Deiseach has, when I posted a link to my article “May the Factory Farms Burn,” in Scott Alexander’s hidden open thread, accused me of numerous errors and factual distortions. Here, I shall explain why all of those criticisms are inaccurate
Your article gives me:
(1) a snippet of doggerel by someone I never heard of (who is M. Frida Hartley and why should I care what she thinks?)
You obviously don't have to care. Sometimes articles include dramatic quotes for literary effect.
(2) links to paywalled newspaper reports so I have no idea what they said
Sorry that this is paywalled--but I was quoting it directly; there’s no room for misleading distortion.
(3) excepts from books which may or may not be accurate - I'm old enough to remember foot and mouth outbreaks and I don't remember the "sharpshooters chasing terrified cows" and "cows still moving and blinking a day after being shot" (plus I thought they were being burned on pyres or bulldozed into mass graves?)
No doubt some are true for each of them. Some were shot and others were burned on pyres.
"Foot-and-mouth disease is a form of flu, treatable by proper veterinary care, preventable by vaccination, lethal neither to humans nor to animals."
You drive me to the use of Wikipedia:
"Many early vaccines used dead samples of the FMD virus to inoculate animals, but those early vaccines sometimes caused real outbreaks. In the 1970s, scientists discovered that a vaccine could be made using only a single key protein from the virus. The task was to produce enough quantities of the protein to be used in the vaccination. On June 18, 1981, the US government announced the creation of a vaccine targeted against FMD, the world's first genetically engineered vaccine."
The UK outbreaks were in the 60s so the "preventable by vaccination" didn't happen until a decade or more later. But sure, give me all the historical facts!
Deiseach claims that I'm lying by quoting Scully for the claim that vaccines can treat it is wrong--vaccines for foot and mouth disease were created around 1981; the outbreak described by my sources is the one in 2001, not from the 60s.
(4) 'You can't handle the truth!' because we don't know what slaughterhouses are like. As part of my (long ago) certificate in biology for lab tech training, we got a tour of the local abbatoir (pigs not cattle). They didn't let us see the actual slaughtering (probably thought it would be too traumatic) but we did see every other part.
I think that a lot of people, though not all of them, would be put off by the knowledge that we treat animals horrifically badly. Many people find the horrors of factory farming sufficiently disturbing that they go vegan—but most just sort of abstractly think they should and then don’t.
(5) As someone else pointed out, you're claiming not to talk about the legality of the practice. So you can express your moral opinion but not enforce it on others. Meat-eating is as legal as abortion. I feel about 'animal rights' the way other people feel about 'it's a baby not a fetus' - I don't share your opinion and I think it's perfectly fine.
The argument that something should be legal because it’s just one’s opinion is just as bad in both cases. We make lots of mistreatment of animals illegal (e.g. mistreatment of dogs). I simply think we should afford pigs, cows, and chickens the legal protections we give to dogs. Every law that legislates anything is legislating morality; that's why it's illegal to torture babies. It would be ridiculous to say "I feel about 'human rights' the way other people feel about 'it's a baby not a fetus' - I don't share your opinion and I think it's perfectly fine."
"On top of this, thousands of animals burn alive in barn fires, caused by the ammonia and other gasses released by the farms. However, when animals burn alive, even when 200,000 sentient beings burn to death in a fire, to quote an industry spokesperson, “no one was injured.” Hundreds of thousands or millions of animals burn to death—yet despite that, the industry keeps chugging on."
The industry reports *are* correct - no one was injured, that is, no human being was injured. Cattle are not persons the way a fetus is not a person. Cows do not have the same moral worth or value as a human being. Cry harder, maybe enough tears will douse the barn fires!
The point I was making here was that the industries that I describe see animals as unimportant—not worthy of considerations. When they burn alive, they say no one is harmed. The fact that Deiseach feels the same way does not change my point. Of course, I would not deny that cows are less important than humans all things considered, but this doesn’t mean that they are no one—and that them literally burning to death is not bad.
When a dog burns to death we all recognize it as bad. Yet when it happens to a chicken, shrill anti-vegans instruct people to “cry harder.” Note that it occurred to chickens, not cows, as the article describes.
Oh, and is it "hundreds of thousands" or "millions"? Make it billions, the bigger the figure the more impactful, right? Gotta get those tears flowing for the plight of the poor moo-cows! Rhetorical exaggeration in the service of the good cause isn't lying.
It is unclear exactly how many—I was unable to find official figures. What I do know is that on a single occasion, it was 200,000—so it could very well be in the millions when all things are taken into account.
"Are you really in favor of paying for the blending of babies?"
Oh, honey. Let me tell you how vacuum aspiration abortions work.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/vacuum-aspiration
But don't get alarmed, it's only "gentle suction" to remove "the products of conception"
https://www.bpas.org/abortion-care/abortion-treatments/surgical-abortion/vacuum-aspiration/
Whether or not abortion is wrong is a difficult question—but in the case of abortion, one is doing it for a mostly non-conscious being that hasn’t been born yet, to avoid an onerous pregnancy, while in the case of chickens, one is doing it for omelets. The permissibility of inflicting a degree of harm depends on the benefits gained.
"The horrors of factory farming should be relatively uncontroversial; babies should not be ground up in blenders so we can enjoy their byproduct."
A fetus is not a baby, bigot, learn to Science! That's the general response to moral appeals in the human abortion debate, why think the animal debate will go any better - save that the liberals who think "fetus not baby" are much more likely to be convinced that "animal is baby" because they're idiot sentimentalists.
The baby chicks that are ground up in the egg industry are not fetuses—they are babies. These are male chicks that have been born and then are ground up in macerators.
"For the cries of the helpless calf who sobs before their dying mother "
Somebody watched too many anthropomorphic Disney movies at an impressionable age!
Cows do cry. Thus, it seems implausible that they wouldn’t sob, at any point, before their dying mother. Sure, this is probably not the most common event in the meat industry—they’re usually separated—but it’s no doubt happened sometimes. This was also mostly a rhetorical flourish.
Additionally, as I’ve said before, I do not get that emotional about the mistreatment of animals. I think it’s immoral, but I don’t personally like animals very much. I’ve never liked dogs or cats much, for example.
"Sixth, as Alastair Norcross argues, eating meat is analogous to a case in which a person tortures puppies in their basement because it produces a chemical that makes food taste better. How is that any different from eating meat. In both cases, we’re causing enormous animal suffering for the sake of trivial taste pleasure."
Thought experiments not real, otherwise the inventors of the trolley problem and the surgeon would all be banged up for life for murder. Also "Fred tortures puppies because this makes their meat taste like chocolate which is the only way he can now taste chocolate and he really likes chocolate" is exactly the same as eating meat? Well that is surely not a contrived and over-emotional appeal to blind sentiment!
Suppose I say I don't care if puppies are tortured, because I don't care about puppies? Then Fred's case is "eh, not my kink, but I don't get to kinkshame others".
I’ll just lead this person to my article on how to deal with thought experiment deniers. The mere fact that something hasn’t happened has nothing to do with whether it can feature in thought experiments or be used to test moral principles. You can, of course, have the reaction to Fred of thinking what he’s doing is fine—but the point is that most people don’t have that reaction. You can have that reaction to any moral argument—but some moral arguments are still convincing.
Let's boil it down to the basics (like your beloved pigs boiled alive): should factory farming be needlessly cruel? No.
This is a very strange thing that one sees when advocating against treating animals badly. Generally, when you advocate against the mistreatment of a particular group, people are broadly sympathetic. But in the case of animals, when you argue that they should have the most minimally decent treatment, people treat this as horrific and radical and use this to mock you. Very strange behavior.
Also, in another example of Deiseach having not read the article carefully—it’s the chickens that are boiled alive, as I discuss.
Is intensive industrial agriculture always going to go for the most efficient rather than the most cuddly methods? Yes.
This is such bizarre euphemistic language that ignore the degree of the problem. It would be like describing dousing gasoline on a cat before setting it on fire as “not the most cuddly methods.”
Even if we all became vegans in the morning, the switch to the necessary plant production to feed the mass of humanity would involve methods that resulted in huge acreage of monoculture with ill effects on wild life, from plants to animals. The fieldmouse 'neath the harrow writ large, millions upon millions of time. Large scale food production means competition from weeds to animal predation has to be reduced - why else GMO crops and intensive herbicide and pesticide spraying?
Large agriculture kills far fewer animals and in far less gruesome ways than the meat industry. This chart shows the number of deaths.
To quote an earlier article of mine.
Animals eat plants—thus, if you want to minimize plant agriculture deaths, you should avoid meat. The chart that I linked finds literally every animal product causes more deaths from plant agriculture—by causing the animals to eat plants—than every plant product.
Plant agriculture doesn’t produce the types of torture chambers that factory farms do. Even if the deaths were similar, the conditions are much worse.
FWIW I really enjoyed your piece on factory farming.
Deiseach is a bit of a troll, so I wouldn't put too much weight into his response. If you want a laugh, here's his review of my short story: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-2485/comment/10177680
Why are you responding to a bad faith commenter on a hidden open thread? Surely not worth your time??