I’m curious if you have any sense of how the average conditions/welfare levels of farmed animals are expected to change on this default trajectory, or how they’ve changed in the last few decades. I imagine this is difficult to quantify, but seems important.
In particular, assuming market pressures stay as they are, how should we expect technological improvements to affect farmed animal welfare?
My uneducated guess: optimizing hard for (meat production / cost) generally leads to lower animal welfare. This seems roughly true of technological improvements in the past. For example:
I assume factory farming is much worse than early human farming/hunting.
Antibiotics allow animals to be kept in worse sanitary conditions than would otherwise be livable.
Artificial selection and growth hormones has created broiler chickens that grow too fast for good health, though it’s unclear to me whether slower growth would be net good (because it would probably lead to more total chicken-days spend living in factory farms, even after accounting for higher prices leading to fewer sales).
Great post, James!
I’m curious if you have any sense of how the average conditions/welfare levels of farmed animals are expected to change on this default trajectory, or how they’ve changed in the last few decades. I imagine this is difficult to quantify, but seems important.
In particular, assuming market pressures stay as they are, how should we expect technological improvements to affect farmed animal welfare?
My uneducated guess: optimizing hard for (meat production / cost) generally leads to lower animal welfare. This seems roughly true of technological improvements in the past. For example:
I assume factory farming is much worse than early human farming/hunting.
Antibiotics allow animals to be kept in worse sanitary conditions than would otherwise be livable.
Artificial selection and growth hormones has created broiler chickens that grow too fast for good health, though it’s unclear to me whether slower growth would be net good (because it would probably lead to more total chicken-days spend living in factory farms, even after accounting for higher prices leading to fewer sales).