Im intrigued where people stand on the threshold where farmed animal lives might become net positive? I’m going to share a few scenarios i’m very unsure about and id love to hear thoughts or be pointed towards research on this.
Animals kept in homesteads in rural Uganda where I live. Often they stay inside with the family at night, then are let out during the day to roam free along the farm or community. The animals seem pretty darn happy most of the time for what it’s worth, playing and galavanting around. Downsides here include poor veterinary care so sometimes parasites and sickness are pretty bad and often pretty rough transport and slaughter methods (my intuition net positive).
Grass fed sheep in New Zealand, my birth country. They get good medical care, are well fed on grass and usually have large roaming areas (intuition net positive)
Grass fed dairy cows in New Zealand. They roam fairly freely and will have very good vet care, but have they calves taken away at birth, have constantly uncomfortably swollen udders and are milked at least twice daily. (Intuition very unsure)
Free range pigs. Similar to the above except often space is smaller but they do get little houses. Pigs are far more intelligent than cows or sheep and might have more intellectual needs not getting met. (Intuition uncertain)
Obviously these kind of cases make up a small proportion of farmed animals worldwide, with the predominant situation—factory farmed animals likely having net negative lives.
I know that animals having net positive lives far from justifies farming animals on it’s own, but it seems important for my own decision making and for standing on solid ground while talking with others about animal suffering.
It’s really hard to judge whether a life is net positive. I’m not even sure when my own life is net positive—sometimes if I’m going through a difficult moment, as a mental exercise I ask myself, “if the rest of my life felt exactly like this, would I want to keep living?” And it’s genuinely pretty hard to tell. Sometimes it’s obvious, like right at this moment my life is definitely net positive, but when I’m feeling bad, it’s hard to say where the threshold is. If I can’t even identify the threshold for myself, I doubt I can identify it in farm animals.
If I had to guess, I’d say the threshold is something like
if the animals spend most of their time outdoors, their lives are net positive
if they spend most of their time indoors (in crowded factory farm conditions, even if “free range”), their lives are net negative
it seems important for my own decision making and for standing on solid ground while talking with others about animal suffering.
To this point, I think the most important things are
whatever the threshold is, factory-farmed animals clearly don’t meet it
99% of animals people eat are factory-farmed (in spite of people’s insistence that they only eat meat from their uncle’s farm where all of the animals are treated like their own children etc)
That’s really interesting on your own life. Even in the midst of my worst emotional states (emotional not physical pain,) I would still feelI’m on the positive side of the ledger.
Yes I agree on your list 2 points, those are the most important in general
In Northern Uganda here though. the majority of animals people eat (not often, many people eat meat once or twice a month) have lives from my first example. In New Zealand almost all beef and sheep meat is from something like options 2 and 3, so I think the question has some relevance to a decent number of people.
Just adding: the discussion of dairy cows, here and elsewhere, tends to focus on the experience of the adult cattle & the suffering for them of being milked, deprived of their babies, etc.
But it’s not implausible to me that the majority of the disvalue from dairy is in the lives of the calves born to dairy cows. In typical milk-producing operations, adult cows have 1 calf every 18 months or so; 50% of them are male, and so are killed within a few hours to a few months after birth.
(& these lives more likely to be net negative because they have less time to experience positive things to outweigh the terror and pain of death. Undoubtedly, some of their deaths will be quite quick, but others are slow and brutal.)
(Also, veal calves are treated very badly—intense confinement to reduce movement to keep the meat tender, dietary restriction to keep the meat pale, individual confinement in a tiny ‘hutch’, etc.)
(& let’s not forget the fetal calves who are still gestating when their mothers go to slaughter. They’re killed slowly, if they ever get purposefully slaughtered at all rather than just left to asphyxiate. Obviously, it’s unclear whether they’re conscious, but I’ve read accounts of them moving, opening eyes, trying to breathe, etc.).
Thanks Bella, this has crossed my mind and definitely updates me towards dairy farmed cows in New Zealand being more likely to be net negative. I’m not sure whether the veal thing happens in New Zealand though I’ll look into it.
Thanks for this. My view is the same as yours. The first two strike me as “net positive.” I’m also unsure about what pigs and dairy cows need. I wouldn’t be hugely surprised if they have either “net positive” or “net negative” lives, but I think it’s most likely (80%+ chance) they are “net positive.”
(Qualifying discussion of net value of existence with ” ” because I find such valuations always so fraught with uncertainty and I feel I owe other beings tremendous humility in this!)
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.
“but it seems important for my own decision making and for standing on solid ground while talking with others about animal suffering.”
I’m highly skeptical of this—why do you think it is important for your own moral decision making? It seems to me that whether farmed animals lives are worth living or not is irrelevant—either way we should try to improve their conditions, and the best ways of doing that seem to be: a boycott & political pressure (I would argue that the two work well together).
By analogy, no one raises the question of whether the lives of people living in extreme poverty, or working in sweatshops and so on, are worth living, because it’s simply irrelevant.
This seems relevant to any intervention premised on “it’s good to reduce the amount of net-negative lives lived.”
If factory-farmed chickens have lives that aren’t worth living, then one might support an intervention that reduces the number of factory-farmed chickens, even if it doesn’t improve the lives of any chickens that do come to exist. (It seems to me this would be the primary effect of boycotts, for instance, although I don’t know empirically how true that is.)
I agree that this is irrelevant to interventions that just seek to improve conditions for animals, rather than changing the number of animals that exist. Those seem equally good regardless of where the zero point is.
I suppose I agree with this. And I’ve been mulling over why it still seems like the wrong way to think about it to me, and I think it’s that I find it rather short-termist. In the short term if farms shut down they might be replaced with nature, with even less happy animals, it’s true. But in the long term opposing speciesism is the only way to achieve a world with happy beings. Clearly the kinds of farms @NickLaing is talking about, with lives worth living but still pretty miserable, are not optimal. Figuring out whether they are worth living or not seems only relevant to trying to reduce suffering in the short term, but not so much in the long term, because in the long term this isn’t what we want anyway.
Im intrigued where people stand on the threshold where farmed animal lives might become net positive? I’m going to share a few scenarios i’m very unsure about and id love to hear thoughts or be pointed towards research on this.
Animals kept in homesteads in rural Uganda where I live. Often they stay inside with the family at night, then are let out during the day to roam free along the farm or community. The animals seem pretty darn happy most of the time for what it’s worth, playing and galavanting around. Downsides here include poor veterinary care so sometimes parasites and sickness are pretty bad and often pretty rough transport and slaughter methods (my intuition net positive).
Grass fed sheep in New Zealand, my birth country. They get good medical care, are well fed on grass and usually have large roaming areas (intuition net positive)
Grass fed dairy cows in New Zealand. They roam fairly freely and will have very good vet care, but have they calves taken away at birth, have constantly uncomfortably swollen udders and are milked at least twice daily. (Intuition very unsure)
Free range pigs. Similar to the above except often space is smaller but they do get little houses. Pigs are far more intelligent than cows or sheep and might have more intellectual needs not getting met. (Intuition uncertain)
Obviously these kind of cases make up a small proportion of farmed animals worldwide, with the predominant situation—factory farmed animals likely having net negative lives.
I know that animals having net positive lives far from justifies farming animals on it’s own, but it seems important for my own decision making and for standing on solid ground while talking with others about animal suffering.
Thanks for your input.
It’s really hard to judge whether a life is net positive. I’m not even sure when my own life is net positive—sometimes if I’m going through a difficult moment, as a mental exercise I ask myself, “if the rest of my life felt exactly like this, would I want to keep living?” And it’s genuinely pretty hard to tell. Sometimes it’s obvious, like right at this moment my life is definitely net positive, but when I’m feeling bad, it’s hard to say where the threshold is. If I can’t even identify the threshold for myself, I doubt I can identify it in farm animals.
If I had to guess, I’d say the threshold is something like
if the animals spend most of their time outdoors, their lives are net positive
if they spend most of their time indoors (in crowded factory farm conditions, even if “free range”), their lives are net negative
To this point, I think the most important things are
whatever the threshold is, factory-farmed animals clearly don’t meet it
99% of animals people eat are factory-farmed (in spite of people’s insistence that they only eat meat from their uncle’s farm where all of the animals are treated like their own children etc)
That’s really interesting on your own life. Even in the midst of my worst emotional states (emotional not physical pain,) I would still feelI’m on the positive side of the ledger.
Yes I agree on your list 2 points, those are the most important in general
In Northern Uganda here though. the majority of animals people eat (not often, many people eat meat once or twice a month) have lives from my first example. In New Zealand almost all beef and sheep meat is from something like options 2 and 3, so I think the question has some relevance to a decent number of people.
Just adding: the discussion of dairy cows, here and elsewhere, tends to focus on the experience of the adult cattle & the suffering for them of being milked, deprived of their babies, etc.
But it’s not implausible to me that the majority of the disvalue from dairy is in the lives of the calves born to dairy cows. In typical milk-producing operations, adult cows have 1 calf every 18 months or so; 50% of them are male, and so are killed within a few hours to a few months after birth.
(& these lives more likely to be net negative because they have less time to experience positive things to outweigh the terror and pain of death. Undoubtedly, some of their deaths will be quite quick, but others are slow and brutal.)
(Also, veal calves are treated very badly—intense confinement to reduce movement to keep the meat tender, dietary restriction to keep the meat pale, individual confinement in a tiny ‘hutch’, etc.)
(& let’s not forget the fetal calves who are still gestating when their mothers go to slaughter. They’re killed slowly, if they ever get purposefully slaughtered at all rather than just left to asphyxiate. Obviously, it’s unclear whether they’re conscious, but I’ve read accounts of them moving, opening eyes, trying to breathe, etc.).
Thanks Bella, this has crossed my mind and definitely updates me towards dairy farmed cows in New Zealand being more likely to be net negative. I’m not sure whether the veal thing happens in New Zealand though I’ll look into it.
Thanks for this. My view is the same as yours. The first two strike me as “net positive.” I’m also unsure about what pigs and dairy cows need. I wouldn’t be hugely surprised if they have either “net positive” or “net negative” lives, but I think it’s most likely (80%+ chance) they are “net positive.”
(Qualifying discussion of net value of existence with ” ” because I find such valuations always so fraught with uncertainty and I feel I owe other beings tremendous humility in this!)
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.
“but it seems important for my own decision making and for standing on solid ground while talking with others about animal suffering.”
I’m highly skeptical of this—why do you think it is important for your own moral decision making? It seems to me that whether farmed animals lives are worth living or not is irrelevant—either way we should try to improve their conditions, and the best ways of doing that seem to be: a boycott & political pressure (I would argue that the two work well together).
By analogy, no one raises the question of whether the lives of people living in extreme poverty, or working in sweatshops and so on, are worth living, because it’s simply irrelevant.
This seems relevant to any intervention premised on “it’s good to reduce the amount of net-negative lives lived.”
If factory-farmed chickens have lives that aren’t worth living, then one might support an intervention that reduces the number of factory-farmed chickens, even if it doesn’t improve the lives of any chickens that do come to exist. (It seems to me this would be the primary effect of boycotts, for instance, although I don’t know empirically how true that is.)
I agree that this is irrelevant to interventions that just seek to improve conditions for animals, rather than changing the number of animals that exist. Those seem equally good regardless of where the zero point is.
I suppose I agree with this. And I’ve been mulling over why it still seems like the wrong way to think about it to me, and I think it’s that I find it rather short-termist. In the short term if farms shut down they might be replaced with nature, with even less happy animals, it’s true. But in the long term opposing speciesism is the only way to achieve a world with happy beings. Clearly the kinds of farms @NickLaing is talking about, with lives worth living but still pretty miserable, are not optimal. Figuring out whether they are worth living or not seems only relevant to trying to reduce suffering in the short term, but not so much in the long term, because in the long term this isn’t what we want anyway.