beyond Meat features an impressive array of professional athletes who serve as Beyond Ambassadors.

The revolution is underway. Plant-based pseudo-hamburgers will get tastier and tastier, and eventually, they will be cheaper (perhaps quite a bit cheaper) than meat burgers: feeding bushel after bushel of grain to livestock for many months to produce burgers will have a hard time competing with taking a tiny fraction of that grain and making the burger directly. (We are slowing the transition through policies that subsidize the production of grain.) There are some positive feedback mechanisms built-in, too. Start with a small vegan vanguard of environmentalists, animal welfare activists, and health-conscious consumers, use them to jumpstart an industry, induce quality to rise and prices to fall, and watch as the eating of traditional meat transforms into a practice that becomes socially suspect. No doubt there will still be traditionally-produced meat that is eaten, just as hunting has not disappeared, but it will become a niche behavior, and one that many parents will want to shield their children from.

And then there is the coming clean meat alternative...

Promoting Farm Transparency

The recent New York Times article by Matt Richtel that provoked the previous blog post notes the difficulties that researchers and health officials face in attempting to learn about farm conditions, even when there is evidence that those conditions are exacting a huge human toll in disease and death. There seems a lot to be said for full transparency on large-scale farms (or concentrated animal feeding operations, CAFOs). Why should the public have to rely on undercover footage (the collection of which is often illegal) to know what is happening on farms and slaughterhouses and other elements (e.g., transport) in the meat supply chain?

The recent exposure of activities at Fair Oaks Farms (a dairy) brought a pledge (see the 2:15 point of the founder's video response) to provide full video surveillance (with public access to the videos) of all farm areas where humans and non-human animals interact. A further pledge has been made (4:30 mark) to solicit frequent, unannounced visits to the farm by an animal welfare expert. Fair Oaks Farms is documenting their ongoing response here.

While it is too soon to know the long-term effectiveness of the reforms at Fair Oaks Farms, and while it may be that the dairy industry descends from unpardonable and ongoing original sins, why can't the video and unannounced audit reforms adopted by Fair Oaks become standard? Even if the only motive is to protect human health (as opposed to protecting the welfare of the farm animals themselves), there is a strong case for transparency in CAFOs.

Although a legal requirement for such transparency does not seem to be on the horizon in many places in the US -- witness those ag-gag laws -- private actions might spur the requisite reform (as in the Fair Oaks Farms case). Certification programs can add enhanced transparency requirements into their standards. Foundations or NGOs could subsidize the acquisition and maintenance of monitoring equipment. Other sorts of agricultural subsidies or benefits could be made contingent on farm transparency. Pressure could be brought on major purchasers (fast food outlets, grocery chains) to only deal with transparent suppliers. There's tons of room for a more radicalized transparency in the food system.

No one enjoys seeing the video evidence of cruel treatment of farm animals; but the easier it is to see it, the less there will be to see.

Antibiotic Administration to Farm Animals

Yesterday's New York Times features a superb front-page story by Matt Richtel about antibiotic resistance that passes to humans after originating from large quantities of antibiotics administered to farm animals; when people get ill from the resistant salmonella (or E. coli), multiple types of standard antibiotics are rendered useless. Maryn McKenna's 2017 book Big Chicken (subtitled "The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats") gave prominence to the story, and much detail. I had thought that the routine use of antibiotics on industrial farms came from the need to control disease in the terrible conditions on those farms, together with the breeding of animals with traits (such as fast growth) that are economically valuable but bring a health cost. This does seem to be the case, but I learned from Big Chicken that widespread administration of antibiotics to farm animals originated after it was discovered that the antibiotics themselves served as growth promoters. The use of antibiotics for growth promotion in livestock is now (since 2006) banned in the EU, and contravenes FDA guidelines in the US. (The World Health Organization also has weighed in.) There is some evidence that farm use of antibiotics (or antimicrobials) has been declining in the US and in the EU in recent years, though in the US, purchases of antibiotics for farm animals far exceed quantities purchased for human use.

Richtel's article highlights the difficulties that researchers and public health workers have in accessing farms and farm-level data, even when evidence points to farms as the source of outbreaks of resistant diseases in humans. The lack of access to farms risks prolongation of such outbreaks -- a high price to pay to allay concerns that some farms might have their reputations unfairly besmirched.

Grounds for Optimism?

The scale of farm animal suffering is so huge that the journey to a cruelty-free system can appear daunting. But at the same time, many roads are being extended to help us make that journey. Those parallel roads go through various terrains, including territories that are primarily: Environmental; Biological; Economic; Legal; Technological; Ethical; or, Health and Diet-related. I'll just mention a few sites within each of these (overlapping) territories.

Environmental: greenhouse gas emission and livestock; fertilizer (for plants to serve as animal feed) and compromised ground water; other forms of water pollution, such as sewage from pig farms or aquaculture; ecosystem endangerment and wild animal extinctions

Biological: research into animal sentience, animal emotions, animal intelligence, and animal behaviors

Economic: agricultural subsidies; externalities and other market failures; animal welfare as a public and a private good; animal standing in cost-benefit analyses; information avoidance

Legal: personhood; standing; animal law as a legal sub-discipline; animal-based reforms of property law

Technological: non-animal-based replacements for meat, leather, dairy, eggs, fur; You Tube and social media as forums for information about animal welfare and substitute products; cell phone and other cameras for recording animal abuse

Ethical: animal ethics as a burgeoning research area within academic philosophy and related fields -- with accessible contributions that engage the popular consciousness

Health and Diet-related: Improved access and quality of vegan and vegetarian foods; health concerns with overconsumption of meat/dairy; zoonoses; antibiotic degradation

In some parts of the world, these developments have spurred animal welfare improvements in recent decades. We can hope that the confluence of these myriad inroads challenging the status quo can continue to effect change, both incremental and perhaps systemic. At the same time, seemingly every week, there's public exposure of current farm animal mistreatment -- mistreatment even by a standard that accepts "normal" farm operations as constituting satisfactory treatment.

The Youth of Slaughtered Animals

In the immediately prior post I noted the young age at which farm animals are slaughtered. In his fine 2014 book Meat Logic: Why Do We Eat Animals?, author Charles Horn provides a table of "Approximate Lifespans" for pigs, cows, and chickens, with entries both for natural lifespans and for ages at slaughter. Pigs can live 10-12 years according to Horn, but are slaughtered at about 6 months; cows can live more than 20 years, but "meat" their demise after 18 months; and, chickens, which live some 8 years naturally, are killed in about 7 weeks. (Veal is another awful story altogether.) That is, chickens get less than 2 percent of their natural lives, though cows get some 8% and pigs some 5%. But given the conditions of their lives, for many of them, the brevity is surely a blessing.

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.