What is the most convincing argument that a factory animal is suffering on a day to day basis?
I would note that the very act of eating is a pleasure for all creatures, and so is the process of going to sleep. I suspect the life of a factory cow is pretty routinized, such that it can learn the basic daily patterns and anticipate that it will be fed and that it will be able to rest and sleep on a regular basis. My dog is all about routine.
I wonder if there is a physiological correlate of suffering that is measurable. High cortisol? Beta-endorphins? Some change in brain structure?
Your dog doesn’t spend its entire life in a box, you take it to the vet when it gets sick or injured, and you take it outside to poop so that it doesn’t have to live in its own feces. You presumably feed it food intended to taste good and be healthy for dogs.
I actually DO think seriously about the rest of your argument, but before I seriously respond to it I want to be clear that the comparison with your dog is almost completely irrelevant, and distracts from the issue.
I don’t know how the “net suffering” works out. I don’t know whether, if given a choice somehow, animals in a factory would choose to die or to live, and how much they’d care. But I know that, at least with mammals, chances are the neural pathways are similar enough to humans that I can make some assumptions.
Self reported happiness levels suggest that human happiness DOES adjust to new circumstances. People have a baseline level they usually return to, with dramatic events mostly causing temporary spikes. I’ve also read that people tend to be less happy when they have to agonize over available choices. So given that factory-farmed animals have pretty much one constant state of existence, and they are probably incapable of imagining anything better, I AM willing to grant the possibility (perhaps even likelihood) that their existence isn’t a constant stream of torture, but rather a dull, aching pointlessness. Plenty of humans live in conditions just as bad and, however bad it gets, opt not to kill themselves.
But I don’t think “opt not to kill themselves” is a useful metric for determining a good moral framework. Human slaves may have adapted to their situation and made the best of it. That doesn’t mean that “breed a race of slaves that doesn’t know any better” is a good thing. I’m of the opinion that if we’ve decided that we have moral justification for producing infinite creatures with abysmal but barely livable lives, then it’s far more likely that we have a made a mistake than devised a useful system of morality.
Your use of “pointlessness” makes me think of something. Saying that someone’s life has a point (purpose) usually means they have some long-term goal that they work toward, which implies thinking about future possibilities and developing abstractions like “purpose”. Not to say that the animals most people eat can’t think into the future, but if they do live “in the moment” to a much greater extent than humans, doesn’t that greatly reduce the cruelty argument? I think a sufficiently unintelligent human would be happy to sit and eat all day (as some are wont to do already, of their own volition), to say nothing of what a chicken might like. I’m not implying they’re in paradise, but if a chicken’s daily list of desires is “eat stand sit eat groom stand eat sit stand sleep”, it doesn’t sound like they’d even be experiencing a “dull, aching pointlessness”, because that is precisely what they want and would be doing otherwise.
I suppose my question is, do cows, chickens, pigs, etc. have long-term notions of contentment like humans do?
I don’t think cows and chickens have much real sense of long term contentment. Pointlessness was perhaps a bad choice of word, since it implies human-style abstract thinking. I didn’t mean the chicken sits in its cage thinking “man, what is the meaning of life? Why do I sit hear every day? Nothing changes… nothing gets accomplished, what am I doing with my lif—” (abruptly gets its head cut off).
But I do think there may be a sort of proto-wondering. There’s no complex question or desire for change, it just sits there with a vague dissatisfaction about its existence. I don’t think there’s a way to prove this yet, and probably never. (Unless we identify the exact neuron pattern for it in humans and discover something very similar in chickens. Maybe.)
Food and sleep are definitely sources of pleasure, but being able to get exercise is another important one. Resting is nice, but if you’re stuck in the same place too long you get cranky and irritable, and if you’re stuck in the same place for weeks.
I believe chicken-farming is less ethical than cow farming because chickens are literally stuck in either a 1′x1′ box for their entire life, or they are thrown in a giant coop where each chicken still only gets about a cubic foot of space. In addition, they are given growth hormones to maximize production of meat, making them grow larger than their legs can support, leaving them practically immobile if not actually breaking their legs. Describing this situation as “they get to sit around and eat all day” is pretty significantly mischaracterizing it.
On the flipside, cows by nature need to be able to graze, so they usually get to move around. I consider that a step up, but if they injure themselves while walking they’re pretty much screwed. I’m a little less angry about this because, honestly that IS the situation they’d face in the wild (by contrast, the chicken situation is absolutely nothing like how they’d exist in the natural world). But they still are pumped full of food and chemicals that are not healthy for them.
Just one comment on chicken farming. I’m not too sure if you have actually worked or spent a large amount of time in a chicken processing plant or chicken farm, but you have used incorrect specifics about it. I have worked in one and the facts you used about chickens being “literally stuck in a 1′x1′ box… or in a giant coop where each chicken still only gets about a cubic foot of space” is actually wrong—at least on the farms I have witnessed firsthand. If meat is stressed throughout life, and in particular before death, then it will be a terrible product. Businesses do not want bad products. Chicken farming actually regulates the heat for perfect comfort, delivers a constant amount of fresh water, a mixture of dietary requirements that delivers the right growth (if growth is too fast then it becomes a bad product), and also perfect amounts of light. Also chickens have been domesticated so what is the situation they would face in the wild? Instead of being eaten by humans they would be eaten by foxes, wolves, dogs, etc. I think that would be more traumatic (if they actually knew what that was) than being rendered unconscious through an electric shock before a quick death.
I realize the grandparent explicitly mentioned chicken meat, but I think a lot of the memes about chicken mistreatment come out of the egg industry, and may have crosspollinated. Do you have comparable insights about egg-laying chickens’ conditions?
My intuition is that your view of animal happiness is closer to the truth than the vegetarians. First, I consider research on happiness even in humans, especially “Stumbling on Happiness” which book I highly recommend. Even for humans, happiness does not generally correlate with what you or I think would make you happy. A compelling example: conjoined twins are generally as happy as “singleton” (i.e. normal) people, but virtually no singleton would guess that intuitively. Generally, we adjust to the status quo across gigantically broad ranges: those who live in the slums of Bombay are not clearly happier or less happy than those of us living in mansions.
So I would imagine chickens in ooky coops, cows in stockyards, like humans, adjust to the mean. Then have their moments of pleasure and moments of pain primarily as variations around that.
And the terror or fear at slaughter? It seems very unlikely that they spend much time dreading it, as my dog trainer said to a couple who was sure the dog was punishing them for going out by pooping on the floor: “I think dogs live more in the moment than that.” And I expect that for cows, pigs, and certainly chickens.
So far, we live in only one world of a possible MWI. So far, mammals are born, they live, they experience emotions positive and negative, and they die. How much sense does it make to adopt a moral system which thinks we are wrong for just doing what nature has very many animals do for millions of years?
How much sense does it make to adopt a moral system which thinks we are wrong for just doing what nature has very many animals do for millions of years?
Maybe a lot. Nature is fucked up. For example, remember Charles Darwin’s parasitic wasps. The hell with nature.
And I expect that for cows, pigs, and certainly chickens.
Certainly chickens? Do you think birds are generally less intelligent/self-aware than mammals?
Some birds, especially corvids and parrots, are among the most intelligent animal species; a number of bird species have been observed manufacturing and using tools, and many social species exhibit cultural transmission of knowledge across generations. Wikipedia
Also see the following links that indicate how similar/intelligent some other species might be:
So far, mammals are born, they live, they experience emotions positive and negative, and they die. How much sense does it make to adopt a moral system which thinks we are wrong for just doing what nature has very many animals do for millions of years?
Morality is not a prescriptive natural law. There is no imperative here. Personally I want to minimize suffering as much as I can. That means that I am going to kill an (subjectively) inferior being to survive. But I am living in a western country, having enough money to effort a healthy diet without inflicting additional suffering for the pleasure of eating meat. Surely if you assign higher utility to eating meat than negative utility to killing other beings, that’s completely rational. But you seem to be committing the naturalistic fallacy here.
Hm. I am currently not clear enough in my head to think it through, but something inside my head thinks that as transhumanists/singularitarians (I somehow dislike those nouns) we have to deal with a quantification of negative utility in inferior species in a way that makes it difficult to dismiss neurological facts with regard to “moral worth” of any entity. I have not thought it through, tough.
Hm. I am currently not clear enough in my head to think it through, but something inside my head thinks that as transhumanists/singularitarians (I somehow dislike those nouns) we have to deal with a quantification of negative utility in inferior species in a way that makes it difficult to dismiss neurological facts with regard to “moral worth” of any entity. I have not thought it through, tough.
I think that what you bring up is a good reason to avoid using happiness as the sole or majority measure for utility or moral value.
Because I doubt you would be at all willing to relocate to the slums of Bombay, even knowing this, and you shouldn’t.
Likewise, swine might get used to (and be as happy) living practically swimming in their own feces and stillborn siblings, but to the extent that we realize that they would really rather not, we shouldn’t force them to. If they are really so mindless as to be indifferent, I don’t see that we should care, but I don’t think that’s the case.
Also, a nitpick; research shows that happiness isn’t correlated with all those things we think make us happy above a threshold. People who starve on a regular basis, or are continually abused really are less happy than the rest of us. We don’t fully adapt to regular torment. The threshold is perhaps shockingly low, but shouldn’t be ignored.
What is the most convincing argument that a factory animal is suffering on a day to day basis?
I would note that the very act of eating is a pleasure for all creatures, and so is the process of going to sleep. I suspect the life of a factory cow is pretty routinized, such that it can learn the basic daily patterns and anticipate that it will be fed and that it will be able to rest and sleep on a regular basis. My dog is all about routine.
I wonder if there is a physiological correlate of suffering that is measurable. High cortisol? Beta-endorphins? Some change in brain structure?
Your dog doesn’t spend its entire life in a box, you take it to the vet when it gets sick or injured, and you take it outside to poop so that it doesn’t have to live in its own feces. You presumably feed it food intended to taste good and be healthy for dogs.
I actually DO think seriously about the rest of your argument, but before I seriously respond to it I want to be clear that the comparison with your dog is almost completely irrelevant, and distracts from the issue.
I don’t know how the “net suffering” works out. I don’t know whether, if given a choice somehow, animals in a factory would choose to die or to live, and how much they’d care. But I know that, at least with mammals, chances are the neural pathways are similar enough to humans that I can make some assumptions.
Self reported happiness levels suggest that human happiness DOES adjust to new circumstances. People have a baseline level they usually return to, with dramatic events mostly causing temporary spikes. I’ve also read that people tend to be less happy when they have to agonize over available choices. So given that factory-farmed animals have pretty much one constant state of existence, and they are probably incapable of imagining anything better, I AM willing to grant the possibility (perhaps even likelihood) that their existence isn’t a constant stream of torture, but rather a dull, aching pointlessness. Plenty of humans live in conditions just as bad and, however bad it gets, opt not to kill themselves.
But I don’t think “opt not to kill themselves” is a useful metric for determining a good moral framework. Human slaves may have adapted to their situation and made the best of it. That doesn’t mean that “breed a race of slaves that doesn’t know any better” is a good thing. I’m of the opinion that if we’ve decided that we have moral justification for producing infinite creatures with abysmal but barely livable lives, then it’s far more likely that we have a made a mistake than devised a useful system of morality.
For the record, information on factory farming (as well as how pointless most “humane” labels are) can be found here: http://www.farmsanctuary.org/issues/factoryfarming/
Your use of “pointlessness” makes me think of something. Saying that someone’s life has a point (purpose) usually means they have some long-term goal that they work toward, which implies thinking about future possibilities and developing abstractions like “purpose”. Not to say that the animals most people eat can’t think into the future, but if they do live “in the moment” to a much greater extent than humans, doesn’t that greatly reduce the cruelty argument? I think a sufficiently unintelligent human would be happy to sit and eat all day (as some are wont to do already, of their own volition), to say nothing of what a chicken might like. I’m not implying they’re in paradise, but if a chicken’s daily list of desires is “eat stand sit eat groom stand eat sit stand sleep”, it doesn’t sound like they’d even be experiencing a “dull, aching pointlessness”, because that is precisely what they want and would be doing otherwise.
I suppose my question is, do cows, chickens, pigs, etc. have long-term notions of contentment like humans do?
I don’t think cows and chickens have much real sense of long term contentment. Pointlessness was perhaps a bad choice of word, since it implies human-style abstract thinking. I didn’t mean the chicken sits in its cage thinking “man, what is the meaning of life? Why do I sit hear every day? Nothing changes… nothing gets accomplished, what am I doing with my lif—” (abruptly gets its head cut off).
But I do think there may be a sort of proto-wondering. There’s no complex question or desire for change, it just sits there with a vague dissatisfaction about its existence. I don’t think there’s a way to prove this yet, and probably never. (Unless we identify the exact neuron pattern for it in humans and discover something very similar in chickens. Maybe.)
Food and sleep are definitely sources of pleasure, but being able to get exercise is another important one. Resting is nice, but if you’re stuck in the same place too long you get cranky and irritable, and if you’re stuck in the same place for weeks.
I believe chicken-farming is less ethical than cow farming because chickens are literally stuck in either a 1′x1′ box for their entire life, or they are thrown in a giant coop where each chicken still only gets about a cubic foot of space. In addition, they are given growth hormones to maximize production of meat, making them grow larger than their legs can support, leaving them practically immobile if not actually breaking their legs. Describing this situation as “they get to sit around and eat all day” is pretty significantly mischaracterizing it.
On the flipside, cows by nature need to be able to graze, so they usually get to move around. I consider that a step up, but if they injure themselves while walking they’re pretty much screwed. I’m a little less angry about this because, honestly that IS the situation they’d face in the wild (by contrast, the chicken situation is absolutely nothing like how they’d exist in the natural world). But they still are pumped full of food and chemicals that are not healthy for them.
Just one comment on chicken farming. I’m not too sure if you have actually worked or spent a large amount of time in a chicken processing plant or chicken farm, but you have used incorrect specifics about it. I have worked in one and the facts you used about chickens being “literally stuck in a 1′x1′ box… or in a giant coop where each chicken still only gets about a cubic foot of space” is actually wrong—at least on the farms I have witnessed firsthand. If meat is stressed throughout life, and in particular before death, then it will be a terrible product. Businesses do not want bad products. Chicken farming actually regulates the heat for perfect comfort, delivers a constant amount of fresh water, a mixture of dietary requirements that delivers the right growth (if growth is too fast then it becomes a bad product), and also perfect amounts of light. Also chickens have been domesticated so what is the situation they would face in the wild? Instead of being eaten by humans they would be eaten by foxes, wolves, dogs, etc. I think that would be more traumatic (if they actually knew what that was) than being rendered unconscious through an electric shock before a quick death.
I realize the grandparent explicitly mentioned chicken meat, but I think a lot of the memes about chicken mistreatment come out of the egg industry, and may have crosspollinated. Do you have comparable insights about egg-laying chickens’ conditions?
My intuition is that your view of animal happiness is closer to the truth than the vegetarians. First, I consider research on happiness even in humans, especially “Stumbling on Happiness” which book I highly recommend. Even for humans, happiness does not generally correlate with what you or I think would make you happy. A compelling example: conjoined twins are generally as happy as “singleton” (i.e. normal) people, but virtually no singleton would guess that intuitively. Generally, we adjust to the status quo across gigantically broad ranges: those who live in the slums of Bombay are not clearly happier or less happy than those of us living in mansions.
So I would imagine chickens in ooky coops, cows in stockyards, like humans, adjust to the mean. Then have their moments of pleasure and moments of pain primarily as variations around that.
And the terror or fear at slaughter? It seems very unlikely that they spend much time dreading it, as my dog trainer said to a couple who was sure the dog was punishing them for going out by pooping on the floor: “I think dogs live more in the moment than that.” And I expect that for cows, pigs, and certainly chickens.
So far, we live in only one world of a possible MWI. So far, mammals are born, they live, they experience emotions positive and negative, and they die. How much sense does it make to adopt a moral system which thinks we are wrong for just doing what nature has very many animals do for millions of years?
One nitpick:
Maybe a lot. Nature is fucked up. For example, remember Charles Darwin’s parasitic wasps. The hell with nature.
Generally a very insightful post, though.
I for one like to bring up such tasteful subjects as traumatic insemination, “homoerotic necrophillia in the mallard duck”, and baby eating.
Certainly chickens? Do you think birds are generally less intelligent/self-aware than mammals?
Also see the following links that indicate how similar/intelligent some other species might be:
Bigger Not Necessarily Better, When It Comes to Brains
Clever New Caledonian crows use one tool to acquire another
Meet the Genius Bird: Crafty Crows Use Tools to Solve a Three-Step Problem
Metacognitive Apes
Chimpanzees Prefer Fair Play To Reaping An Unjust Reward
Scientists say dolphins should be treated as non-human persons
Evidence suggesting that humans and other primates process numbers using common cognitive skills with a shared evolutionary origin.
Good Dog, Smart Dog
Common fish species has ‘human’ ability to learn
Octopus carries around coconut shells as suits of armour
Altruistic chimpanzees clearly help each other out
Amazing rats
Ravens console each other after fights
Missile-throwing chimp plots attacks on tourists
How chimpanzees deal with death and dying
Hyenas cooperate better than chimps, study finds
Morality is not a prescriptive natural law. There is no imperative here. Personally I want to minimize suffering as much as I can. That means that I am going to kill an (subjectively) inferior being to survive. But I am living in a western country, having enough money to effort a healthy diet without inflicting additional suffering for the pleasure of eating meat. Surely if you assign higher utility to eating meat than negative utility to killing other beings, that’s completely rational. But you seem to be committing the naturalistic fallacy here.
Hm. I am currently not clear enough in my head to think it through, but something inside my head thinks that as transhumanists/singularitarians (I somehow dislike those nouns) we have to deal with a quantification of negative utility in inferior species in a way that makes it difficult to dismiss neurological facts with regard to “moral worth” of any entity. I have not thought it through, tough.
Hm. I am currently not clear enough in my head to think it through, but something inside my head thinks that as transhumanists/singularitarians (I somehow dislike those nouns) we have to deal with a quantification of negative utility in inferior species in a way that makes it difficult to dismiss neurological facts with regard to “moral worth” of any entity. I have not thought it through, tough.
I nominate this for the title of “Most Gratuitous Quantum Mechanics Reference of the Month”.
I think that what you bring up is a good reason to avoid using happiness as the sole or majority measure for utility or moral value.
Because I doubt you would be at all willing to relocate to the slums of Bombay, even knowing this, and you shouldn’t.
Likewise, swine might get used to (and be as happy) living practically swimming in their own feces and stillborn siblings, but to the extent that we realize that they would really rather not, we shouldn’t force them to. If they are really so mindless as to be indifferent, I don’t see that we should care, but I don’t think that’s the case.
Also, a nitpick; research shows that happiness isn’t correlated with all those things we think make us happy above a threshold. People who starve on a regular basis, or are continually abused really are less happy than the rest of us. We don’t fully adapt to regular torment. The threshold is perhaps shockingly low, but shouldn’t be ignored.