Do fish feel pain? The issue has been hotly debated for years. One naysayer is former University of Wyoming professor James Rose. “A fish doesn't appear to have the neurological capacity to experience the unpleasant psychological aspect of pain,” Rose wrote in 2000. “Thus, the struggles of a fish don't signify suffering.”1 Whether it's fish, cows, or chickens, this perspective that animals used for food don't suffer—at least not enough to worry about—is at the root of most modern animal farming practices. Thus, one North Carolina pig farmer said the hyper-confined pigs in his factory farm “love it. . . . They don't mind at all.”2
Increasingly, however, consumers sense something is wrong with this dismissive attitude. People are informed and concerned about animal farming methods, and in surveys assessing shoppers' attitudes toward factory farming, a majority of respondents prefer practices that are more humane.3 Beyond the weighty ethical questions, thanks to recent research, we can also now quantify and monetize consumer sentiment toward animal farming. For example, agricultural economists F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson Lusk show in their 2011 book, Compassion by the Pound, that consumers are actually willing to spend their own, real money—in average amounts ranging from $23 to $57 per thousand animals—to improve farm animals' lives.
Factory farming often exacts a toll on animals in the form of pain and stress, and because humans care about how animals are treated, we suffer too. In this chapter (and the closely linked Appendix D), you'll find recent research into the physiological and emotional effects that industrial production methods have on animals used for food, including fish, pigs, chickens, and dairy cows. You'll also find an estimate of the financial costs that producers impose on society by persisting in those methods despite a general consumer preference for change. A key caveat: I don't believe a simple cost estimate can meaningfully represent the massive scope of routine, lifelong suffering endured today by virtually all US farm animals (that is, the 99 percent of farm animals raised in factory farms). Nevertheless, because economists do recognize a human cost in known animal suffering, and this book is about economics, it's helpful to try to quantify this sum in an objective way.
To repeat a familiar refrain, it's about the money. Animal food producers don't think of themselves as a cruel or sadistic bunch. They're just trying to maximize profits, and in the animal food business, you do that by minimizing the amount spent on each animal's comfort. This turns the focus to animals as production units, rather than as living beings with physiological and emotional needs. Practices some consider cruel are just a side effect of industrial production. Ron Torell, for example, is a self-proclaimed “long-standing educator and advocate of animal agriculture” who writes a column for the Nevada Cattlemen's Association monthly newsletter. In a 2011 column, Torell advises beef producers to slaughter “poor producing economic units”—that is, low-yielding females—as soon as possible. Torell further cautions against letting “pet cows avoid the terminal trip to McDonald's. It makes no economic sense why these cows are given a free pass based on sentiment, color pattern or simply an experience the owners had with the pet when it was a calf.”4 Such a dollars-and-cents mentality informs most animal handling practices in the industry.
Some may question the appropriateness of this topic. For starters, cruelty is a value-laden, subjective concept, and what's cruel to one person or animal may not be to another. Some think it cruel to keep cats indoors while their natural urge is to be outside in the sunshine, exploring and playing. Others think it cruel to let cats outside, where they might kill birds or rodents, become lunch for a coyote, or get hit by a car. (I live with two cats and wrestle with this issue myself.) To avoid such value judgments, as used in this chapter, cruel means those practices which published research finds cause animals measurable pain or stress.
Some may find descriptions of cruelty disturbing. But because farm animal cruelty costs American society at least $21 billion yearly in externalized empathy costs, it's important to understand where these costs come from. As recent research on marine life is particularly timely and important, several pages of this chapter discuss fishing and fish farming. On the other hand, there is less material on decades-old practices like raising hens and pigs in battery cages and gestation crates, as most readers are likely familiar with them. (That said, for the uninitiated, a detailed summary of these methods can be found in Appendix D.)
René Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher and mathematician, was one of the first scientists to theorize that animals don't suffer. The father of analytical geometry argued that among animals, humans were uniquely endowed with minds and souls. This belief led to his famous remark, “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”). As a corollary, he argued that animals were mere machines whose responses to stimuli were simply mechanical. Because he and his followers considered nonhumans incapable of thought, emotion, or the capacity to feel pain, they treated live animals as pieces of equipment and mocked those who objected.5
However, today we know that if an animal changes her behavior in response to harmful stimuli, then she likely experiences those stimuli as pain.6 Because the ability to feel pain helps animals remember to avoid harmful situations, this capacity has played a role in evolution and in the success of species who experience pain.7 Conversely, if harmful stimuli did not produce a painful reaction, animals would not learn from encounters with such stimuli and would repeat dangerous interactions at the risk of injury or death. That's why it turns out, for example, that virtually all sentient beings have evolved the same ability that a human child has to avoid a hot radiator after touching it once or twice.
While the Cartesian view remains popular with some people in the scientific community, modern research has turned the traditional wisdom about the suffering of animals—including fish—on its old-timey wigged, powdered head. Scientists have confirmed in the past decade that fish not only feel pain, but they also experience emotions. In one study, researchers assessed how fish responded to having acid or bee venom injected into their lips. With eighteen pain receptors on a trout's head and face, some more sensitive than those in the human eye, it turns out they don't like having their face injected with stinging chemicals any more than we would. The injected fish engaged in stress-associated rocking behavior and, compared to control groups, reduced their swimming activity, waited three times longer to eat, and had significantly elevated breathing rates. The researchers concluded that “both the behavior and physiology of the rainbow trout are adversely affected by stimuli known to be painful to humans. This fulfills the criteria for animal pain.”8
How do we know the trout exhibiting these responsive behaviors weren't just engaging in the reflexive behavior of Cartesian machines? Because in a similar, later study, trout dosed with morphine again had their lips injected with harmful toxins. The medicated fish engaged in significantly less rocking, lip-rubbing, and elevated breathing than those who did not receive morphine.9 Researchers concluded that because the responsive behaviors were directly related to the level of pain as managed by the morphine, the trout's responsive behaviors could not be merely reflexive and that “pain perception in fish” is a reality.10 Although these trout studies don't seem particularly humane in themselves, their results may suggest a need to reconsider how we treat marine animals.
Another study involving goldfish shows fish experience emotions like fear and anxiety.11 Researchers studied two groups of goldfish—one dosed with morphine and one undosed—who were subjected to painful levels of heat. Both groups responded reflexively in an attempt to escape the heat. However, after being returned to their tanks, the morphine-dosed group soon returned to normal behaviors, while the undosed group showed stress-related behavioral changes. The undosed fish acted defensively, exhibiting what researcher Joseph Garner called “fear and anxiety.” According to Garner, “The goldfish that did not get morphine experienced this painful, stressful event. Then two hours later, they turned that pain into fear like we do. To me, it sounds an awful lot like how we experience pain.”12
The recent research into fish and pain leads some to conclude that fish farming, the fastest-growing segment of animal agriculture, is one of the least humane of all processes to produce animal food. Farmed fish suffer routinely both during their lives and when slaughtered. As one would expect from any profit-minded fish farmer, tight stocking densities are used in typical farms to help keep costs down. But it's a hard-knock life for the fish since tight densities cause them chronic stress and make it impossible to engage in natural behaviors like defending territory or escaping from bullies. One group of researchers found that “the aquaculture environment is inherently unsuitable for fish that are territorial or solitary animals in their natural environment, such as some salmonid fish [salmon and trout]. In these cases, agonistic interactions can be particularly stressful to the fish.”13
Packed stocking densities also cause fish a variety of physical problems. Injuries to tails and fins are common because of aggression-induced cannibalism and frequent friction with cages and other fish. Tightly packed fish are highly susceptible to eye diseases leading to cataracts and blindness, a problem pervasive enough to merit the formation of a group called Friends of Blind Fishes.14 One research team even worried that the prevalence of blindness among farmed fish might give consumers “doubts on the ethical standards of industrial fish farming.”15
These overcrowded containers can also give rise to parasitic infestations. In the case of salmon, there are various techniques for dealing with sea lice—none of which is completely effective and all of which have their own welfare implications. One is to douse infested salmon with a chemical like hydrogen peroxide. Because such chemicals are harsh skin irritants, they cause the fish to exhibit stress behaviors for days after treatment.16 Another technique is to introduce helper fish called wrasse as cleaners to pluck the parasites from their hosts. However, in such close confinement, the wrasse are often bullied or killed by the salmon, and in any event, they're killed by farm workers at the end of the season to prevent the spread of disease to the next batch of salmon.
Slowly consuming their hosts, sea lice cause lesions, bleeding, and sometimes death. As one would expect, salmon don't enjoy being eaten alive; research shows those infected with sea lice suffer from chronic stress and compromised immune systems.17 Sometimes the parasites eat all the way down to bone. When this happens on a fish's head, farm workers call the grisly result a “death crown.”
When ready for slaughter, farmed fish are killed in profit-focused ways that many commentators deem inhumane. For starters, farmed fish are often starved for a week or more before slaughter to eliminate fecal matter from their intestines and make it easier to butcher them. While any sentient being presumably dislikes being starved, for fish conditioned to being fed at the same time every day, research finds this sudden disruption in their feeding schedule is particularly stressful.18
One common method of killing fish is to throw them in water rich in carbon dioxide. Placed into this acidic, low-oxygen environment, fish thrash around for half a minute or more, and even after calming down, continue to show signs of distress, such as vigorous head and tail shaking, for up to nine minutes.19 Fish killed in this manner routinely bleed from the gills because of the intensity of their reaction.20
Another popular slaughter technique at fish farms is to bleed the animals while they're fully conscious. This might involve cutting open their gills, opening their bellies with a knife, or some other method developed for a particular species. It's unclear whether we need research to determine that it hurts animals to have their bodies cut open while fully conscious, but regardless, the research has been done. Here's what the scientists found: if not stunned first, fish feel pain when bled to death.21 In fact, those eviscerated or degilled while conscious struggle “intensely” for four to seven minutes and respond to stimuli for up to fifteen minutes.22
For greater freshness and salability, many farmers like their fish to freeze while dying. Gradually slowing a dying animal's metabolism helps to minimize tissue decomposition and preserve its taste. Because fish asphyxiate at a slower rate when ambient temperatures are lower, chilling can lengthen the suffocation process by seven minutes or more.23 Not surprisingly, being frozen to death is distressful to the animals. Research measuring levels of the stress hormone cortisol in fish found that these levels increase markedly when the animals' ambient water is chilled.24
In the world of animal foods, fish are an anomaly—an outlier. For one thing, fish differ from land animals in their inability to cry out when hurt or suffering. This powerlessness to vocalize leads many to confuse a dying fish's silence with a lack of suffering—although the research shows otherwise. And then there is the conventional wisdom that says fish are particularly nutritious. But a flotilla of scientific papers shows that fish are routinely high in mercury, PCBs, and cholesterol, making them a distinctly unhealthy alternative to plant foods (see Appendix A).
Nutritional issues aside, this chapter centers on the humane issues facing fish because marine animals frequently take a backseat to land animals—and because the recent research in this area is particularly compelling. Of course, cattle, pigs, and poultry have their own set of humane problems, like gestation crates for pigs, battery cages for laying hens, zero-grazing systems for dairy cows, and rapid growth and hyper-confinement for broiler chickens (as mentioned, more on that in Appendix D).
Given the chance, what—if anything—would you pay to change animal food production practices that are particularly inhumane? Economists Norwood and Lusk have sought to answer this question through studies involving real people and real money, and the answers are enlightening. In auctions where participants used their own cash to bid on animal welfare improvements, people paid an average of $57 per person to actually move one thousand laying hens from caged to free-range systems.25 Bidders also spent an average of $23 per person to actually move one thousand sows and their offspring to shelter-pasture systems from confinement crates. Even more interesting for our purposes, Norwood and Lusk extrapolated from their auction results to estimate that people would spend a one-time average of $342 and $345 per person, respectively, to implement these two welfare changes throughout the United States.26
Now I propose to extrapolate further. Let's add three more hypothetical changes in animal farming to the two above: ending zero grazing for dairy cows, eliminating rapid growth and hyper-confinement for broiler chickens, and banning overstocking and inhumane slaughter of farmed fish. In terms of the number of animals affected, these five items likely represent the most prevalent industry practices in need of reform. Take $343.31, the midpoint of the range between the two amounts Norwood and Lusk estimated people would pay to improve hen's and pig's lives, and apply it to all the hypothetical changes. The total that this exercise suggests each American would be willing to pay, on average, to make these five changes is $1,717.27 Adjusting this figure for inflation, multiplying by the number of US adults, then amortizing the total over twenty years (the standard IRS depreciation period for farm buildings) yields a total of roughly $20.7 billion yearly that farm animal cruelty imposes on Americans in externalized costs.28
Some will argue this figure is too high because not everyone would pay nearly $2,000 to improve the lives of fish and farm animals. That's true, but this figure is proposed as an average that puts us in the right vicinity. Some would spend nothing, while at the other extreme, some would spend $50,000 or $100,000. How much might billionaire casino owner and vegan Steve Wynn pay? Five million dollars? Fifty million?
In fact, if anything, I believe this cruelty number is too low. For starters, it excludes the amounts the animals themselves would be willing to pay—if this could be measured and conventional economics ascribed any value to it. Measuring animals' economic preferences is not all that far-fetched. One study actually measured pigs' willingness to pay for certain items. The animals were taught to repeatedly press a nose-plate to receive either food or increased social contact. By a ratio of 2:1, the pigs demonstrated they were more willing to spend time and effort on food than on friendship.29
Of course, if we could assign a value to animals' willingness to pay for better conditions, it would nevertheless go unrecognized by economic standards that measure only the human value of goods and services. Some believe this omission represents a deficiency in conventional economics. As methods improve for measuring animals' willingness to pay, and humans become more comfortable with the idea of using such figures, better metrics may emerge for making these calculations. Is it possible to measure the economic effects of producing animal foods without accounting for a single penny of economic cost associated with the individual animals' personal suffering? Because many of the 60 billion land and marine animals killed to feed Americans each year suffer throughout their lives, and some suffer further at the time of slaughter—in each case in measurable ways—perhaps assessments based on conventional economics omit a material component.
Furthermore, the estimate of $20.7 billion yearly covers only five inhumane practices. It doesn't include numerous others, like raising veal calves in crates, force-feeding ducks to produce foie gras, castrating pigs and cattle without anesthetic, and killing male chicks by starvation, suffocation, or grinding. Adding these and other practices to the calculation might double or triple the total.
The living conditions discussed in this chapter and Appendix D might seem apocryphal, exceptional, or illegal. They're not. They're the normal, lawful, day-to-day conditions that industrially raised animals routinely face. For some, these images may suggest a need for change.
Want to have an immediate impact? Here's one idea: stop eating eggs and products made with eggs. Laying hens have it tough regardless of whether they're squeezed into battery cages, stuffed into enriched cages, or crammed into so-called cage-free buildings at unregulated densities. For a bird subjected to a painful debeaking, starved on a regular basis, and bled to death—while alert—eight years before her time, the differences between one kind of cramped living quarters and another are largely inconsequential. Besides, there's little to suggest that eggs are good for you and much to suggest they're not (see Appendix A). Giving them up will likely lower your cholesterol and could help prevent or reverse heart disease.
If you like eggs for breakfast, try a grilled tofu patty as a fried egg alternative—or a tofu scramble instead of scrambled eggs. For baking, try replacing eggs with banana, applesauce, or a commercial starch-based egg replacer. With these and other plant-based egg substitutes widely available, today it's easier to give up eggs than ever before.