To minimize human-caused suffering as much as possible, it seems that farm animals should be let to live freely until they die naturally and shouldn’t need to be modified in any way. A quick google search told me that cows have lifespans of 15-20 years and chickens have lifespans of 3-7 years. Since the world produces enough food to feed the global population several times over (even though hundreds of millions of people go without food), it might be that society and individual habits can be restructured in such a way (such as by using less of our food to feed farm animals and individuals not wasting any food they buy) so that we could farm in the way I just said and we would virtually eat as much as we currently do.
Analgesics are better than nothing. However, they don’t erase the trauma that the animals experience from being modified. I don’t know how the modifications affects the animals in the long run, but I wonder if they would cause chronic living struggles similar to what humans experience who are missing a limb, have back problems, etc. Also, the animals cannot communicate to us any secondary problems that result from their body modifications. It seems that addressing the pain caused by our modifications of them could potentially bring up all the issues I just raised plus many more that could have been avoided altogether by not modifying them in the first place.
Hi Paul, I am absolutely with you in that I think factory farms are awful and would of course continue to be awful with the widespread use of analgesics. I fully support doing everything we can to eliminate them through some combination of developing alternative proteins and moving people and institutions toward eating the plant-based alternatives we already have. I in no way support mutilating animals even with analgesics. The reason I wrote this post is because I think it would be an improvement for animal welfare over the status quo of using no analgesics, and I think that this improvement is relatively achievable.
As a side note, my position has shifted a bit since I’ve written this based on new technological developments. I now think efforts in this domain should be more targeted toward adoption of drugs and genetic engineering that eliminate the need for the modifications in the first place. When I wrote this, those seemed a long way off but I no longer feel that way. But to be clear, even if we could completely eliminate all forms of direct mutilation that this post discusses I will still think factory farms are horrible.
To minimize human-caused suffering as much as possible, it seems that farm animals should be let to live freely until they die naturally and shouldn’t need to be modified in any way. A quick google search told me that cows have lifespans of 15-20 years and chickens have lifespans of 3-7 years. Since the world produces enough food to feed the global population several times over (even though hundreds of millions of people go without food), it might be that society and individual habits can be restructured in such a way (such as by using less of our food to feed farm animals and individuals not wasting any food they buy) so that we could farm in the way I just said and we would virtually eat as much as we currently do.
Analgesics are better than nothing. However, they don’t erase the trauma that the animals experience from being modified. I don’t know how the modifications affects the animals in the long run, but I wonder if they would cause chronic living struggles similar to what humans experience who are missing a limb, have back problems, etc. Also, the animals cannot communicate to us any secondary problems that result from their body modifications. It seems that addressing the pain caused by our modifications of them could potentially bring up all the issues I just raised plus many more that could have been avoided altogether by not modifying them in the first place.
Hi Paul, I am absolutely with you in that I think factory farms are awful and would of course continue to be awful with the widespread use of analgesics. I fully support doing everything we can to eliminate them through some combination of developing alternative proteins and moving people and institutions toward eating the plant-based alternatives we already have. I in no way support mutilating animals even with analgesics. The reason I wrote this post is because I think it would be an improvement for animal welfare over the status quo of using no analgesics, and I think that this improvement is relatively achievable.
As a side note, my position has shifted a bit since I’ve written this based on new technological developments. I now think efforts in this domain should be more targeted toward adoption of drugs and genetic engineering that eliminate the need for the modifications in the first place. When I wrote this, those seemed a long way off but I no longer feel that way. But to be clear, even if we could completely eliminate all forms of direct mutilation that this post discusses I will still think factory farms are horrible.