Spreading around the term âhumane meatâ may get it into some peopleâs heads that this practice can be humane, which could in turn increase consumption overall, and effectively cancel out whatever benefits youâre speculating about.
I donât know what the correct definition of âhumaneâ is, but I strongly disagree with this claim in the second half. The question is whether higher-welfare imports reduce total suffering once we account for demand effects. So we should care about improving conditions from âtorture campsâ â âprisonsâ â âdecentâ. Torture camps are many times worse than merely âinhumaneâ!
The average consumer (who eats a ton of super high suffering chicken, doesnât know that most chicken is torture chicken, and doesnât believe labels anyway) wouldnât eat much more chicken overall when the expensive chicken with the non-fraudulent âhumaneâ label lowers in price. Nor would enough vegetarians start eating chicken because theyâre only 5% of the US population and many of those are motivated by religion or health.
More likely, there will need to be a huge effort to get consumers to understand that they should spend anything on lower-suffering chicken, then another to get grocers to not mark up the price anyway, after which implementing this policy could replace 260 million torture camp chicken lives with maybe 300 million slightly uncomfortable chicken lives. (With a net increase mostly due to competition lowering the price of higher-suffering chicken.)
One can object to actually implementing this policy on deontological or practical grounds, but on consequences, high-suffering chicken is many times worse than âinhumaneâ pasture-raised chicken, so the demand increase would not even be close to canceling out the benefits unless you have a moral view under which everything inhumane is equally bad. I wish we were in a world where we could demand that food be 100% humane, but ignoring the principle of triage is why EA animal advocates, not purity-focused ones, have prevented billions of years of torture.
I donât know what the correct definition of âhumaneâ is, but I strongly disagree with this claim in the second half. The question is whether higher-welfare imports reduce total suffering once we account for demand effects. So we should care about improving conditions from âtorture campsâ â âprisonsâ â âdecentâ. Torture camps are many times worse than merely âinhumaneâ!
The average consumer (who eats a ton of super high suffering chicken, doesnât know that most chicken is torture chicken, and doesnât believe labels anyway) wouldnât eat much more chicken overall when the expensive chicken with the non-fraudulent âhumaneâ label lowers in price. Nor would enough vegetarians start eating chicken because theyâre only 5% of the US population and many of those are motivated by religion or health.
More likely, there will need to be a huge effort to get consumers to understand that they should spend anything on lower-suffering chicken, then another to get grocers to not mark up the price anyway, after which implementing this policy could replace 260 million torture camp chicken lives with maybe 300 million slightly uncomfortable chicken lives. (With a net increase mostly due to competition lowering the price of higher-suffering chicken.)
One can object to actually implementing this policy on deontological or practical grounds, but on consequences, high-suffering chicken is many times worse than âinhumaneâ pasture-raised chicken, so the demand increase would not even be close to canceling out the benefits unless you have a moral view under which everything inhumane is equally bad. I wish we were in a world where we could demand that food be 100% humane, but ignoring the principle of triage is why EA animal advocates, not purity-focused ones, have prevented billions of years of torture.