For When We Suffer, We Suffer As Equals

And in their capacity to suffer, a dog is a pig is a bear is a boy

Somewhere bordering on 80 billion animals will be tortured and killed on factory farms this year.

This fact is indisputable—indisputable if anyone has spent any time reading about the horrors that occur on factory farms, the things so horrific that they would chill any person who is not a moral imbecile to their core reading about them. If we treated murderers and rapists the way we treat factory-farmed animals, our criminal justice system would be widely rebuked as the cruelest the world over. And yet we don’t do it to criminals—we do it to innocent creatures, creatures that have done nothing wrong because torturing them to death is the cheapest way to dine on their charred flesh.

When confronted with this horror and cruelty, most people do not stop. They do not regard it as a moral emergency, they do not regard it as something that must end now, for every second it continues, billions are crying out in agony, misery, and despair. Instead, they mutter some mild-mannered conciliatory statement about how maybe we probably shouldn’t do it as a society. Then they go back to paying these cruel industries driven by consumer demand to torture more animals.

We often brand cattle, placing hot irons upon their flesh for identification purposes, giving them third-degree burns. This probably feels to them roughly like it would if someone held your hand against a stove until you got third degree burns.

We castrate animals in the cruelest ways imaginable. Only sometimes do we drag a knife across their testicles until it rips them clean off. This probably feels roughly like having a knife dragged across the testicles of a human until it’s ripped clean off. But sometimes, we do something much worse—we tie a rubber band around their testicles until they cut off the blood flow. Then, after this point, they generally fall off, and if not, they’re scraped off. This probably feels roughly like tying a rubber band around the testicles of a human until they fall off.

We cut off the beaks of chickens with a hot knife. The beaks have lots of nerve endings. This probably feels roughly like having a hot knife cut off your nose. Why do we do this strange practice? What good could come of cutting off their beaks? Well, the animals are mistreated so badly that they cannibalize each other in stress and fear in factory farms. So we remove their beaks.

When we suffer, we suffer as equals.

There may be types of suffering that an animal cannot experience. A pig may not understand the deep cosmic injustice of being mistreated. But it can understand pain and agony and terror. And when it is given third-degree burns, it feels like a human would who got third-degree burns.

These animals are not as smart as us. But they are smarter than babies, and yet despite this, we regard the suffering of babies as very bad while the suffering of these animals as barely bad at all.

If you hurt a baby, you’re a monster, everyone agrees you should be locked up. But if you inflict far more suffering—270 years of torture worth—on beings much smarter than babies, then that’s seen as perfectly fine, and you won’t be arrested. In fact, if you abstain from this unimaginable, senseless, gratuitous cruelty, all done for the sake of comparatively minor pleasure, you’re seen as some kind of weirdo, and the object of popular ridicule.

Most people do not give a fuck about the animals that they senselessly torture because it’s fun. Just like the rapist or the child molester, the meat eater is perfectly content inflicting unimaginably horrendous suffering on others because they enjoy it. The main difference between the two is that one practice is socially accepted—when society advances to thinking that eating meat is wrong, no one will keep defending eating meat, just as no one in the modern day defends owning slaves.

Of course, this doesn’t mean most people are horrible on an individual level. Just like the average Nazi or racist southerner when slavery was around, most people don’t see that it’s wrong, because they are bad at reasoning and very biased. And yet in their actions, the average meat eater does something unspeakably evil.

Factory farming inflicts more suffering every few years on animals than has been inflicted on humans in all of human history. And we do this because it’s fun. Because we enjoy it. Because it gives us taste pleasure. We torture others because their flesh tastes good on pizza. It is an unspeakable evil, a blot on civilization that must end now.

What we do to animals is equivalent to torturing billions of cognitively enfeebled humans. One’s intelligence has nothing to do with the badness of their pain, but if it does, then the relevant reference class is humans with the cognitive capacities of an animal. But it is unspeakably horrific when a mentally enfeebled person has their hand pressed against the stove until they develop third-degree burns. So, replicating that experience but inflicting it on cows is unspeakably evil.

The suffering of a cow, like the suffering of a dog or of a baby is an utter travesty. And when we torture billions of them, it’s high time we do something different. If you lived the lives of every person, and then after that the lives of every animal that we eat, you’d spent the vast majority of your life being tortured in a factory farm. If I sound extreme or shrill or angry, it is not half of how you would judge it if you had to live the lives of every human plus every animal.

The meat industry only is tolerated because we avoid—at all costs—putting ourselves in the shoes of the victims. If everyone who dined on steak imagined the horrific fate of the cow that now adorns their plate, they’d recognize that it must end. If we had any semblance of empathy for the ones on our plates, we’d recognize factory farming as the greatest moral emergency of our time.

And yet in our apathy, our refusal to care about them at all, they continue to suffer. Their suffering is like our suffering, their pain like our pain. The experience undergone by billions of beings is roughly similar to the experience of a baby being hurt, or a puppy. And yet because we continue to pay their torturers, billions keep screaming in the factory farms.