Extreme Suffering On The Farms

"Amounts we cannot fathom of agony that we cannot fathom."

Content warning: this post will provide non-graphic discussions of extreme suffering. You may have been able to guess that from the title.

What’s the most painful thing that ever happened to you? Seriously take a moment and contemplate it—try, in as much detail as you can, to remember what it was like. Maybe, for many of you it was childbirth—an experience which, when it takes place without anesthesia, is temporarily completely debilitating. Nothing other than the pain occupies the mind of the sufferer.

Perhaps it was getting a tattoo. Someone on Quora summarized the pain of getting a tattoo in the following way:

They hurt.

There are between one and 20 needles being poked through your skin hundreds of thousands of time in a single session. The number of needles will determine the type and intensity of pain. So expect it. The real question is how much will it hurt.

I’ve been quite lucky and never experienced any particularly severe pain. I can remember quite a few times I’ve had pretty intense pain—barely eating for two days, having a doctor press down on my infected finger until it popped when I was ~8, having a very severe stomach ache, falling out of a treehouse (though remaining in the tree) and banging my chin on the side of it—but nothing has been that bad. I’d guess the worst experience of my life is a lot less painful than a wrist tattoo.

The most painful experience that most of us have ever had is classified as disabling pain. This is the sort of pain that’s bad enough that during it you can’t enjoy doing anything else—you can’t, for instance, enjoy a game of chess while giving birth—and that makes it impossible to focus on anything other than the pain. Examples of this kind of pain include a very painful fall, breaking a bone, burning yourself, giving birth, severe dog bites, getting a tattoo, kidney stones, and hemorrhoids.

While we often forget about these later, when they’re happening, they feel like the most significant thing in the world. They’re extremely bad—if you offered me $1,000 to get severely bitten by a dog, its teeth ripping off a chunk of my flesh, or have needles pierce my skin hundreds of times, I wouldn’t take the deal. Certainly I wouldn’t undergo childbirth for 1,000 dollars—especially if it was without anesthetic!

Sadly, on average, the animals that we eat endure hundreds of hours of this kind of debilitating agony over the course of their life. They endure somewhere on the order of an hour a day of this pain.

I’ll just discuss one such case—the case of the egg-laying hen, with the facts gathered from this report. Egg-laying hens in conventional farms endure about 400 hours (!!!!!) of this kind of disabling agony. Remember, this is agony about as bad as the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, unless you’ve had an experience as bad as being severely tortured. This is the agony that makes it impossible to think of anything else. The hens endure about an hour of a day of this extremely intense agony.

This intense pain comes from many sources including (this list is non-exhaustive):

1. Bone fractures. The majority of hens experience a bone fracture over the course of their life. On average, they have three. Imagine if you broke the same bone three times. This is, and I can’t emphasize this enough, what most hens deal with—the industry that produces our eggs is so cruel that it breaks the bones of most hens multiple times. In fact, the situation is much worse for hens than it would be for us, because the area around their keel bone, which is the most common kind of fracture, has a huge number of nerves. While such experiences in humans usually produce disabling pain for about a day, for chickens, such pain lasts about a week. Often the bone doesn’t heal properly, leading to constant intense agony.

2. Injurious pecking. In a hen's natural environment, she’ll spend most of her time pecking the ground looking for food. In a modern farm, hens can’t do that, so they spend a lot of their time pecking other hens, often leading to severe injury (just imagine that you were being bitten all the time by people surrounding you). It’s not terribly uncommon for hens to be pecked to death (seriously imagine what it would be like for that to happen) or for pecking to affect a hen’s body part known as the vent which is particularly sensitive (in this case, for the males reading this, imagine someone biting your balls). Often this becomes infected.

3. Every one of a hen’s natural behaviors are thoroughly squashed in the farms. Hens cannot make a nest prior to laying an egg, which causes them quite severe distress. Hens are willing to undergo strong electric shocks in order to get a suitable nest—about as strong as the electric shocks they’ll endure in order to get food after being starved for 28 hours (!!!!!). Remember, hens lay an egg roughly daily! This may not seem like a big deal, but only because we don’t appreciate the experience of being a nesting hen; an alien wouldn’t understand why we care about sex so much. Konrad Lorenz, a nobel prize winner summarized:

“The worst torture to which a battery hen is exposed is the inability to retire somewhere for the laying act. For the person who knows something about animals it is truly heart-rending to watch how a chicken tries again and again to crawl beneath her fellow-cage mates to search there in vain for cover”

Whenever you purchase a few cartons of eggs, you are consigning a chicken to living in these horrifying, excruciating conditions. Before you next purchase eggs—or chicken, or most any other animal product, though eggs are likely the worst—remember what the worst experience of your life is like, and vividly consider the fact that your purchase will likely cause others to endure many hours of an experience just as bad.

Tragically, the true scenario is much worse than that. Even worse than these scenarios of intense yet bearable pain are experiences that the authors of the report call excruciating pain. This is the sort of pain experienced when a person is brutally tortured or slowly eaten alive or burned to death for minutes; the sorts of pain that, if you’re really brave, you can read about in some detail here. They’re horrible enough to take on an almost qualitatively different dimension—something most of us wouldn’t trade for many decades of happy life. This kind of pain is literally inconceivable—it’s so bad that many people who experience it attempt suicide. A hen might experience this right as she’s being trampled and pecked to death.

Hens experience, on average, about two and a half minutes of this horrifying agony. The hundreds of hens that the average person eats over the course of their life (and yes, your consumption of eggs does cause more hens to be brought into existence, mistreated, and killed) mean that the average person is probably causing several hours of this unfathomable agony—the sort of agony one experiences in the minutes that they die from burning, boiling, being eaten alive, or suffocating to death; the kind of agony worse than being mauled by a dog, worse than childbirth, worse by orders of magnitude than anything you’ve ever experienced. The kind of experience that, to take a contemporary example, George Floyd probably experienced for the minutes that he was suffocating.

The average meat eater causes hours of that!

This is why factory farming is such a great moral emergency. It’s the cause of agony beyond what we could hope to imagine. Amounts we cannot fathom of agony that we cannot fathom. It’s not just egg-laying hens that experience this; it’s ubiquitous in the entire factory farming industry. As Ren says in an article that’s very worth reading, describing her own experience with fairly intense pain:

A single broiler chicken experiences fifty hours of [disabiling] pain during their lifespan, which lasts 4-6 weeks. There are 69 billion broilers slaughtered each year. That is so many hours of pain that if you divided those hours among humanity, each human would experience about 400 hours (2.5 weeks) of disabling pain every year. Can you imagine if instead of getting, say, your regular fortnight vacation from work or study, you experienced disabling-level pain for a whole 2.5 weeks? And if every human on the planet - me, you, my friends and family and colleagues and the people living in every single country - had that same experience every year? How hard would I work in order to avert suffering that urgent?

Factory farming is probably responsible for more agony than has ever existed in human history—especially agony of the most intense kind. This massive quantity of agony exists because consumers pay for it. Fortunately, we can do better. There are highly effective organizations working to reduce the extent of animal mistreatment in factory farms, which save around 18 animals from a cruel fate for every dollar they’re given. Additionally, if you’re horrified by this conduct, you can stop paying for it and either go vegan or only eat meat from small humane farms, if you can find them.

(I think this is one of the more important articles I’ve written, so if you could like and share this post, I’d really appreciate it).