92.2 Billion Victims of a Grave Crime

More additional land animals are killed every year relative to previous numbers than there are humans on earth

92.2 billion land animals were killed last year on farms.

For a while, estimates for the number of animals killed each year was 60-80 billion. But the new figures are out, and 92.2 billion animals are the victims of humanity’s crimes. The number of additional animals killed each year, beyond the highest estimates from before, is 12.2 billion—more than the number of people on Earth. These are the number that die every year.

There are interesting intellectual questions about meat eating, surrounding whether it’s okay to eat animals that live genuinely good lives. But these questions are little more than theoretical exercises for most people; nearly all the animals in the U.S., are factory-farmed. Nearly all of them live in conditions that if inflicted on any human, we would not hesitate to call torture. Animals have to endure, en masse, conditions that are like something out of a saw movie; chickens have their beaks sliced off with a knife, a beak filled with nerve endings; egg-laying hens spend their entire lives in tiny cages unable to ever turn around or see the sun; pigs are castrated with no anesthetic and have their tails ripped off; most pigs get pneumonia because they are forced to live in shit and ammonia for almost their entire lives; young pigs are beaten to death against concrete, in a way that’s totally legal; pigs live their entire lives unable to turn around; pregnant mothers must give birth without enough room to move; beatings are routine; chickens spend most of their time barely able to move, inactive; thousands of chickens are stuffed in boxes every hour in transport, leading 15% of them to die; leg deformities are common, as is extreme sleep deprivation of a kind that we call torture when inflicted on people.

These are just a small sliver of the horrors that the factory farming industry inflicts on the 92 billion animals that are killed every year. Almost every land animal in these cruel factory farms lives a life crueler than that which any dog abuser could dream of. We zealously condemn those who beat dogs while we stuff our faces with the corpses of those who endured a far crueler fate, on account of our dime.

It’s true that animals are not exactly the same as us. But we know that they can feel pain. And pain is obviously bad. That it’s bad to feel bad is among the most obvious of ethical truths—when we experience our own pain we can see that it is bad. So it’s worth investigating how much pain is experienced by the globe’s most abused group, a group so thoroughly ignored that few even think to wonder what the lives of those whose deaths they pay for endure. Fortunately, some people did look at how much pain animals experienced. Rethink Priorities compiled the most detailed report on the subject. What did they conclude? That chickens, the main victim of humanity’s crimes, can experience pain about a third as intensely as humans. Pigs experience pain roughly half as intensely as humans.

So even if we conservatively say that the only downside of factory farming is the agony it causes, we still come to the conclusion that factory farming causes around as much agony as torturing and killed 30 billion people a year, even if we ignore all sea life. Every second of every day, even by the outdated estimate that is thus a significant underestimate, around 23 billion animals languish in factory farms.

This suffering is staggering. Most of these animals are chickens. That means that the suffering of animals is about as vast as it would be if the entire population of Earth was being tortured in dark sheds, for about three times the population of humans on Earth is tortured on factory farms, while experiencing around a third of the suffering. ‘

This is the worst thing in the world. If these numbers are right, it means that factory farm causes as much agony as torturing everyone on Earth would. Even if we think an animals pain is only 1% as bad as a humans pain, a wholly unjustified assumption, factory farming is still as bad as something that causes 92 million people to be in constant agony akin to torture. Surely that would be the worst thing in the world, for about one in nine people to have an experience as bad as torture. To think factory farming is the worst thing in the world, you don’t have to think that animals have rights or are like people—you just have to think that their suffering is bad.

This may strike you as outrageous—it strikes many that way. But it only seems crazy because of the extent to which we regard animals as totally unimportant, as beings that can be used however we want. If we take their agony remotely seriously, then an industry that causes them to suffer more in a few years than all humans ever have in history is clearly history’s worst.

What conceivable justification could there be for judging an animal’s agony to be over 100 times less important than a humans agony? The fact that they have feathers or are not homo sapiens is clearly irrelevant? As is the fact that they aren’t very smart; we don’t think that the agony of babies or the severely cognitively enfeebled is less than 100 times as bad as the agony of intelligent adults. The claim that animals’ suffering is barely bad at all rests on little more than an unjustified prejudice; because they do not look like us, because they scream in a tongue that we cannot hear, we ignore the horror of their agony—an agony that is so abundant all throughout the world that it totally swamps all human agony.

With the recent outrage over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I saw many people express outrage. People seemed to express deep rage over various crimes on one side or the other. It’s very easy to be outraged over crimes being perpetrated by other people. But in order to avoid flagrant hypocrisy, to be consistent one must cease their own wrongdoing before expressing outrage over other’s wrongdoings. Jesus famously said “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.” This point of elementary morality seems to be above the paygrade of many of those who condemn horrific wrongdoings perpetrated by others all the while carrying out horrifying wrongdoings, doings that they know to be wrong, without batting an eye.

This is not a hard issue and it is not particularly complicated. 92 billion beings are being tortured for the sake almost exclusively of relatively minor pleasure. People have a whole host of justifications for this, each one of which crumbles after about 5 seconds of thought.

This post is not about the minuscule segment of people who eat animals that lived genuinely good lives. If you get all your animals from a farm with animals who you know lived good lives, that is quite separate from those that this post is about. It is instead about the practice adopted by almost everyone in wealthy countries of buying meat from animals that endure more pain in their short lives than you or I will ever know. It is about those who scoff at the mistreatment of animals, who act like paying for hundreds of years of extreme agony is some venial sin rather than a serious crime. It is about, most of all, those who recognize the horrible evil of factory farming, but do nothing about that fact, and in fact continue to pay for the atrocity. If, upon realizing that you’re complicit in grave evil, you’re not even willing to stop shoveling burgers into your mouth to end complicity in that evil, then you should have no delusions about your own virtue; you simply don’t care very much about doing the right thing.