Animals are incredibly diverse. Agreeing that animals have some moral standing is one thing, but do they all get the same moral standing? A 2018 survey of Americans showed that 47 percent of them believe that animals should have the same rights as people in terms of being free from harm or exploitation.1 I’m not doubting that people respond that way when asked directly, but I’m also pretty sure that even those people tend to be more upset by a moose dying than a goose.
When we think about what kinds of things have moral standing, one characteristic that’s pretty much universally agreed upon as important is consciousness. That is, most people and ethicists believe that having some ability to consciously experience pleasant and unpleasant mental states (feelings, as I’m referring to them in this book) is sufficient for some kind of moral consideration.2 This is the reason we think that a rock doesn’t have moral standing, but a penguin does. When we look at humans, deer, mice, and flies, many of us get a strong intuition that as we go down the list there’s less suffering capability. How does science weigh in?
Consciousness
Let’s assume that suffering requires conscious experience. That is, if something is harmed, or its goals are frustrated, it doesn’t count as suffering unless it actually feels like something—or, as we say in cognitive science, has some subjective experience.3 Even if we might say that a Roomba has a “goal” to clean the floor, we don’t think it’s an ethical violation to prevent it from doing so, because the Roomba can’t actually feel frustration. At first blush, consciousness seems to be an on-or-off kind of thing. “Creature consciousness” is the question of whether beings of a particular kind are capable of being conscious of anything at all. The idea is that some entities, such as peanut butter, do not have creature consciousness, and others, like humans, can be conscious of things. This raises the question of which entities have creature consciousness and which do not. Do mice? Do flies? Paramecium? Most relevant to this book is the capacity of a creature to consciously feel positive and negative mental states, which is often referred to as “sentience.”4
But when we look closer, it’s clear that even for a “fully” conscious human being, there are lots of brain processes going on that she’s unaware of. It’s not enough to say that she’s conscious. It matters what she’s conscious of and what she isn’t. She might be conscious of her feeling that she wants to sit down, but unconscious of the edge-detection processing going on in her early visual system, or how her mind puts words together to make grammatical sentences. This is “state consciousness”: you’re conscious of some states of your mind, and not others.
Most cognitive scientists, though, don’t think of consciousness of even a particular thought or feeling as being simply on or off. Our consciousness of any particular thing is graded. There are things that we are barely conscious of, and other things we feel very conscious of, suggesting that there are levels of consciousness. When we’re anesthetized, we can experience reduced, but not always eliminated, conscious states. Perhaps state consciousness is a continuous variable—more like a dimmer than an on-off light switch.5 So even if we think mice have creature consciousness, we have the further question of what they can be conscious of, and how conscious of things they can be.
Although we cannot get into the heads of other creatures, we do have several reasons to think many of them are sentient to some extent. First, the feeling of pain and pleasure solves an evolutionary “design problem” that almost all living creatures share: getting the organism to do things that are good for it. How do you make a being eat food that’s nutritious for it? Make it pleasurable to eat it. How do you make a being reproduce? Make sex pleasurable. How do you make it avoid harm? Make bodily harm painful. Some animals, like mussels, are not able to move later in life, so we assume that they don’t feel pain. The sea squirt begins life like a fish and swims around until it finds a good place to secure itself, then it sticks to a rock and eats its own brain, presumably because it doesn’t need it anymore. For a sea squirt, pain has an adaptive value only for the swimming part of its life. So although it might feel pain later, without a brain, it’s unlikely, because maintaining the ability to feel pain would incur the kind of needless nutritive cost that evolution tends to be good at eliminating.
The fact that so many different kinds of creatures need to avoid some things and approach others suggests that some mechanism for motivating behavior would be, evolutionarily speaking, very old. This means that it’s likely that conscious feelings of pain and pleasure probably evolved a long time ago, and most creatures alive today who descended from this ancient population of critters probably inherited sentience, too.
And indeed, the brain structures, neurotransmitters, and brain behavior related to feelings appear to be somewhat consistent across many species. For example, the brain activity and structures that are correlated with pain in humans match up pretty well with other creatures. Finally, creatures of many species behave the same way when put in situations that we would expect would cause pain and pleasure. They cower and rest when hurt, and get energetic when well-fed, healthy, and rested. Mammals even have similar facial expressions to human beings in different emotional states. Anesthetic drugs (painkillers) make creatures of many different species, even insects, behave as though they are in less pain, putting in less effort to avoid harm.
Some people take extreme views, saying that the suffering of any human or animal is equivalent, or, at the other extreme, that human capacity for suffering is so great that animal suffering is negligible or nonexistent. But most of us are in the middle somewhere. But let’s take a look at the possible views. I break them into four categories. The Unconscious Animal Theory holds that nonhuman animals are conscious of nothing at all. The Muted Animal Theory holds that animals have consciousness, but experience the same event with less intensity. The Same Pain Theory holds that the same event, like breaking a femur, causes the same exact amount of suffering in a human as any other animal. And finally, there is the Tinker Bell Theory, that nonhuman animals actually feel more suffering than humans given the same event.6 Let’s talk about them.
Unconscious Animal Theory: Nonhuman Animals Feel Nothing
We might prefer a human life to a pig life, but would we prefer a human life to 100 pigs? Or 1,000 pigs? Infinite pigs? If animal lives are worth nothing, it could mean two things. First, it could mean that one believes that animals actually can’t suffer. That is, they are morally equivalent to rocks and water: you actually can’t hurt them in any moral way, because they cannot suffer.
The other thing it could mean is that animals are capable of suffering, but we shouldn’t care about them morally.
Thinking about a human death is a little extreme, so let’s think about a less severe form of suffering, say, stubbing your toe so that it mildly hurts a little for a minute or so. If one’s view is that animals cannot suffer, then one can test how sure one is about this view by asking: would you rather have the experience of a human stubbing their toe or the suffering of 10,000 pigs slowly starving to death? Believing that animals cannot suffer means that anything done to animals to cause the slightest bit of happiness for a human is worth doing. For example, if a psychopath gets a thrill out of torturing dogs, this position would have to conclude that, aside from upsetting other people who hear about it, there is nothing morally wrong with it, as it is giving happiness to a human, and the dogs feel nothing anyway. If these ideas makes you hesitate, then maybe you’re not so sure that animals don’t feel anything after all.
Although believing animals cannot feel pain has a long intellectual history, it is certainly out of touch with modern sensibilities. But there are still a few scholars who believe that nonhuman animals feel nothing at all.7
Muted Animal Theory: Simpler Animals Feel Things Less Intensely
This means that the simpler the animal is, the less intensely it feels anything. Simplicity can be defined in several ways. I’ll talk about this at length later.
Same Suffering Theory: Nonhuman Animals Feel Just as Intensely as Humans
This idea, which seems very plausible to some, holds that the capacity and intensity of animal consciousness is the same as that of human beings. We might think of an equivalent action, like having a leg torn off, and speculate that a human, cow, or spider would feel the same amount of suffering.
Tinker Bell Theory: Nonhuman Animals Feel More Pain than Humans
One thing we don’t often think about is how simpler animals might have the capacity to feel more pain than complex ones. How could this be possible?8
For one thing, people can contextualize their emotions. For example, being in prison might suck, but knowing you’ll be in prison for a lot longer is an additional source of suck. On the other hand, if you’ve been in prison for a long time, and you’re getting out tomorrow, you might be happier than many people who are free!9
Suffering (and happiness) is more complex for human beings. Being in pain because you are assaulted is more distressing than being in the same amount of physical pain in a medical procedure.
Chickens can’t contextualize anything. For better or worse, they are always in the moment. A wild animal captured so we can help it is just as terrified as an animal trapped to be killed and eaten.10 Suffering might be worse for animals, overall, because they can’t attenuate it with any sense-making. They are always in the moment, suffering, with no hope of rationalization.
Another way to look at it is that when simpler animals experience something, their very simplicity makes that feeling all-consuming. This idea is expressed in the stage directions of the play Peter Pan, in reference to Tinker Bell’s mental states: “She is not wholly heartless, but is so small that she has only room for one feeling at a time.” Think about having a pain, like a sprained ankle. You can distract yourself with movies, talking to people, reading, and thinking complex thoughts. We all know that the subjective suffering when in pain is worse when you are focusing on it. But if you didn’t have the cognitive capacity to understand language, and appreciate stories, and to focus on intellectual problems, how would you distract yourself from the pain? Wouldn’t the pain be inescapable, all-consuming? If your mind was simple, the pain would account for a higher proportion of the overall thinking that was happening, which could, subjectively, be a much worse state of suffering. Could it be that a stegosaurus feels more pain than an elephant, or a snail feels more pain than a human?14
What we would need to be sure about this are good theories about what parts of brains are capable of conscious feelings. Scientists are still working on this, and there is substantial disagreement. The harder problem is knowing how to compare the intensity of the conscious experience across beings.
So should we assume that all animals, regardless of complexity, feel the same intensity of feelings, or that they are graded in some way, or maybe they feel nothing, or more?
Given the uncertainty about this, it’s fair to acknowledge the different points of view and give them all some probability of being true. I’ll do this when feasible. But in going deeply into reasoning about ethics, I’ll continue on the theory I endorse, the Muted Animal Theory, which holds that simpler animals feel less change in welfare than complex ones, given equivalent events or situations.
Levels of Consciousness vs. Moral Value
When we think about these issues, it’s helpful to distinguish some concepts. Let’s take an example of getting stabbed. Painful, right? How might we compare the stabbing of a human with the stabbing of a mouse? We need to think about three things: the event, the feeling, and the moral value.
First, the event. The event is the thing happening in the world that is externally observable. Getting stabbed, eating a piece of cake, dying, being hungry, having your feelings improved by a compliment, and so on. When we’re comparing different creatures, we need to take care in what we consider the “same” event. Getting stabbed with a switchblade has about one fourth to one third of a chance of killing a human being.17 Although there is no data on this, I assume that getting stabbed with a switchblade is much more lethal for a mouse! So maybe the equivalent event for a mouse would be being stabbed by a mouse-sized switchblade, scaled down appropriately.
Second, the event causes some feeling (a conscious pleasant or unpleasant mental state), which might have some intensity and duration. Here is where we might look at whether or not the same events result in the same feelings. To take a stabbing example, is the amount of pain felt by a mouse and a human the same amount of pain, given the same (or equivalent) external event? Maybe. We just talked about several theories with different answers to this question.18
Third, this feeling might have some moral value. Even if we found two events that caused the exact same amount of pain in a mouse and a human, some people think that the suffering in the human is of more moral worth than the same suffering in a mouse. That is, we should try to prevent suffering in the human over the mouse even if the intensity of suffering felt is the same.19
Let’s assume that two animals, say a mouse and a human, are suffering an equivalent amount. If animals have muted consciousness, then the mouse might need a greater event to cause the same amount of suffering. If animals feel the same intensity as humans, then it might be the same event. Now we can consider the moral value of this pain. How much more important is it to relieve the human of suffering than a mouse of the exact same amount of suffering? The answer to this question reveals differences in the moral importance of changes in welfare across different species.
Extreme speciesism holds that animals get no moral consideration at all. A way to favor humans over animals would be to acknowledge some nonzero discount for animal suffering, but to simply not care about it. That is, one might acknowledge that animals suffer, but simply not be concerned with it. To maintain this position, one needs to abandon the notion that happiness and suffering are the ultimate moral goods, and qualify it to something along the lines of happiness and suffering of human beings. This strikes me as what some consider speciesist: that is, like racism or sexism, but for species.20 Caring about happiness and suffering is something that appears to be self-evident, but restricting it to a particular species feels somewhat arbitrary. It’s hard to argue for it, and many arguments you could make might equally apply to sub-groups of human beings, which should make everybody uncomfortable: if one accepts this arbitrary addendum, one cannot, in principle, oppose any other arbitrary addendum, such as caring only about people with a particular religion or skin color. It’s likely that in societies with slavery, many slave owners believed that slaves could suffer, but just didn’t give a shit. There are some smart people who hold this view, however, so it cannot simply be dismissed.21
The view of “Equal Consideration” holds that the same amount of suffering has the same moral value, no matter who is feeling it. The “Unequal Consideration” view is that some beings get a higher moral consideration than others.22 Perhaps humans at the top, mice below them, and insects of lower value still. A possible view is that animals get more moral consideration than humans, but this view, if anyone at all holds it, is very rare.
Understand that this is a different set of theories from how much consciousness different animals feel. The uncertainty of both of these transitions needs to be acknowledged: how much feeling in a particular being is caused by a given event, and how much moral weight do we give that feeling? Sometimes people agree that a human is more important than a chicken, but differ in their reasons why: one says that chickens feel less, but that all suffering is of equal moral value, and others say that chickens feel the same amount of suffering, but humans have more moral worth.
Let’s go into some more detail about the Muted Animal Theory, and why I think it is the most plausible. According to this idea, if a human breaking a femur has an experienced pain of ten, maybe a mouse’s broken femur would have an experienced pain of five, or two. Acknowledging that there is a difference is easy. The hard part is knowing what this weighting is.
Can we use brain size to estimate the capacity for feeling? It makes intuitive sense that if a brain is too small, then it would be less complex, and a certain amount of complexity is required for conscious states. In human beings, bigger brains positively correlate with intelligence.23 Scientists disagree on what part of the brain is involved with conscious experience, but several theories have something to do with high connectivity. And high connectivity is more likely with more neurons.
So maybe bigger brains are more conscious? This leads to some conclusions that are not intuitive. For example, it would mean that whales and elephants are more conscious than humans, and that men are more conscious than women. The average brain volume of an adult human male is 1,345 grams, and for an adult human female is 1,222 grams.24 (In practice, nobody thinks that small differences in brain size or complexity between individuals of the same species should be used in law or ethics to favor some people over others. As a practical matter, there is general agreement that all healthy humans should be treated as being equally conscious.) Some scholars suggest that babies are more conscious than adults, because adults have seen so much that they don’t notice the things they are used to, and babies notice everything.25
A better estimate than raw brain size is brain-to-body ratio. That is, brain size relative to body size. A blue whale needs a bigger brain just to run a huge body, but that doesn’t mean it’s smarter or more conscious. The brain-to-body ratio has the comforting advantage of putting human beings at the top of the list.26 I’m not going to get into details, but there are many examples in human history of the group with power over others endorsing a moral system that perpetuates that power by choosing criteria that give the ones in power more moral consideration. Just something to keep in mind!
But what does seem true is that the amount of suffering a being is capable of is not linearly proportional to brain size or number of neurons. That is, just because a human has about four times as many neurons as a chimpanzee27 doesn’t mean that getting stabbed with a pencil feels four times better for the chimp than for a human.
Of course, it’s not like our brains get smaller when we lose consciousness, either. A better way to estimate consciousness would be to look at the activity of those parts of our brains, or patterns of functioning in our brains, that have to do with conscious processing. This is problematic for a couple of reasons. First, scientists don’t know (or think they know but don’t agree) about what those parts of the brain are. The second is that we don’t know that other animals would necessarily use the same brain areas as humans. An octopus, for example, might create consciousness in a different way.28
Let’s compare a stegosaurus, which had a tiny brain, and an elephant, which has a much larger brain. The stegosaurus weighed about four and a half metric tons, but its brain weighed about eighty grams—about the same as a dog. An elephant weights about six metric tons, but its brain weighs about five kilograms—that’s over sixty times larger! Both are large, herbivorous land animals, so what on earth is the elephant doing with all that extra brain that the stegosaurus didn’t need to thrive for over five million years?
Although it’s tempting to think of animal evolution as directly optimizing things like eating, reproducing, and staying alive, over the eons many species evolved more and more complex brain structures to indirectly get to these things. Elephants are particularly social creatures, so they need more brain processing power to be able to handle social interactions (primate brain sizes are proportional to how social the species is).29 In this example, an elephant can experience loneliness in a way that is likely much less in a stegosaurus.
But a great deal of mammalian brain volume is dedicated to running bodily systems more effectively, such as digestion and the immune system. These processes are unlikely to be relevant to feelings. That is, the brain functions you have to optimize your immune system probably can’t feel happy or sad. Bigger brains also mean some redundancy, and more in-brain infrastructure so that distant parts of the brain can communicate with each other.31 These communication channels also might be morally irrelevant. This gives us reason to think that some, but not all, differences in brain size correspond to increases in the potential to have good or bad feelings.
Pain, however, is likely equally important for a stegosaurus and an elephant. They both have a strong evolutionary incentive to act in a way that avoids bodily harm, starvation, and so on. So in terms of physical pain, these two animals have the same needs.
So the suffering of big-brained animals might be more complex. A human can feel loneliness, anxiety about the future, and existential angst as well as pain. Nonhumans are “merely conscious.”32 But to make decisions about how to treat different kinds of beings, we would need more than just a vague idea that more complex creatures can suffer more.
Just using our imagination is likely to lead us astray. Studies show that when a person experiences some pain and suffering, and some other person experiences the same pain and suffering, a person will believe that their own pain was worse than the other person. For example, a study by Cathy McFarland found that when people estimated pain that would be felt in film clips about getting treatment for serious wounds, they estimated (on a scale of 1 to 9) that they themselves would feel pain at a level of 7.36, on average, but that other people would feel it only at 6.32.33
Brought to the scale of a species, it might well be that we think humans can suffer more than other creatures simply because it’s easier to imagine what the experience of another human would be than that of an ocelot or a cow. This is a reason to be skeptical of our own intuitions.
Can we rank animals? Or even better, can we come up with numerical magnitudes to adjust feeling intensities for each species of animal?34
To reiterate, we just don’t know to what degree nonhuman animals can suffer. It would help if we knew how to detect consciousness in animal brains, but we really don’t, and some say that consciousness isn’t anywhere in the brain, because it’s merely our central executive system attending to some other part of the brain’s functioning.35 But let’s assume that it has to do with the complexity of the cortex (also a rough measure of intelligence). If we compare cortical neuron counts (where data is available), we can calculate an estimate for how much suffering a member of some nonhuman species can experience relative to a human.
Does this make any sense? I believe that it does, as a rough estimate, and I’ll give you a reason to think so. Scientists have come up with a way to measure the level of consciousness of human beings in different states using brain measurements. It involves stimulating a part of the cortex and measuring with an EEG the complexity with which that stimulation reverberates around the rest of the cortex. This measurement technique comes up with a single number, between 0 and 1, that is intended to reflect the degree of consciousness that brain is in at the time of measurement. This number is the perturbational complexity index, and if it’s higher than 0.31, then the brain is at least a little conscious. Why should we trust this number? Because it predicts the levels of consciousness we would expect for states like being awake, being in deep sleep, or being under deep anesthesia. What’s interesting about this consciousness measure is that it shows that consciousness might be, or might be a result of, a lot of active connections across the cortex. If the cortex isn’t widely communicating with itself, there doesn’t seem to be any consciousness.36
How does this relate to animals? Well, let’s assume that the level of connectivity in the cortex of a species scales with the number of neurons in the cortex—probably nonlinearly. Then there will be far fewer connections in a smaller cortex than in a larger one. As such, even if an animal is awake and at peak brain capacity, maybe its consciousness is diminished, relative to human beings, simply because their small brain cannot support the same intensity of inter-neuron communication as humans.37
In what is probably the most important table in this book, here are moral values for humans and the animals we eat (or could eat):38
Species |
Consciousness adjustment multiplier |
|---|---|
Human |
1 |
Cattle |
0.035 |
Pig |
0.027 |
Chicken |
0.0038 |
Salmon |
0.0012 |
Shrimp |
0.0000012 |
Cricket |
0.0000029 |
Mealworm |
0.00000029 |
Crickets and mealworms are included not because people eat them very often (they don’t), but because they are sometimes suggested as alternative possible food sources.
If a human year of suffering counts as 1, a cow year of suffering counts as 0.035. This estimate says that it would take 28.57 cows suffering for a year to be just as bad, suffering wise, as one human suffering for a year (1/0.035).39
This reflects the idea that humans have a greater capacity for conscious feelings than other animals. That is, our joys are happier and our pains are more miserable. It assumes that simpler brains have muted feelings.
This does not mean that an animal can’t have a better life than a human. Imagine a Chihuahua who lives with a retired human and is doted on for their whole life. Now imagine a human who suffers from crippling depression and is shunned by society, and never recovers. Humans can suffer in all the ways (or in equivalent ways) animals can, and in many other ways besides. So it’s not that human lives are always better than those of other animals, it’s that they are more intense, and can be much better or much worse.
You might doubt the entire notion of muted feelings for some species. But note that even among normally functioning human beings we have variation in pain sensitivity and emotional response. Even if you see consciousness as an all-or-nothing affair, we still have the problem of identifying which beings in the world have it and which do not. In this case you might want to consider the probability of each creature being conscious, rather than their degree of consciousness. And on what basis would we estimate this probability? The same ones we’d use to estimate the degree of consciousness. These numbers would also be between 0 and 1, and the moral conclusions we’d draw would be similar.
We can use this table to find equivalent amounts of suffering. If we give some number to how much pain a human would feel if we cut off their arm with a chain saw, we multiply that number by 0.035 to find how much suffering a cow would experience for the equivalent event. This means that we’d have to saw off the legs of twenty-eight cows to get the same amount of raw suffering as sawing off one human arm (sorry for the grisly descriptions).
But now we have to decide on the moral value of this suffering. I believe in Equal Consideration, so for me, suffering is suffering, and well-being is well-being, and it doesn’t matter who is experiencing it. That is, I give the same moral value to the same amount of pain and suffering, even if it takes different events to generate it in different animals. If we assume that cortical count is the best way to come up with these weights, then not only do we need twenty-eight harmed cows to create the same amount of suffering of one human, but that these harms would be morally equivalent. Not everyone agrees with this.42
Looking at this table (and accepting the assumptions behind the calculations that were used to make it) makes it look like shrimp are the most moral animals to eat, in terms of direct animal suffering (unless you can stomach crickets, but a friend of mine says they don’t taste very good).43
This might be true if all animals have the same amount of meat on them. But you only have to picture a chicken and a cow in your mind to see that that isn’t the case.
If you think that suffering is equally bad for every animal, then the suffering of one chicken is ethically equivalent to one cow. If you think that cows can suffer ten times as much, then maybe you think that the suffering of one cow is equivalent to the suffering of ten chickens. Before we go on, what number do you pick? How many chicken sufferings are equivalent to one cow suffering?
It takes about 200 chickens to get the same amount of meat as one cow. So if your number was less than 200, then it’s more ethical to eat beef than chicken. The smaller your number, the more ethically problematic it is to eat chicken than beef. If your number was one, then eating beef is 200 times more ethical than eating chicken, when it comes to animal suffering due to death (the environment is another matter, because farmed cows contribute a lot more greenhouse gases). That would also mean that somebody who ate beef every other night for a year would be morally better (in terms of animal suffering due to death) than a vegetarian who slipped up and ate chicken once.
And what about whales?
If we’re talking about eating these animals, though, the most relevant way to compare them is the number of calories one can get from one animal. Calories per kilogram of meat vary from animal to animal, but range between about 850 to 2,760, with beef, pork, and poultry all being above 2,000 kcal/kg.
But the animals we eat suffer more than just the pain at their moment of death. We also might want to consider the number of years taken away from its expected life span, and the conditions under which it lives those years. I’m not going to bore you with all the math, but you can read it in the papers I reference.44 But when you mix up all that stuff, the winner is (drum roll, please)… salmon. If you want to reduce the suffering you cause to animals, avoid poultry and eggs, and focus on salmon, pork, beef, and milk. Even though crickets and shrimp are really small, and possibly feel so little pain, it takes so many of them to make a meal that it’s ethically worse to eat them.
Here is where we encounter a big problem with estimating suffering in a being’s life. Lives can be better and worse, and just about everybody agrees that at some point a life is so bad, so miserable, that the creature would have been better off not existing at all. If we think of the feelings of a creature, over the course of its life, in terms of utility, we might say that if a creature’s life is bad enough that it has an overall negative utility. Although it’s easy to agree with this common-sense notion, it turns some ideas on their head. Let’s say, for example, that the life of a chicken raised in a batter cage is so awful that its life has an average negative utility. This is entirely possible, given the terrible life conditions of battery hens. I have a friend who worked at a chicken factory. I asked him, “Would you rather have a life as one of the chickens in that factory or not have any life at all?” He only had to think for about two seconds before he said, “No life at all.”
Under this condition, ending a being’s life earlier is better, not worse, because you’re putting it out of its misery. We would not count years of life lost, because those years of life it might have had would be torturous.
I acknowledge that many readers will not agree with my views on animal welfare. This is to be expected, because even experts disagree. By how much? Can we look at what the entire field thinks about it, given all of the uncertainty?
I collaborated with economist Richard Bruns on a paper that tries to grapple with the uncertainty in the field.47 What we did was estimate the percentage of scholars who believed this or that theory. Ideally we would survey experts, but for now we estimated that 3 percent of scholars endorsed the Unconscious Animal Theory, 62 percent endorsed the Muted Animal Theory,48 30 percent endorsed the Same Suffering Theory, and 5 percent endorse the Tinker Bell Theory.
Further, we estimated the field’s endorsement of the various ethical theories. We estimated that 10 percent endorse the Extreme Speciesism view, 60 percent endorse the Equal Consideration View, and 30 percent endorse the Unequal Consideration view.
The nice thing about all of these views is that they can be expressed in terms of numbers. For example, if you think that a dog has muted consciousness, and feels only 60 percent of the suffering that a human would for the same event, then you would express this as a multiplier of 0.6. So if a human would experience 100 points of suffering from an event, a dog would experience 100*0.6=60 points of suffering for the same event. With the Unconscious Animal view, the multiple is 0, and for the Same Suffering theory, the multiple is 1 (in other words, there is no change). There are similar multiples for the ethical theories. If animal suffering doesn’t matter at all (Extreme Speciesism), then the multiple is 0, meaning any number you multiply it by turns to nothing.
We assume that a theory’s probability of being true is equal to the percentage of experts in the field who endorse it (for example, if 62 percent of people endorse the Muted Animal Theory, we assume there is a 62 percent chance it is correct). We made a simulation that randomly chose an animal suffering theory according to the chance of it being correct. Then it chose an ethical theory in the same way. You multiply the two associated multiples together to get a measure of how much hurting an animal morally matters. Our simulation was run 10,000 times (this is called a Monte Carlo Simulation), giving us a spread of uncertainty in the field, independent of what any individual thinks is true.49
The results of these simulations, which we ran for crickets, salmon, chickens, pigs, cows, and elephants, was that the uncertainty was enormous. If we respect the views of people in the field, for all of these animals there is a 90 percent chance that the suffering multiplier is between 0 (it doesn’t matter at all) and 1 (each individual animal’s suffering is as intense and matters as much as a human’s).
I will return to this point in the conclusion, but what I take from this is that this degree of uncertainty is so high that we are better off putting our efforts into helping the world in ways for which there is more expert agreement. Specifically, it’s more effective to treat human health than putting the same effort into helping the conditions of animals.
Recently I read the novel Watership Down, an animal fantasy about some rabbits. When I would tell people I was reading it, they would often say something like, “That’s really violent and brutal, isn’t it?” This reaction stems from an unrealistically sanguine idea of what the lives of wild animals are like.
Suppose you’re sitting on your back porch on a fine autumn evening, and you see a rabbit come out of the woods to eat some clover growing around the grass of your back lawn. You smile and watch the rabbit, peacefully munching away, until its ears perk up, and it hops out of sight, back into the forest. It’s so beautiful! Then the mosquitoes start to annoy you, so you retire inside your house.
What you didn’t see is that this rabbit had recently been forced out of its den by other rabbits around midday, and is smarting from a wound on her leg that she suffered in the scuffle. You didn’t notice this because she behaves in a way that hides it, because predators target wounded animals. She’s been hiding all day, stressed out about going outside during the day, and waiting for the evening, when she can still see but is less likely to be seen by predators. She desperately needs to create another den somewhere safe, as she is pregnant. But she’s practically starving, which is why she dared to venture out onto your lawn, where she is more visible to predators. Including you. She knows you are there, and her stress levels are high, knowing you can see her. Finally, she sates her hunger enough so that she’s not quite so desperate. But she hears something that might be a predator, and hops away to the relative safety of the woods, where she is plagued by mosquitoes for several hours as she tries to find a place for a new den. She doesn’t. She gets mauled by the fox she heard earlier, who brings the rabbit carcass to her kits. The foxes, similarly famished, devour the rabbit. They will survive at least two more cold nights.
Animal welfare often focuses on the way human beings treat animals. But let’s not be under any illusions that animals in the wild are living in some paradise. How bad is it? The first thing to talk about is bugs, because, compared to the number of bugs, large animals like rabbits practically don’t exist. There are an estimated ten quintillion insects alive at any given time. That’s a 1 with 19 zeroes after it. That’s 300 pounds of insects for every human.50
“Bug” is not a perfect term. It’s a nonscientific, functional term for small animals we want to keep out of our food and off of our bodies. A more accurate term is “small invertebrate animal,” but that’s clumsy, so I’ll use the term “bug,” and what I mean are insects, spiders, worms, and things like that.51
Can bugs feel pain? Probably (see the sidebar “Wait a Minute. Did You Say Crickets Feel Pain?”). Recall that the cricket, for example, has been estimated to feel 0.0000029 the amount of consciousness as a human being.52
So nothing to worry about, right? Unfortunately, there are so many bugs in the world that the amount of suffering that bugs are capable of, taken as a group, is staggering. I discussed above the implications for using things like crickets as food, but even that problem is dwarfed by the problem of wild animals suffering.
Wild Animal Suffering
The scholarly field of “wild animal suffering” endeavors to understand how much suffering happens in more-or-less natural environments, without human interference. A few things are relevant to this discussion. One is the difference between K and r strategies in reproduction. The K strategy is the one that humans and elephants use. It involves having very few offspring and investing a lot of parental care into each one of them to ensure their survival. The r strategy, on the other hand, involves having a giant brood of offspring, sometimes tens of thousands, with little or no parental investment. It works because even though the vast majority of them will die due to starvation or predation, enough survive to keep the species going. Different species occupy different points on this K-r continuum.
Another relevant fact of ecosystems is that for every large creature there are many smaller creatures.54 For every large animal like a moose, there are many more medium-sized animals, like raccoons. For every medium-sized animal, there are many more smaller animals, like mice. Every small animal, there are far more bugs. For every bug there are thousands upon thousands of microorganisms, which consist of only a single cell. This relationship, that the smaller an organism is, the more of them there are, is true of all ecosystems.55
This is important because the smaller the animal is, the more likely it is to use an r reproductive strategy. If most animals are small, and smaller animals tend to be more on the r side of the spectrum, then the vast majority of animals that live in the world have lives that are very short, followed by a painful death. If an organism’s population is relatively constant over time, and broods are numbered in the thousands, then that means that thousands of creatures (all but two, for the two parents of the next generation) will die a possibly painful death (from starvation, thirst, or predation) every single generation. It appears that, in evolution, there arose a reproductive strategy that caused pain and very short life spans for the vast majority of creatures that come into existence. Would you rather be born as an average fish, where you are more than likely to be devoured by a predator in the first few days of living, or not live at all?
Here’s another way to look at it. Suppose you had two options: die by being hit painfully by a car, or die peacefully in your sleep, but earlier in life. That is, you can have a longer life if it ends in a painful car accident. How much earlier would you be willing to die so that you could avoid the car-accident death? Is your answer more than a few weeks? If so, then you might think that the life of an average animal isn’t worth living, because the majority of them live less than a few weeks before dying horribly of predation, starvation, or thirst.
The answers to these questions are important, because they help answer the next question: On average, do animals enjoy a positive net welfare, or negative? That is, if you look at the average animal, is their life worth living, or is it not worth living? If your answer to the car-accident question was more than a few weeks, then you’d probably rather not live the life of an average animal, because the average animal is small, is a member of an r-reproducing species, and dies a painful death that is a large portion of its short life. The pain of death would be too high a proportion of your life in total.
Let me reiterate here that because of the vast numbers involved, if bugs feel pain, then the sufferings and pleasures of the large animals, humans included, is negligible. Even with the vast discounting of conscious experience that we’re assuming for smaller creatures, their sheer numbers mean that bug welfare is where all the moral action is.
So the vast majority of creatures in Earth’s ecosystems are living very short lives with deaths involving suffering, and it just might be the case that it is worse for them to be alive than to have never lived at all. I really hope this is not the case, because it means that a universe without life at all would be less miserable than a world with life. Imagine some utopia, with blissfully happy humans living in it. It’s a disturbing thought that to ecologically support all of this human happiness requires cosmic amounts of suffering, paid for by the smaller creatures dealt a terrible hand by evolution with r-reproductive strategies, or for whatever other reason live lives of net negative welfare.
This line of reasoning has been used by some to justify habitat destruction. I know this sounds bonkers, but the reasoning is consistent, whether or not you agree with its premises. If more life means more suffering, on net, then fewer ecosystems means a better world. Such is the view of Brian Tomasik. Let’s say there were two identical islands, both thriving with life. One gets plowed over and covered with blacktop—we’ll call it Tomasik Park. The other stays a wilderness. Which island is preferable, from a moral point of view? If the net suffering is higher than the net good feelings for bugs, then Tomasik Park is better. Yikes.
Looking to the future, on this view terraforming other planets will be an ethical catastrophe, because it would cause more suffering than well-being. Just like life does on Earth.
Why We Should Preserve Natural Habitats
I’m going to tell you why I think it’s a bad idea to destroy animal habitats in an effort to improve animal welfare, in case you need any convincing of that.
One reason is that we’re really not sure that the average animal experiences net suffering. We assume that creatures that can’t move don’t have pain, because we understand that the creation of a conscious pain system is reproductively expensive. That is, a species will not evolve to have conscious experience at all unless it has a strong adaptive reason to do so. Some have argued that the expensiveness of conscious experience suggests that creatures who live with extreme r strategies are less likely to feel pain, or at least feel reduced pain. The (suggested) trade-off is that the more suffering the individuals of a species have to experience to reproduce, the less each individual organism will actually feel the suffering. If this trade-off is real, then we simply don’t know if average animals enjoy a positive net welfare, or negative.57 Our confidence in knowing whether bugs’ lives are worth living or not is low.
Some have argued (rather persuasively) that ray-finned fish can’t even feel pain.58 It would be a strange world indeed if a fruit fly felt pain, but a fifteen-foot tuna did not.
We also have good reason to believe that for many other reasons, ecosystem preservation is a really good thing, to say the least! That is, even if bugs probably feel pain, the known cost of ecosystem destruction is so great that we still shouldn’t destroy them. We should be very cautious when entertaining the idea that we’re better off without ecosystems than with them.
Should we intervene with wild animals’ suffering at all? People offer reasons why the answer to this question should be no. The one that comes to many people’s minds is the idea of nature being somehow an intrinsic good—that we shouldn’t be messing with nature, because there’s something about the natural world that should remain pure; that the biological world and the processes it uses to keep going are as they should be, so we shouldn’t change them.
This is a difficult position to justify, and in fact philosophers and psychologists have a word for it: the naturalistic fallacy. Although we tend to focus on the beautiful parts of nature, a lot of it’s really nasty. Just about nobody thinks that we should have let smallpox just run its course, or even let sudden oak death destroy forests, simply because pandemics are a natural part of the world. Even if we ignore bugs, the lives of wild animals are brutal.
Perhaps we’re tempted to think that the way evolution has created ecosystems is in some sense optimized, and thus good. There’s a saying in biology: evolution is smarter than you are. How exactly is evolution smart? In a nutshell, evolution is really good at optimizing reproduction.
There are exceptions to this: the trait of green fur never arose in mammals. We have snakes and bugs that are green, suggesting that it might be a good camouflage color in green environments. I thought of green fur, but it didn’t arise in evolution. Cats never evolved to figure out how to stay downwind of prey, which means that they often get smelled while stalking.59 So in many ways, living things are not really even optimized for reproduction. But in general, evolution does a damn fine job of reproducing as efficiently as possible, and modifying organisms so that their reproduction is maximized.
So if a scientist came along and said that he had a plan to create or modify an organism so that it would reproduce better, we should be skeptical of that, because when it comes to optimizing reproduction, evolution is almost always smarter than we are. However, if someone were to say that the world that evolution has created is necessarily the most good world, in a moral sense, we have very good reason to be skeptical, because in the domain of generating moral goodness, evolution is very likely not smarter than we are. Evolutionary biologists agree that evolution is optimizing reproduction, not the happiness of the individual members of species involved in it.
Evolution Doesn’t “Care” About Happiness
Remember, evolution doesn’t actually care about anything, it’s just something that happens. When we talk about evolution caring, it can make it easier to think about, but keep in mind that it’s only metaphorical.
But allowing this metaphorical language, all evolution “cares” about is reproduction. Everything else it cares about is only instrumental. That is, if a species has evolutionary pressure to be able to run quickly, evolution only cares about running quickly because it leads to more reproduction. Even survival itself is merely instrumental to reproduction, which is why, in most species, evolution doesn’t optimize survival of beings that can no longer reproduce.
What is conspicuously missing from evolution’s optimization is happiness. Evolution doesn’t even have any intrinsic goal of happiness, and the existence of so many of Earth’s creatures that use an r strategy for reproduction is evidence of how little evolution cares. Remember, if a reproductive strategy arises that involves enormous pain and suffering, but turns out to be a better way to propagate the species, evolution will take it. There is no law of biology that says that good feelings have to outweigh the bad. Feelings are only there at all to aid in reproduction.62
Let’s look at the agricultural revolution that happened to human beings with cultural evolution. Before farming wheat, hunter-gatherers had to live sparsely. The same area of land could support people living tightly together, if they farmed wheat. But those people would be more poorly nourished and more susceptible to disease. Why, then, did the agricultural way of life take over the world, pushing the hunter-gatherers out? The same area of land that might support a hundred hunter-gatherers can support about a thousand people. So even though they were worse off at the time, there were so many more of them that they took over.63 More people that were (probably) less happy.
If evolution is not optimizing goodness, we cannot use its products as a moral standard. That is, just because some system evolved does not mean that it’s good, or is something that should exist, from standpoints of happiness, goodness, morality, or anything like it.
Even people who believe that nature is sacred have their limits. They probably advocate, at least in principle, for wildlife rehabilitation: medical help for hurt animals, and euthanasia for animals that are too far gone and just need to be relieved of their suffering. They want to intervene in nature in these circumstances. It’s telling, though, that the wildlife rehabilitation world’s number two problem is burnout.64 That’s how much suffering is in the natural world. (I assume their number one problem is animal suffering.)
This leads us to the position that perhaps we should intervene on nature, where it is reasonable to do so. The problem with this is that most of the time we have no idea what we’re doing, and our attempts to change natural patterns end up doing more damage than helping at least half the time. Rabbits were introduced to Australia, which was a disaster. There were too many rabbits, so they introduced foxes to hunt them. Now there are too many rabbits and foxes, to the detriment of just about every indigenous animal species on the continent.
In my opinion, and opinions of many other scholars, we shouldn’t try to improve ecosystems simply because of our ethical, economic, and ecological understanding of these systems is too primitive to be confident that we’re going to be doing more good than harm with any given intervention that we come up with.65
So given that we really don’t know whether life is, on average, good or bad when it comes to pain and pleasure, along with our ignorance about how the world works that would make interventions unlikely to be successful, it makes sense for people concerned with expanding happiness in the world to support the conventional views with regard to environmental conservation: preserving habitats, reducing pollution, conserving resources.
That said, people intervene with nature all the time, and when we do we should consider the welfare of all of the sentient beings involved. The kind of thinking I’m advocating here can be used when deciding between, for example, two different interventions that will affect nature.
To summarize, whether bugs have lives worth living is very possibly the most important question there is. But our uncertainty about its answer, and the vastly different and hugely consequential results of doing anything about it are also so large, that it’s best that we don’t destroy Earth’s ecosystems just yet, turning all the habitats into Tomasik Park.
Okay, so when it comes to animals, what matters and what unmatters? Even though wild animal suffering is kind of the only thing that matters, we are in such a terrible position to do anything about it that the best we can do is focus on what we can more safely control—how we treat livestock, deal with fish, and preserve natural habitats. It’s not much, but it’s all we can do.
For now.
Figuring out how to most effectively help human beings, complicated as it is, is relatively simple, because we generally think that all human beings have equal value, with adjustments for age and a few other things. But when we talk about nonhuman animals (who I’ll refer to simply as “animals”), there is enormous variety in size, biology, cognitive ability, and how much people care about individual species. Even experts don’t agree on some fundamental issues.
When I talk to people about helping reduce the suffering of animals, people often suggest I help out at the local humane society. When people think about abuse to animals, they think of dogs chained in a backyard with no water, or animals used in laboratory experiments.
The majority of human-caused suffering for large animals is in catching fish and raising animals for eating. If we add up all the animals killed in shelters, sacrificed in laboratory experiments, and killed for fur, we get 25.5 million animals per year. Not a small number, but it’s dwarfed by the number of chickens we eat every year: 139 million.
How many land animals are killed to feed humanity? About 60 billion per year, which is about nine animals per human.66 The global capture of wild fish is estimated to be between 1 and 2.7 trillion fish every year, or about 150 per human.
It takes land to raise animals, and it takes land to grow crops. But don’t forget that we need to grow crops to feed many of the animals we eat. So not only are we using land and other resources to raise the animals, but we have cropland needed to make food to feed them. This leads to inefficiencies: only about one-tenth to one-quarter of the calories are retained for human consumption by the time the meat is eaten. That is, it’s much more efficient to get the calories directly from crops.67
As I mentioned above, animal protection laws are often different for pets, livestock, and sea animals. If you go to a restaurant and eat chicken or bacon, that animal was probably treated in a way that could get you arrested if you did it to a dog. But for the animals we eat, it’s perfectly legal and socially accepted. Although I find animal welfare advertisements’ focus on charismatic animals like cats and seals a little annoying, I recognize that for some they are gateway animals that get people interested in animal welfare in general. As people look more closely, they might then realize that suffering cats and seals are a negligible problem in the world today.
Changing How You Eat
Given that one of the biggest effects our behavior has on animal welfare is due to farmed and fished animals, it’s worth talking about which animals we should eat. The subject is one of the most fascinating to investigate, because eating can be evaluated through so many lenses. There’s taste, nutrition, cost, environmental effects, animal welfare issues, national business values, and cultural values associated with eating.
Staying alive requires eating and, for most animals, to eat means to kill. Humans, in particular, require consuming living cells to live, be they from plants or animals. With very few exceptions, every living thing gets its sustenance from the death of other living things. As a result of this, almost every living thing has evolved measures to try to prevent it from being eaten. Animals have claws, shells, camouflage, and the ability to run away. Plants have toxins, bark, and thorns.
Fruit, for example, is made of living cells, but eating fruit does not harm the plant it came from. For one thing, plants don’t feel pain, so far as we know, and for another thing, the whole point of fruit is to be eaten.68 Fruiting plants evolved to create food for other animals, who, by eating it, help the plant reproduce. But even this has nuance: hot peppers plants are better spread when birds eat them than mammals, so they evolved to be hot in our mouths to keep mammals from eating them. But birds eat these fruits freely because they can’t feel capsaicin.
Fruitarians go to the extreme, with some people only eating fallen fruit, so that no plants are harmed due to eating. The fruitarian diet is not recommended by nutritionists, though, and several children have died as a result of having this diet imposed on them.69
The consumption of most plants, however, involves killing the plant. Even though, from an evolutionary perspective, most plants don’t “want” to be eaten, at least they feel no pain when they are cut down and killed, as far as we know. Killing plants for food is generally viewed as morally justified for this reason. As discussed above, eating less meat causes fewer beings overall to suffer. This is generally true, but there are some interesting nuances.
What about avoiding meat that’s going to be thrown out anyway? Let’s suppose you go out to dinner with a couple of friends and one ordered a gigantic plate of food that she couldn’t finish. She is going out of town and can’t take the leftovers home. Should you eat the meat or throw it out?
Eating this meat will not increase demand because it has already been purchased. So eating it does not increase animal suffering in the near-term. However, if you’re a vegetarian, eating meat might make you fall off the wagon: if eating the meat might tempt you to eat more meat, it’s probably best to avoid it. Another possible downside is that people who know you might see you eating the meat. If you’re just a reducetarian, like I am, this doesn’t matter much, but if you’re vegetarian or vegan, people might see you as being inconsistent, or see your apparent giving in to temptation as evidence that vegetarianism is unsustainable.
Meat served at restaurants is typically from factory farms, so let’s assume that the meat was raised unethically. As bad as it is to harm animals in this way for human consumption, I think it’s much worse to harm animals in that way for no reason at all, which is what happens if that meat gets thrown out: the animal suffers and dies for nothing.
But the larger issue is that wasting food is bad. Composting only recovers a fraction of the energy needed to create the food (and most restaurants don’t compost). If the leftovers are eaten, it means less food that needs to be purchased in the future. So who should take it home? The ethical answer is: the person most likely to buy meat in the future. If the other friend at the table is a carnivore, give it to her because she’ll have it for lunch the next day, and not have to buy a pastrami sandwich.70
But most people eat meat, and that means, at the very least, killing beings that have feelings. Just like pet cats, humans have, in practice, “harmful needs.” We might accept that animals have to die to keep other animals alive. In this case, we should strive to kill as humanely as possible. For some animals, this simply isn’t possible. Whales, for instance, are too big to kill humanely while keeping intact the reason to kill them in the first place—harvesting oil and meat.
But even for cases where the killing is humanely carried out, there is still the important question of needless suffering on the part of those animals as they live in captivity, and how it can be reduced.
Let’s look at chicken meat raised in a typical farm in an industrialized nation like the United States. There’s so much ammonia in the air that it hurts the eyes and lungs of the birds. Bred to be heavy, sometimes they collapse on their own weight and die of thirst.
Eating eggs seems better than eating chicken meat, because you don’t have to kill the bird. But laying hens are kept in cages so small they can’t even stretch their wings if they were in there alone. But they’re not kept alone; they’re in there with three or more others. The most aggressive bird in the cage sometimes pecks the others to death (this is where the term “pecking order” actually comes from). But this problem was solved by slicing off their beaks with a hot blade. Their beaks are full of nerves, and this is done without anesthetic.71
I’m not going to go into more detail, because I’m afraid that I’ll lose my readers. It’s just too horrible to read. I’ll just say that it’s also really bad for pigs.
So what can be done about it? Well, you’ve got choices. The obvious one is to reduce the amount of meat that you eat. If you live in America or Canada, you probably eat much more meat than people in other countries, so your idea of what a normal amount of meat to eat is rather skewed.
The mildest version of eating less meat is being a reducitarian, where a person tries to reduce the amount of meat they consume. The most extreme is veganism, where no animal products are consumed, including gummy bears, which include gelatin, an animal product.
Suppose someone wants to eat less meat so that they are doing some good for animals. How many animals suffer due to your eating? By some estimates, the average American eats thirty land animals every year, twenty-eight of which are chickens.75
If you eat a chicken, then that’s one chicken. Obvious, right? If you eat steak, you’re only eating a fraction of the cow, but that’s still easily measurable. What if you eat pork loin, or salmon? Here things start to get complicated, because pigs and fish are sometimes fed meat, and when you eat an animal that was fed meat, you are responsible not only for that animal, but the animals that animal ate. For example, only about 10 percent of the fish caught for food are directly eaten by human beings. The rest of it goes to feeding larger animals we’d rather eat. Pigs are fed sardines, fish are fed chicken and fish. Most fish are carnivorous. To get a kilogram of salmon, you need to feed it three or four kilograms of other fish to fatten it up.76
Creating Demand
Does reducing meat consumption do any good? There’s an argument that it doesn’t, and this argument feels particularly tempting if you love to eat meat, like I do. Let’s consider the effects of buying a chicken breast. The grocery store (or restaurant) buys meat in bulk—let’s say, they order a number of cases of chicken breast at once. One person buying or not buying a single breast is probably not going to affect how many cases are bought next week. This makes it seem like your eating a chicken breast won’t make any difference to how many chicken breasts your grocery store buys—let alone change the number of chickens raised by the farm.
However, once in a while the store will be in a position to buy an additional (or one fewer) case due to a single extra chicken breast being (or not being) purchased by a customer. If you happen to be considering buying chicken at that time, then you will influence demand in a real way. This will only happen once in a while, but when it does, your buying the chicken breast will cause a great deal more demand for chicken, far greater than a single breast. Your purchase (or decision not to purchase) will cause the buying (or not buying) of an entire case of breasts! So the expected effect of buying chicken breasts, over a lifetime, will be that you cause demand roughly in proportion to what you purchase. Some weeks it’s you causing more or less demand, sometimes it’s somebody else. This is why an individual refraining from buying meat results in fewer animals being farmed.80
Later, when I talk about environmental ethics, I will return to the subject of meat-eating, because cows are worse for climate change than chickens. My estimates suggest that even taking into account the suffering due to climate change, it’s still far worse to eat chicken than beef.
Hunting
People can get bent out of shape about hunting, but there are reasons we probably shouldn’t be too upset about it when considering animal suffering. First of all, hunting accounts for a small amount of animal death relative to fishing and the farming industry. In the United States, only 5 percent of people hunt at all, and the decline is expected to accelerate. Further, hunters tend to target animals that are full-grown, and have lived a full life of the kind that most animal welfare advocates would like animals to have—a life in the wild. Although death is not always quick for hunted animals, it’s probably less suffering than what’s experienced in a factory farm. If someone hunts a deer and eats that meat, that’s better for animals than that same person eating the same amount of meat from the grocery store. What I’m saying applies to the suffering of the hunted animal, but of course there are other factors to consider. People hunt endangered species, which is bad for different reasons. But putting your energies into protecting non-endangered animals from hunting is a less effective use of your resources than trying to protect animals in factory farms.
Hunting makes people upset because of the vivid, violent image it generates in people’s imaginations. But you might be surprised to hear that much of the American success of bringing species back from the brink of extinction was paid for by hunters. Sixty percent of the revenue from wildlife conservation groups comes from the sales of hunting licenses and permits. And these agencies are facing dwindling resources as hunting goes out of fashion. Wildlife conservation is one area where people who are otherwise quite different—say, hunters and women’s groups who love birds—can come together to create positive policy change. The Audubon Society was started by a hunter, George Bird Grinnell. So not only does hunting do a only a small amount of damage to the animals killed by hunters, the activity of hunting has had an overall positive effect on wildlife and environmental conservation.81
All of this discussion of hunting has not included industrialized fishing, which is an altogether different enterprise, and one that actually matters a whole lot. Wild fish get to live out their lives free in the water, but their death due to fishing is pretty brutal. Fish get caught in hooks and are dragged for many hours until the net is pulled up. Then they suffocate in the net.82
Fish are quite alien, so it’s easy to ignore the possibility that they feel pain just like other animals. But they react to harm similarly to other animals, learn to avoid harm, and their behavior changes when they’re drugged with painkillers. However, there is currently a debate in the literature over whether fish (specifically ray-finned fish, unlike sharks and rays) can feel pain at all. There are a few arguments against the idea that fish feel pain. One is that pain seems to involve the cortex in humans, but when the fish equivalent is removed they still try to get away from harm. Further, the behaviors they take when trying to avoid harm can be explained by reflex actions, similar to those that a human will still engage in even after a spinal cord injury that renders them unable to consciously feel pain below the neck. Finally, when their fins are harmed, they don’t favor them like mammals do—if you harm a rat’s paw, for example, it will lick it and try not to walk on it. Damaged fish don’t seem to react this way. Other scientists dispute these findings and interpretations of them, so the science is inconclusive.83
Vegan Diets
Although a vegan diet means that animals are not killed so that you can eat meat, we can’t fool ourselves into thinking that veganism does not result in any deaths at all. When you harvest plants as a part of industrial agriculture, there are deaths as a side effect. Mice, rats, and voles can get chopped up or trapped in compacted tunnels, crushed by tractors, or have their burrows destroyed by plows. Poisons kill rodents and insects. When you plough a field, predatory birds follow the plough to feed on all the small mammals, lizards, and snakes killed in the farming process. Beetles live in the flour processing plants and must be killed. Small amounts of their crushed bodies are in our bread—it actually makes the bread a little more nutritious.
Some think that these deaths are so numerous that they could potentially outweigh the animal suffering associated with eating pasture-raised cattle. The idea is that when you raise a cow on a field, it doesn’t kill that many mice or insects. When you eat beef, you’re only killing the equivalent of a tiny fraction of a cow. This means that to the extent that you eat plant-based food from industrialized agriculture instead of pasture-raised cattle, you are doing a disservice to animal welfare. This view is the new omnivorism.
A problem with thinking about this issue is that the data on which how many animals are killed in harvesting are rare and problematic in many ways. Getting an answer is tough for many reasons, including the following: different plants have different numbers of animals living in and around them, different climates have different kinds and numbers of animals, it’s hard to know which animals merely fled when the harvester came versus those that died because of it, it’s even harder to know how those animals fared after being displaced, some animals die of increased predation due to the clearing of a field, pesticides have runoff that has effects on other animals, including fish in the waterways, and some animals actually have increased populations due to agriculture.84 So few scientists care about the issue that almost no work is being done on it.
A very, very rough estimate suggests that there is one rodent death for every hectare of cropland harvested.85 Okay, so not so many rodents killed. The vast majority of animals killed in agriculture are bugs killed by pesticides.
In a previous draft of this book, I tried to calculate the moral impact of pesticides, but eventually decided not to include it, because the numbers we have to use to try to estimate it are very uncertain, and often missing entirely. Without a much more in-depth analysis, and more data collection, I am not confident knowing if plant agriculture is good or bad for animals. Here are some of the relevant factors we’d need to consider for, say, a hectare of land: the number of bugs in a cultivated field, how often the bugs die by pesticides, how much bugs enjoy their lives, and how much they suffer when they die, how much that matters, how much food is generated by the crops, and how much utility humans get from that, and so on. But even if we understood this, we’d have to compare that land use to what would be done with it otherwise: the counterfactual. Would it be wild? A parking lot for a clothing store? To understand this we need an estimate of the moral value of a field of crops versus what else would be done with the land, and there’s just too much uncertainty here. I’m afraid I’ll have to reserve judgment on this until more work is done.
The new omnivorism argument is controversial and considered debunked by many animal rights activists. But even if it were true, it only applies to pasture-raised beef. Other meat, like chicken and pork, requires growing food to feed the animals, so you get all of the drawbacks of farming food anyway.
As it looks right now, reducing meat consumption appears to be better for animal welfare if the choice is between eating a lot of meat or eating none at all. But some have argued that pasture-raised cattle have fairly decent lives—lives that would not have existed if we didn’t eat beef. So by eating beef you’re giving a pretty good life to a cow. Again, though, the moral value of this depends on what the counterfactual is. What would we be eating in place of beef? What would the pasture have been used for otherwise? What animals would have lived if those cows hadn’t, and how happy would they have been? We don’t know.
Cultured Meat and Plant-Based Meat Substitutes
Eventually, raising animals for their meat might become outdated and all but disappear because the alternatives are a better value for consumers. I say “all but disappear” because there will likely always be a market for meat from animals. Some might see it as more authentic. Perhaps the reduction in farm animals will be the kind of magnitude decrease that the world experienced when cars replaced horses—there are still horses around, but far, far fewer.
There are two ways to create meat alternatives: making plant-based products that taste like meat—your veggie burger and the like. I’m glad to see that, at the time of this writing, several plant-based burgers are not only on the market, but getting popular with consumers.
The other way is to create meat without having to raise an animal. This involves growing cells to create a piece of meat (or simulated ground meat) that is actually made of animal cells. But the cells are created in a vat, and didn’t require raising and killing an animal to make it. This latter method has a host of difficulties—for example, a piece of meat growing in a vat doesn’t have an immune system. But if it works, people could eat meat without contributing significantly to animal suffering.
Right now meat substitutes are not competitive with meat in terms of attracting the business of non-vegetarians, but this will change. When it will change, though, is highly uncertain. Estimates range from just a few years away to seventy years.86
Keep in mind, though, that because of insect death, these plant-based burgers are possibly not as ethical to eat as pasture-raised beef burgers, but are probably better than grain-fed beef burgers.
Activism
The individual actions you take in your life, like what you choose to eat, or whether or how you adopt a pet, are fairly small potatoes compared to what you can do in terms of donating to effective animal charities. The situation is similar to being good to people—actions that aren’t donations don’t add up to much good or bad.
The most effective animal welfare charities are listed on the Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) website.
I’ll focus on one, the Humane League. The ACE estimates that for every dollar donated to the Humane League, between -6 and 13 animals are saved.87 This big range shows how much uncertainty is in this calculation, so we have to be humble about what we think we know for sure. The midpoint of -6 and 13 is 3.5, so you can expect to save 3.5 animals for every dollar you donate to the Humane League, mostly chickens. Think about this for a minute—if you donate a dollar to the Humane League, you’re probably saving 3.5 chickens from factory-farming. That’s a very good deal. If you gave $365 a year (a dollar a day) to the Humane League, you would save 1,277.5 chickens from factory farms. Even if you ate a chicken a day, if you donated a dollar a day to the Human League the world would have 912.5 fewer chickens in factory farms than if you didn’t exist.88
The most efficient thing you can do for animal welfare is to donate to an effective animal-welfare charity. Given that the typical American diet results in the death of about 300 animals (the thirty we eat and the rest as side effects89), donating even $100 might completely cover you for eating meat, and donating $200 is far more effective at helping animals than even being vegetarian. Because it’s so cheap to save animals in this way, let me be perfectly clear: it’s far easier and more efficient to help animals through donation than by changing your diet.
But if you are still interested in changing your diet to help animals, eat mostly plants, and when you eat meat, try to eat mussels, salmon, and pasture-raised beef.
The study that concluded that salmon was good to eat did not put into its estimations the other morally relevant aspects of eating animals: environmental impacts, nutritional value (aside from caloric content), or the pleasure we get from the meal.
The nutritional effects of eating meat are contested and complex.90 Some studies show that moderate amounts of eating meat has no effect on mortality, and other studies show that eating too much meat increases risk for cancer. Obviously, if you’re starving, eating meat lengthens your life, not shortens it, so there is not one number that says how much your life will be shortened or lengthened by eating a kilogram of beef, for example. It’s some unknown nonlinear effect based on how hungry you are and how much meat you eat in general. It also matters what diet you’re turning vegan from. A meta-analysis of studies showed that going vegan from an American diet has more health benefits than turning vegan from a Taiwanese diet, for example, because the normal Taiwanese diet is more healthful than a normal American one.91
For people who have enough to eat, however, it looks like being vegetarian adds about 3.6 years to your life, with many effects occurring twenty years after you become a vegetarian.92 It also saves you about $11 per week in terms of food cost.93
It also does not take into account how delicious meat is, either. The pleasure of eating the meat could be measured, converted into life years saved, and brought into the calculation.
We Raise Them to Be Eaten
When we often think about the ethics of eating animals, we tend to think about an animal being alive, and then, if we kill it, it loses its life. This is what actually happens for hunting and catching of wild fish for food. But a moment’s reflection reveals that for farmed animals, the only reason they are alive in the first place is because farmers brought them into existence for the sole purpose of being eaten. Is this morally relevant?
If you refrain from eating ten chickens, it does not mean that there will be ten chickens who would have otherwise been killed will now live happy chicken lives. It does not mean a better life for ten chickens. Refraining from eating ten chickens means that (roughly) ten future chicken lives will not be brought into existence in the first place.
Looking at it this way, we might ask the question differently: when we eat a farmed animal, looking at its whole life, including its death, is that animal’s life worth living, or would it have been better for it to never have existed?94
When framed this way, different intuitions about right and wrong come into play. Let’s take, as an example, a human being who is suffering a lot. At age thirty, they have had chronic pain for their whole life, they have depression, and no social life. In fact, they are scorned by their society because of some superficial physical trait and live a lonely, miserable life. Although we are comfortable saying that this life is far from great, and that they experience a lot of suffering, it’s another thing entirely to say that this person’s life is not worth living; that it would have been better if that person had never existed at all. Curiously, even when a human’s life involves more bad feelings than good, we have trouble assigning an overall negative moral weight to their lives. We want to help such a person, but stop short of saying that they’re better off dead, or that it would have been better had they never been born.
But things get weird when we apply this to animals. Our intuitions about the horrendous conditions of factory farms are saying just that: that the animals in there suffer so much that it would have been better for them never to have existed. And this is why refraining from eating factory-farmed meat is a moral good: it prevents painful lives from existing in the first place.
It’s interesting that even for human beings, our intuitions are different if we’re talking about potential human lives of the future or present human lives that already exist. For example, suppose a couple is considering having children, but they live in a war-torn, famine-stricken area, and on top of that the couple is in extreme poverty and suffer from addiction problems. Suppose this couple decided that the life that they expect their child to live would be very difficult, and for this reason they refrain from having a child. Most of us would applaud this as a responsible, moral decision: don’t have kids if you can’t take care of them. And the reason we think this is a morally good decision is because of the suffering that the child would experience. But once that child is actually born, and becomes an actual person, and not just a potential one, our ideas about the moral value of their life changes. We still might think it was irresponsible to have had the child, but we wouldn’t want to say that the child would be better off dead. Our intuitions resist the notion that, if that child were to die in her sleep, the world would be a better place. We’d still see that as tragic.
The ethics of eating farmed meat, then, is relevant to the lives of potential animals of the future. And when we think about potential lives, we are comfortable weighing the pleasures and pains of that future animal to decide whether or not it would be good for it to exist. On this framing, the question of whether it’s okay to eat a farmed animal comes to this: eating animals of a particular kind (say, chickens in factory farms) leads to more animals like that being brought into existence. So the morality of creating demand for animals of that kind is determined by the expected moral value of that potential animal’s life. Or, put more simply, do those animals have lives worth living?
By one thoughtful estimate, factory-farmed chickens have lives that are not worth living, but cows have lives that are. Pigs’ lives are worth living, but only barely, and only assuming that they habituate to their miserable conditions somewhat.95 If a chicken’s life in a factory farm is horrible, then killing it sooner is better. Our ideas of long lives take on a negative value, because if each day of life would have been better to never have been lived, then a long life is bad, not good. On the other hand, if a life has an overall positive value, then allowing animals to live longer is better.
Some readers might be unimpressed by all of this, particularly if they are deeply concerned with human issues. It’s easy to say that because humans can suffer more than animals, then we shouldn’t concern ourselves with animal welfare. That’s why the numbers are important, though, because even with a steep discount, enough animal suffering starts to compete with human suffering concerns when it comes to taking effective action in the world. If we’re trying to optimize our goodness, when it gets right down to it, should we try to help humans or animals?