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?
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?