Thanks for writing this, it drives home to me the point of taking a broad perspective when making ethical choices. I am wondering if you take animal product consumption a step further and look at only eating animal products where you know both of the below are true?
The animals have a very high degree of welfare (think small, local farms you can visit, you know the farmer, etc.)
The way they are slaughtered is the most humane possible, ideally on-farm etc. so they more or less have no idea what is coming for them until they are gone—in my mind this more or less has no suffering from a utilitarian perspective (unless the animals somehow are able to anticipate the slaughter and have increased anxiety throughout their lives because of it).
I have been pretty vegan so far, but people around me are arguing for the type of animal products above and I have a hard time pushing back on it.
Hi Ulrik—I’m not aware of farms which have slaughter facilities on-site (is this more common in the US than in the UK maybe?) and the ‘small, local high welfare farm’ is also a bit of a myth. The majority of farmed animals (85% in the UK, 99% in the US) are factory-farmed (i.e. raised in the most intensive conditions), are killed at a fraction of their natural lifespans, transported and killed in high-speed slaughterhouses—whilst abuses have been documented in both large and small ‘local’ slaughter facilities. The 2 conditions / requirements you have stipulated in your post are hypothetical / wishful-thinking type scenarios which are, unfortunately, not borne out by the realities of farming and killing billions of animals for consumption.
“The majority of farmed animals (85% in the UK, 99% in the US) are factory-farmed (i.e. raised in the most intensive conditions)”
But the majority of cows and sheep are not factory farmed. All chickens are factory farmed and they are many. On the other hand, ruminants are often raised from pastures, as anybody driving in the coutryside can check by herself.
Nor in Scandinavia. Driving, or riding trains, you often see cows grazing on pastures. Of course, that is not in the slaughterhouse, or when their young are taken away from them, but I still wonder whether their life on average is worse than mine. (I am also going to die one day, and adjusted for my greater understanding I am not sure mine will be a more pleasant death than a cow’s.)
Ok that’s good to know—I will probably be pretty vegan going forward. By the way I love all the hard evidence here on the EAF about animal welfare. It really makes me viscerally upset about the scale of abuse we currently inflict on our feathered and four-legged friends. So thanks to you and everyone else on further opening my eyes and heart to this.
Not opining on the overall question, but FWIW I’m not sure on-farm slaughter is better. Reason being — I think that large slaughterhouses have “smoother” processes and (per animal killed) are less likely to end up with e.g. no stunning, stunning but resuscitation before being killed, etc.
But this does have to be weighed against the stress of transport, and I bet in a lot of cases it’d have been better to have on-farm slaughter given the length & conditions of transport.
This is an interesting question. Even if the conditions were not fulfilled for almost all cases, I have not yet seen an answer to this question concerning ethical judgements in cases where these conditions are fulfilled.
When considering this question, the more general point is that the way that different animals are farmed should make some difference in ethical judgement. This post is about quantitative comparisons of suffering, but the differences in farming seem to be neglected. In particular, Brian Tomasik’s table on which this post is based ranks different animals by “Equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded”, but this comparison is strongly driven by column 5, “Suffering per day of life (beef cows = 1)”:
“Column 5 represents my best-guess estimates for how bad life is per day for each of type of farm animal, relative to that animal’s intrinsic ability to suffer. That is, differences in cognitive sophistication aren’t part of these numbers because they’re already counted in Column 4. Rather, Column 5 represents the “badness of quality of life” of the animals. For instance, since I think the suffering of hens in battery cages is perhaps 4 times as intense per day as the suffering of beef cows, I put a “1“ in the beef-cow cell and “4” in the egg cell.”
I don’t mind using subjective estimates in such calculations, but note that this assumes that an average day in the life of all of these animals is a day of suffering. This may be the case in factory farming, but I doubt that that is a necessary assumption for alpine pasture. However, if life is good on an average day of a cow in alpine pasture, we would need a negative sign.
You can enter a negative sign in the table. However, you’ll get an error message, because the whole table is based on the assumption that “Suffering per day of life” is positive. With this assumption, raising the “Average lifespan (days)” (Column 2) increases the “Equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded”. If this is the case, then it is good that farmed animals are “killed at a fraction of their natural lifespans”.
Moreover, Tomasik writes, “Column 6 is a best-guess estimate of the average pain of slaughter for each animal, expressed in terms of an equivalent number of days of regular life for that animal. For instance, I used “10″ as an estimate for broiler chickens, which means I assume that on average, slaughter is as painful as 10 days of pre-slaughter life.”
If the animals actually enjoy their life (negative number in column 5), you can still use that column by entering a negative number in column 6; these are the days an animal would forgo if it could avoid being slaughtered. So if we take the numbers in the table for beef and assume that column 5 is −1 (I don’t know how to interpret this though, as this is all relative to beef cow suffering), we need to enter −395 in column 6 to get to zero in column 7.
I’d be interested if someone has a more general calculator.
Thanks for writing this, it drives home to me the point of taking a broad perspective when making ethical choices. I am wondering if you take animal product consumption a step further and look at only eating animal products where you know both of the below are true?
The animals have a very high degree of welfare (think small, local farms you can visit, you know the farmer, etc.)
The way they are slaughtered is the most humane possible, ideally on-farm etc. so they more or less have no idea what is coming for them until they are gone—in my mind this more or less has no suffering from a utilitarian perspective (unless the animals somehow are able to anticipate the slaughter and have increased anxiety throughout their lives because of it).
I have been pretty vegan so far, but people around me are arguing for the type of animal products above and I have a hard time pushing back on it.
Hi Ulrik—I’m not aware of farms which have slaughter facilities on-site (is this more common in the US than in the UK maybe?) and the ‘small, local high welfare farm’ is also a bit of a myth. The majority of farmed animals (85% in the UK, 99% in the US) are factory-farmed (i.e. raised in the most intensive conditions), are killed at a fraction of their natural lifespans, transported and killed in high-speed slaughterhouses—whilst abuses have been documented in both large and small ‘local’ slaughter facilities. The 2 conditions / requirements you have stipulated in your post are hypothetical / wishful-thinking type scenarios which are, unfortunately, not borne out by the realities of farming and killing billions of animals for consumption.
“The majority of farmed animals (85% in the UK, 99% in the US) are factory-farmed (i.e. raised in the most intensive conditions)”
But the majority of cows and sheep are not factory farmed. All chickens are factory farmed and they are many. On the other hand, ruminants are often raised from pastures, as anybody driving in the coutryside can check by herself.
Nor in Scandinavia. Driving, or riding trains, you often see cows grazing on pastures. Of course, that is not in the slaughterhouse, or when their young are taken away from them, but I still wonder whether their life on average is worse than mine. (I am also going to die one day, and adjusted for my greater understanding I am not sure mine will be a more pleasant death than a cow’s.)
Ok that’s good to know—I will probably be pretty vegan going forward. By the way I love all the hard evidence here on the EAF about animal welfare. It really makes me viscerally upset about the scale of abuse we currently inflict on our feathered and four-legged friends. So thanks to you and everyone else on further opening my eyes and heart to this.
Not opining on the overall question, but FWIW I’m not sure on-farm slaughter is better. Reason being — I think that large slaughterhouses have “smoother” processes and (per animal killed) are less likely to end up with e.g. no stunning, stunning but resuscitation before being killed, etc.
But this does have to be weighed against the stress of transport, and I bet in a lot of cases it’d have been better to have on-farm slaughter given the length & conditions of transport.
This is an interesting question. Even if the conditions were not fulfilled for almost all cases, I have not yet seen an answer to this question concerning ethical judgements in cases where these conditions are fulfilled.
When considering this question, the more general point is that the way that different animals are farmed should make some difference in ethical judgement. This post is about quantitative comparisons of suffering, but the differences in farming seem to be neglected. In particular, Brian Tomasik’s table on which this post is based ranks different animals by “Equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded”, but this comparison is strongly driven by column 5, “Suffering per day of life (beef cows = 1)”:
I don’t mind using subjective estimates in such calculations, but note that this assumes that an average day in the life of all of these animals is a day of suffering. This may be the case in factory farming, but I doubt that that is a necessary assumption for alpine pasture. However, if life is good on an average day of a cow in alpine pasture, we would need a negative sign.
You can enter a negative sign in the table. However, you’ll get an error message, because the whole table is based on the assumption that “Suffering per day of life” is positive. With this assumption, raising the “Average lifespan (days)” (Column 2) increases the “Equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded”. If this is the case, then it is good that farmed animals are “killed at a fraction of their natural lifespans”.
Moreover, Tomasik writes, “Column 6 is a best-guess estimate of the average pain of slaughter for each animal, expressed in terms of an equivalent number of days of regular life for that animal. For instance, I used “10″ as an estimate for broiler chickens, which means I assume that on average, slaughter is as painful as 10 days of pre-slaughter life.”
If the animals actually enjoy their life (negative number in column 5), you can still use that column by entering a negative number in column 6; these are the days an animal would forgo if it could avoid being slaughtered. So if we take the numbers in the table for beef and assume that column 5 is −1 (I don’t know how to interpret this though, as this is all relative to beef cow suffering), we need to enter −395 in column 6 to get to zero in column 7.
I’d be interested if someone has a more general calculator.