Factory Farming Is Not Just Bad: It’s the Worst Thing Ever

A repost of an old article that I wrote when I had only 400 readers

Many horrifying atrocities have occurred throughout history: slavery, the holocaust, various genocides, Stalinist purges, me stubbing my toe this morning, and more. But I think it is undeniable that the badness of factory farming outstrips all of those—it is a horror on a scale never before seen in human history, an atrocity so great that it perhaps is enough single-handedly to roll back the pride of progress—to make it so that, contra Pinker, the world is getting worse.

When one makes such a claim, they often receive very puzzled stares—I made such a claim at a party yesterday (I’m really fun at parties, as I’m sure is evident), and everyone else seemed appalled by the claim¹. But I think this claim is utterly intuitive if we take seriously the reality of pain and suffering. It is the type of claim that sounds wrong at first, but when one really reflects, it is very hard to deny.

Every few years, factory farming causes more suffering than has ever existed in human history. This is hard to deny if one has spent any time reading about what actually goes on in factory farms. Roughly 74 billion animals are routinely mutilated and slain; the horrors of factory farms include castration with no anesthetic, third-degree burns, debeaking, getting disease from unsanitary conditions, and much more. If any human was subjected to such atrocities, we would not hesitate to call it torture.

Perhaps animal suffering isn’t quite as acute as ours. There are certainly ways that we can suffer that animals can’t—animals cannot, for example, experience some types of deep intellectual anguish. But that’s not what’s bad about castration or dying from pneumonia or living in shit and filth all the time. Or at least, that’s not all that’s bad.

It’s quite plausible that animals just suffer less from otherwise similar experiences than we do. Perhaps castrating animals would hurt them less than it would hurt us because we’re more conscious. But probably not by that much. The most thorough report on the topic concluded that the range of possible experiences open to a chicken, for example, is about one-third that open to a human—here’s the chart they give.

Let’s suppose that this is a dramatic overestimate—in reality, chickens suffering is 1/30th as acute as human suffering. This would still mean that factory farming causes way more suffering every year than is experienced by all humans on earth—74 billion is just such a mindbogglingly massive number that if their suffering is bad at all, factory farming becomes the source of more misery than all human wars.

Now, suppose one thinks that animal pain intrinsically matters less than human pain. Perhaps the moral law says that if one is feathered, it is less bad when they suffer. Let’s say that this makes animal suffering quite a bit less bad—maybe 1% as bad. This would mean that factory farming an animal is roughly 1/3000 as bad as factory farming a human. Now, one could object that animals can’t experience the same types of deep emotional pains—so then factory farming 3000 animals is roughly as bad as factory farming one baby or severely mentally disabled person, who can suffer as much as other humans but cannot experience any higher-level cognition.

Note, up until this point we’ve granted totally absurd assumptions. We assumed that the most reliable estimate of animal pain is just overestimating things by a factor of ten for no reason. Then we also assumed that human pain is intrinsically worse than animal pain—it’s unclear why that would be the case. When one has a headache, for example, it seems like the badness of that has nothing to do with the species. Remember, this assumption is that an exactly equal amount of pain is 100 times less bad if it’s experienced by an animal. It’s not about them experiencing less pain—that was already factored in.

But even if we grant totally absurd assumptions, factory farming wins out as the worst thing ever by far. Let’s also ignore all sea life and take a dramatic underestimate of the number of factory-farmed animals—let’s say it’s only 60 billion. Well, we still get the result that factory farming is roughly as bad as torturing and killing 20 million severely mentally disabled people or babies every year. Suppose that every year an industry bred into existence 20 million babies, before castrating them with no anesthetic, forcing them to live in feces and filth such that most of them get horrifying diseases, separate parents from children, cut off their noses with no anesthetic, before eventually slaughtering them. Thousands of them burn alive every year. This would be the worst thing ever by far. And factory farming is as bad as this if we grant the most absurd assumptions imaginable.

Maybe part of what makes would that scenario bad is that it would violate rights. Perhaps animals don’t have rights while humans do. Now, I have no idea why one would think this, but let’s say they do. Well, surely diseases can’t violate rights. So now imagine that there was a disease that afflicted babies. It made them hallucinate horrifying mistreatment, such that they experienced the pain of castration, being mutilated, and so on. Let’s even ignore the fact that factory farming kills the animals—just focus on the pain caused. Clearly, if a disease caused 20 million babies every year to hallucinate being tortured for months on end, such that their rights were not violated but their experience is like that of one who was subject to the tortures of factory farms, it would be the worst thing ever. Thus, even if one believes humans have rights an animals don’t have rights, and animals can suffer much less than humans, and animal suffering is intrinsically much less bad, factory farming is still the worst thing ever.

Additionally, generally rights are thought of as side constraints rather than as things that make a state of affairs bad, so this might make the torture of babies more wrong, but it’s not clear it would make it worse. Very few people think that, for example, the world is worse when a person dies from a rights violation than when they die from a disease.

So even when we adopt the most absurd assumptions imaginable, factory farming is the worst thing ever. What about when we adopt reasonable assumptions, roughly the assumptions I’d adopt? Let’s just focus on the badness of land-based factory farms and ignore all sea life. Well, it seems that if sentient beings experience pain, whether they are animal or human doesn’t matter to how bad the pain is, assuming the amount of pain is really kept constant. If an animal and a human experience the same amount of pain from a headache, I have no idea why the animal’s pain would be worse.

Animals can’t experience some types of acute negative experiences that humans can, but babies can’t either. I trust the Rethink Priorities report. Well, when we combine these assumptions, assuming that 74 billion animals are factory farmed every year—let’s pretend they’re all chickens for simplicity, though many are pigs which makes things even worse—we get the result that factory farming is roughly as bad as torturing a bit over 24 billion babies each year. This would clearly be the worst thing in the world by orders of magnitude. And this is, I think, a pretty good estimate of how bad factory farming actually is.

Thus, that factory farming is the worst thing ever should be relatively uncontroversial. The thing that makes it surprising is just the intuitive idea that the worst thing in the world shouldn’t be animal suffering. But when we realize that animals suffer every few years more than all humans ever have, it becomes very plausible that the industry causing that is the worst thing ever. Maybe suffering isn’t the only bad thing, but it’s certainly a bad thing. Factory farming probably causes thousands of times more suffering than any of the other atrocities, and thus is a good candidate for being the worst thing ever.

That factory farming is the worst thing ever is a surprising conclusion. But is surprising for factual reasons, not moral ones. As a moral matter, it’s overwhelmingly plausible that something that causes thousands of times more suffering than any other human atrocity is the worst thing ever. When the facts are surprising, then our conclusions should be surprising too.

Suppose that you found out that the worst thing that your uncle was doing was what he was doing to goats. This would be pretty surprising—a weird conclusion. But then if you found out that your uncle was forcefully having sex with 385,000 goats every year, then it would stop being surprising. It’s only surprising before you find out about the facts. So too is the conclusion that factory farming is the worst thing ever.

Also, there’s no reason why this should be such a surprise. There are lots of ways that humans can experience pleasure or pain that animals can’t. But when they’re castrated, for example, it’s not clear that humans have a much worse time than animals. Very little of the badness of castration or having a limb cut off comes from the appreciation of the cosmic injustice—most of it just comes from the raw agony. So when those experiences are inflicted upon literally tens of billions of animals, it’s no surprise that they’re the worst thing ever. And it’s not that obvious that animals suffer much less. Human children are dumber than adults, and yet they can suffer more if anything. It’s not self-evident that being smarter makes one able to suffer more.

1. As I explained at the party, I’m an avid partygoer in the sense that I frequently listen to the crashing the war party podcast.