No wet market, no factory farms, better regulation and protocol for labs → No source of zoonotic viruses
Extremely unfortunately from the perspective of animal welfare, factory farming is possibly a net benefit for disease prevention.
I think this is mainly because this enormously reduces human-animal interactions. So zoonotic diseases have a lower chance to both develop and spread to humans compared to open air/backyard farms
Diseases can be contained in the unnatural, environments inside factory farms[1].
Note that this is not because factory farms are clean or healthy.
In a deep sense, the animals tend to be very unhealthy for a number of reasons, including genetics, e.g. they would be much more likely to perish from disease and other issues, in an outside backyard farm
If this isn’t true, I would really like to be updated.
This truth is very inconvenient for farm animal welfare people. But it is good to say the truth and inform people working in other areas.
I’d be careful about this claim. I’m not an expert, but I also don’t see cited sources here.
The limiting factor for zoonotic transmission isn’t the level of animal-to-human contact. It is the virus-to-human contact.
In a small, low-density farm with better ventilation and greater care invested in caring for or separating out sick animals, whatever virus is emitted by sick animals may be at a much lower concentration in the air. This would limit virus-to-human contact. By contrast, a high-density large farm puts a huge number of viral bioreactors (animals) in a cramped facility and exposes the same small number of people to that high-viral-concentration environment over and over again.
I don’t know which of these factors would win out on net. I wouldn’t trust one answer over the other without a lot of good hard evidence. My guess is that the details matter and you’d need to overstudy the issue to really be able to draw any general conclusions on this topic.
It’s not really possible for me to communicate how much I don’t want my first comment to be true.
I’d be careful about this claim. I’m not an expert, but I also don’t see cited sources here.
I think scientific citation is good when done cluefully and in good faith. However, there are levels of knowledge that don’t interact well with casual citations in an online forum and this is difficult to communicate. For literatures, I think truth/expertise can be orthogonal to agreement with some literatures, because knowledge is often thin, experts are wrong or the papers represent a surprisingly small number of experts with different viewpoints[1].
In a small, low-density farm with better ventilation and greater care invested in caring for or separating out sick animals, whatever virus is emitted by sick animals may be at a much lower concentration in the air. This would limit virus-to-human contact. By contrast, a high-density large farm puts a huge number of viral bioreactors (animals) in a cramped facility and exposes the same small number of people to that high-viral-concentration environment over and over again.
I think this is a good argument to begin a conversation with an expert.
I’m not sure this argument is proportionately informed about current intensive farming practices that would be a useful update to my comment.
For one, ventilation systems are substantial in farms, and get more sophisticated in more intensive farming (until they mess up or turn it off, cruelly cooking the animals to death).
More generally, I think it’s good to try to communicate how hostile, artificial and isolated from the outside world intensive farming environments are.
Workers often literally wear respirators:
Together with the respirator, farm workers often wear full body coveralls, gloves.
This produces a suit that should look familiar to people working in biosecurity.
I can keep going—you can get showers, change stations, positive/negative pressure airflow, and maybe literally airlocks.
It is imperative to ensure that the surroundings of the breeding building(s) are protected and that their access is forbidden to any persons or animals. It is therefore essential to install a mesh fence to enclose these boundaries. The passage through this fence must be secured by a gate for personnel as well as for vehicles.
Note how alien and hostile these environments are: the suits and preparations resemble a biohazard lab.
I think you can see how large, intensive farms allow this to happen.
I think the above gives a good sense of the very issue in the top comment:
Basically, once you have an intensive farm, you can put capex into intensifying and concentrating and greatly increasing suffering in one place, and dissolve a lot of biosecurity concerns plausibly. That’s what factory farms do well.
I’m not super interested in elaborating because I’m hoping someone shuts this down and proves this wrong. Help? Rethink Priorities?
I actually do have the cites. I distrust the EA forum to handle scientific expertise and I’m really hoping not to make the case or codify this comment—maybe someone else might make the counter case decisively.
You make a plausible, vivid case in this comment for why factory farming might be lower risk (workers wear PPE and buildings are designed to lower infection risk). And as I said in my reply above, I fully accept that there’s a plausible case why factory farming might pose a lower risk for zoonosis than non-factory farms. I’m just not certain and would want to see a sufficient amount of hard, high-quality evidence.
Consider also that factory farms, by lowering costs and driving up supply, cause a greater amount of animals to be produced than would counterfactually be the case on small farms. People would eat less meat, fewer farm animals would be raised, and there would be less opportunity for viral exposure by farm workers because the industry would be smaller as a whole.
You claim to “have the cites,” but don’t share them because you “distrust the EA forum to handle scientific expertise?” I’m a biomedical engineering graduate student. I eat citations for breakfast lunch and dinner. I barely trust them when I can read them. I trust arguments without citations even less. All that stuff about “distrusting EA forum” and “hoping not to make the case or codify” doesn’t make sense to me, and neither does the bit about “a good argument to begin a conversation with an expert.”
To be clear, I am not making a confident claim about whether or not factory farming is better or worse than other forms of farming or alternative industrial structures. I’m saying that it’s probably a very complex question and that we should not make casual guesses about the answer—we should rely on evidence, and if we don’t have it, we should admit our uncertainty.
I think scientific citation is good when done cluefully and in good faith. However, there are levels of knowledge that don’t interact well with casual citations in an online forum and this is difficult to communicate. For literatures, I think truth/expertise can be orthogonal to agreement with some literatures, because knowledge is often thin, experts are wrong or the papers represent a surprisingly small number of experts with different viewpoints[1].
I don’t know what you mean, and to the extent that I do understand, I think I disagree. If you are making an empirical claim, you should back it up with clear arguments and evidence. If there’s a relevant expert field/literature, you should cite it and if you differ from its distribution of consensus, you should signal that and argue for why. For example, I think your second comment is much better in this regard than your first. The tendency to skimp on this is detrimental to the discourse, I think.
If you just want to say “This is what I reckon” then fair enough, it’s only an internet forum. But this should be signalled. And it would lead me to put near-zero weight on the content.
I agree, there’s lots of cases where there isn’t robust empirical literature or trustworthy expert views. But the relationship between factory farms and zoonotic spillover doesn’t seem like such a case, such that casual speculation without citing evidence is not very useful.
No I didn’t. I had some vague sense of your background being in software engineering from looking at your profile a few months ago, and some sense of your views from seeing many of your comments over time. Why do you ask?
Does ‘figure out who I am’ mean ‘Charles He’ is a pseudonym? If so I wasn’t aware.
Edit: although I seem to remember seeing something about software, I may be mis-remembering and guessing due to the tagged subscription under your name, which is probably a new thing/maybe misleading.
This depends on the path to no factory farms right? If the path is mainly via alternative meat being grown in factories then that would reduce pandemic risk. I
f the path is mainly via replacing factory farms with other farms then I think you make an interesting argument for how this could increase pandemic risk, but I’m not sure whether I agree or disagree.
Extremely unfortunately from the perspective of animal welfare, factory farming is possibly a net benefit for disease prevention.
I think this is mainly because this enormously reduces human-animal interactions. So zoonotic diseases have a lower chance to both develop and spread to humans compared to open air/backyard farms
Diseases can be contained in the unnatural, environments inside factory farms[1].
Note that this is not because factory farms are clean or healthy.
Factory farms are both disgusting, and chronic sources of deadly disease, deadly bird flu is literally happening across the US constantly
In a deep sense, the animals tend to be very unhealthy for a number of reasons, including genetics, e.g. they would be much more likely to perish from disease and other issues, in an outside backyard farm
If this isn’t true, I would really like to be updated.
This truth is very inconvenient for farm animal welfare people. But it is good to say the truth and inform people working in other areas.
Often by, well, sort of torturing the animals to death by heat.
I’d be careful about this claim. I’m not an expert, but I also don’t see cited sources here.
The limiting factor for zoonotic transmission isn’t the level of animal-to-human contact. It is the virus-to-human contact.
In a small, low-density farm with better ventilation and greater care invested in caring for or separating out sick animals, whatever virus is emitted by sick animals may be at a much lower concentration in the air. This would limit virus-to-human contact. By contrast, a high-density large farm puts a huge number of viral bioreactors (animals) in a cramped facility and exposes the same small number of people to that high-viral-concentration environment over and over again.
I don’t know which of these factors would win out on net. I wouldn’t trust one answer over the other without a lot of good hard evidence. My guess is that the details matter and you’d need to overstudy the issue to really be able to draw any general conclusions on this topic.
It’s not really possible for me to communicate how much I don’t want my first comment to be true.
I think scientific citation is good when done cluefully and in good faith. However, there are levels of knowledge that don’t interact well with casual citations in an online forum and this is difficult to communicate. For literatures, I think truth/expertise can be orthogonal to agreement with some literatures, because knowledge is often thin, experts are wrong or the papers represent a surprisingly small number of experts with different viewpoints[1].
I think this is a good argument to begin a conversation with an expert.
I’m not sure this argument is proportionately informed about current intensive farming practices that would be a useful update to my comment.
For one, ventilation systems are substantial in farms, and get more sophisticated in more intensive farming (until they mess up or turn it off, cruelly cooking the animals to death).
More generally, I think it’s good to try to communicate how hostile, artificial and isolated from the outside world intensive farming environments are.
Workers often literally wear respirators:
Together with the respirator, farm workers often wear full body coveralls, gloves.
This produces a suit that should look familiar to people working in biosecurity.
I can keep going—you can get showers, change stations, positive/negative pressure airflow, and maybe literally airlocks.
Here is a representative equipment manufacturer.
https://www.theseo-biosecurity.com/en/our-expert-appraisals/breeders/
Note how alien and hostile these environments are: the suits and preparations resemble a biohazard lab.
I think you can see how large, intensive farms allow this to happen.
I think the above gives a good sense of the very issue in the top comment:
Basically, once you have an intensive farm, you can put capex into intensifying and concentrating and greatly increasing suffering in one place, and dissolve a lot of biosecurity concerns plausibly. That’s what factory farms do well.
I’m not super interested in elaborating because I’m hoping someone shuts this down and proves this wrong. Help? Rethink Priorities?
I actually do have the cites. I distrust the EA forum to handle scientific expertise and I’m really hoping not to make the case or codify this comment—maybe someone else might make the counter case decisively.
You make a plausible, vivid case in this comment for why factory farming might be lower risk (workers wear PPE and buildings are designed to lower infection risk). And as I said in my reply above, I fully accept that there’s a plausible case why factory farming might pose a lower risk for zoonosis than non-factory farms. I’m just not certain and would want to see a sufficient amount of hard, high-quality evidence.
Consider also that factory farms, by lowering costs and driving up supply, cause a greater amount of animals to be produced than would counterfactually be the case on small farms. People would eat less meat, fewer farm animals would be raised, and there would be less opportunity for viral exposure by farm workers because the industry would be smaller as a whole.
You claim to “have the cites,” but don’t share them because you “distrust the EA forum to handle scientific expertise?” I’m a biomedical engineering graduate student. I eat citations for breakfast lunch and dinner. I barely trust them when I can read them. I trust arguments without citations even less. All that stuff about “distrusting EA forum” and “hoping not to make the case or codify” doesn’t make sense to me, and neither does the bit about “a good argument to begin a conversation with an expert.”
To be clear, I am not making a confident claim about whether or not factory farming is better or worse than other forms of farming or alternative industrial structures. I’m saying that it’s probably a very complex question and that we should not make casual guesses about the answer—we should rely on evidence, and if we don’t have it, we should admit our uncertainty.
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
In general, it seems to be the case that the sign of the longterm effects of neartermist interventions is often unclear.
I don’t know what you mean, and to the extent that I do understand, I think I disagree. If you are making an empirical claim, you should back it up with clear arguments and evidence. If there’s a relevant expert field/literature, you should cite it and if you differ from its distribution of consensus, you should signal that and argue for why. For example, I think your second comment is much better in this regard than your first. The tendency to skimp on this is detrimental to the discourse, I think.
If you just want to say “This is what I reckon” then fair enough, it’s only an internet forum. But this should be signalled. And it would lead me to put near-zero weight on the content.
Might be related: Reality is often underpowered
(I skimmed bits of this discussion, so I might be off! Unfortunately, I don’t have time to engage properly.)
I agree, there’s lots of cases where there isn’t robust empirical literature or trustworthy expert views. But the relationship between factory farms and zoonotic spillover doesn’t seem like such a case, such that casual speculation without citing evidence is not very useful.
Your comment is really interesting for a lot of reasons. Just curious, did you click on my profile or try to figure out who I am?
No I didn’t. I had some vague sense of your background being in software engineering from looking at your profile a few months ago, and some sense of your views from seeing many of your comments over time. Why do you ask?
Does ‘figure out who I am’ mean ‘Charles He’ is a pseudonym? If so I wasn’t aware.
Edit: although I seem to remember seeing something about software, I may be mis-remembering and guessing due to the tagged subscription under your name, which is probably a new thing/maybe misleading.
Ok, thanks, this makes sense. (As a digression, yes, the software tag is misleading.)
This depends on the path to no factory farms right? If the path is mainly via alternative meat being grown in factories then that would reduce pandemic risk. I
f the path is mainly via replacing factory farms with other farms then I think you make an interesting argument for how this could increase pandemic risk, but I’m not sure whether I agree or disagree.