I’m always surprised to see sheep get lumped in with cows in discussions of farmed animal welfare (ex. the SSC Adversarial Collaboration). Sure, it’s not a terrible proxy, but sheep are often freer, need to be regularly shorn to avoid overheating, and usually die of natural causes. There are definitely some practices which are awful, but sheep are quite hard to optimise in the same way we’ve done with pigs & chickens, or even cows.
However, we eat them when they’re babies so maybe it swings in the absolute other direction.
Nice point Huw, I agree. I wasn’t trying to lump them together exactly, I agree its very different. Does eating them when they are babies necessarily mean a net negative life though, if the slaughter is humane? It does seem like a weird question though...
The idea behind why eating babies is more likely to be net negative is that there’s a shorter lifespan of positive experiences to balance out the terror and pain of death.
From my experience watching lots of slaughterhouse footage and reading accounts from workers, even the best humane conditions still involve, routinely, a (shorter or longer) period in which the animal goes through the process of dying. This is probably pretty bad. If they only lived for a few weeks before that, it’s harder to imagine it’s a good deal overall.
Under some frameworks, you’d be depriving them of many years of happy life; but then again, if you didn’t kill them as children they probably would never have been born for food. Here we’d be getting too deep into the moral philosophy for me to have a confident take 😅. Interesting nonetheless.
I’m always surprised to see sheep get lumped in with cows in discussions of farmed animal welfare (ex. the SSC Adversarial Collaboration). Sure, it’s not a terrible proxy, but sheep are often freer, need to be regularly shorn to avoid overheating, and usually die of natural causes. There are definitely some practices which are awful, but sheep are quite hard to optimise in the same way we’ve done with pigs & chickens, or even cows.
However, we eat them when they’re babies so maybe it swings in the absolute other direction.
Nice point Huw, I agree. I wasn’t trying to lump them together exactly, I agree its very different. Does eating them when they are babies necessarily mean a net negative life though, if the slaughter is humane? It does seem like a weird question though...
The idea behind why eating babies is more likely to be net negative is that there’s a shorter lifespan of positive experiences to balance out the terror and pain of death.
From my experience watching lots of slaughterhouse footage and reading accounts from workers, even the best humane conditions still involve, routinely, a (shorter or longer) period in which the animal goes through the process of dying. This is probably pretty bad. If they only lived for a few weeks before that, it’s harder to imagine it’s a good deal overall.
Under some frameworks, you’d be depriving them of many years of happy life; but then again, if you didn’t kill them as children they probably would never have been born for food. Here we’d be getting too deep into the moral philosophy for me to have a confident take 😅. Interesting nonetheless.