Find Humane is a free website & app that mirrors ASPCA's Shop With Your Heart Grocery List (and also its Farms List) and provides a map, detailed inventories, and a list of frozen delivery services. We've received two grants from the ASPCA for this work: https://findhumane.com/
The ASPCA has three levels (matched by Find Humane): Pasture, Outdoor Access, and Indoors with Enrichments. We have a toggle to easily switch between the three levels. We default to Outdoor Access and above, but for this crowd, I recommend the highest Pasture setting.
I setup reoccurring monthly donations to FarmKind (and GiveWell) yesterday, in large part because of your writing. Thanks for everything you do and I can't believe I missed my chance to use code bentham!
Good post, but I'd swap points (3) and (2) in order of importance (like, I seriously think that shifting demand to beef and lamb would be a huge win for animal welfare!)
Thanks (not used to you agreeing with my posts :))! I wasn't really listing in order of importance. I also think if people ate mostly pasture raised animals that would eliminate most of the suffering so doesn't seem obvious which is more important.
I agree there's lots of uncertainty about eating fish. I think the most detailed thing written on the subject is from Tomasik. The arguments that struck me as most convincing overall against fishing:
1) Fish turnover produces more births and deaths to replace them.
2) Suffocation is actually just super bad!
3) It prompts some shift towards R-strategist fish.
4) We're eating mostly big fish leading to overpopulation of some small fish.
Overall, these make me highly uncertain but a bit negative about wild fish, though I could easily see changing my mind. Also the more uncertain you are about whether fish live negative lives, the more clear it seems that fishing is bad.
I was imagining that if there was no equivalent of pasture-raised for marine animals then a person who only eats pasture raised would stop eating marine animals. Or perhaps only eat wild-caught fish.
>> Labels that really mean animals are pasture-raised are: Certified Animal Welfare Approved by AGW, Certified Grassfed by AGW, Certified Non-GMO by AGW and Certified Regenerative by AGW. While Certified Humane doesn’t require all animals to be pasture-raised [to receive the] label, they have an optional pasture-raised standard that some of their certified farms use.
In addition, I suggest reviewing animal welfare non-profit label guides:
In addition to AGW & Certified Humane + "pasture raised"/"grass fed", there's a general consensus that G.A.P. Step ≥ 4 is in the same ballpark (mostly found at Whole Foods).
> Other labels mostly don’t mean much but are usually better than nothing.
That's not at all clear. As discussed in the above resources, other labels have little grounding or legal teeth. The three broadly accepted independent labelers (AGW, CH, GAP) are all non-profits and some have very low costs as they're subsidized, so there isn't much of an excuse for companies to avoid getting certified.
> Organic also means that they can be wildly overcrowded and mutilated so long as they’re fed the right kind of diet.
However, organic still lacks many welfare improvements.
After working in this space for a few years, unfortunately, the choices are limited. We recently ran the statistics and the median grocery store has about 7 items certified at the pasture level for the certifications noted above (usually just eggs). It's very difficult to find restaurants that use such certified products (especially with labeling and comingling issues). Frozen delivery services offer many more products and are available nationwide but they obviously cost more and are less convenient. A general heuristic might be to find a small, local farm that you can tour and get to know; however, even then, a farm that looks ostensibly bucolic might have a terrible process for slaughter (this is one place where the certifications really help). Sometimes it's not even the farmer's fault as they don't have many slaughterhouse choices.
FWIW, from someone who has studied animal welfare, developed and managed animal welfare programs and trained auditors for the last 15 years, and, as someone who would be happy to pay more for products that assured better welfare, I will tell you: There is not a single animal welfare certification out there that I would be willing to pay for or support in anyway.
From the standards to the audit tool, to the training, calibration and oversight of the auditors to a complete and total lack of reporting and transparency they are all a joke.
If one is going to answer the call to "eat bigger" then I would also advocate that folks donate to organizations actively working to improve the lives of those bigger animals. Most of the organizations endorsed by ACE are focused on legislation, corporate campaigning, shrimp, fish and now insects.
I will admit my bias here. This is the space that I work. Kinder Ground. Organizations like Kinder Ground are not big enough (yet) so we are not even considered in the ratings of ACE.
I work with farmers to improve the lives of farmed animals in the systems we have today. If you want to make a difference stop elevating meaningless certifications and donate where it counts, look at: https://kinderground.org/
Might I cause less suffering by putting a bullet through the heart of a deer—preventing it from suffering horrible death in the wild—and eating it, nose to tail? I haven’t heard this kind of scenario addressed by EAs. Every day an insane number of deer are painfully mauled by mountain lions and the rest. Isn’t it humane to hunt them?
This is a much more reasonable and livable approach to the issue of animal product use! I appreciate it for that reason. 🩵
I still think you should look into the potential benefits of hunting for one’s own meat. It allows the animal to live in the wild and then be killed in seconds. (If you take a good and responsible shot—which I think you are obligated to!)
I strongly disagree with the claim that larger animals are better. Cow brains are 180x larger than chicken brains and a cow yields about the same factor more meat than the chicken. But the cow suffers for a much longer duration than the chicken. Also the degree of consciousness is probably a power law on neuron number with some exponent greater than 1 but not much more than 2. With an exponent of 1.5 and a chicken lifespan 30x shorter than a cow lifespan, the cow suffers about sqrt(180)*30 times more than the chicken per pound of meat.
(1) Cows only have about 13 times as many neurons as chickens, not 180x. And the cortical neuron count, partially eliminating the confounder that cows are bigger and have a bunch of extra neurons just for controlling the movements of their larger bodies etc., and presumably more directly involved in pain processing, is only 6x as large for cows as chickens.
(2) I expect the scaling (capacity to suffer vs neuron count) to be sub-linear, for various reasons and having thought about this a fair amount. However, I also think we basically don’t know, so can’t be too confident either way (and am curious about your reasoning). There is enough uncertainty that I think we really need to be working with probability distributions over these various parameters. (But not in a blog comment, to be fair!)
(3) Using your assumptions about increasing returns to neurons in capacity to suffer, and the best numbers I could find, we'd find that the suffering per pound ratio is (animals per pound of meat ratio)*(days of suffering ratio)*(neuron count ratio)^1.5 = (3.5 lbs/480 lbs)*(640 days/45 days)*(3 billion neurons/220 million neurons)^1.5 = 5, i.e., cows are 5 times worse. Using cortical neurons we get that cows are 1.5x worse, and with my estimate for welfare ranges we get something like chickens are 5-6x worse. I think the takeaway here is that it's basically a wash between chickens and cows...
(4) EXCEPT for the fact that conditions for chickens are way, way worse. Adjusting for capacity to suffer, I’d expect chickens to suffer way more per day. In fact I think it’s quite plausible that each chicken suffers as much or more than each cow (though this is clearly very hard to know), so that eating chicken is something like 80x worse than cow under my assumptions about suffering capacity, and something like 10x worse than eating cow under your scaling assumption with cortical neurons.
So in the end, I agree with your point that the mere size isn’t dispositive, but I think when you look more at the details Bentham (and most animal welfare advocates) are right that cows are still better to eat than chickens from a welfare perspective.
How would you weight the climate impacts of eating animals, given that the recommendations for climate conscious eating go exactly in the opposite direction (ie chickens and other small animals are less carbon and energy intensive than large animals, especially cattle)?
I'm surprised to see you reference only factory farming when you talk about the ethical downsides of eating meat. Given that it's possible to buy pasture-raised meat, hunt, or even to buy from local farms with visible, known conditions, I'm sure that you have reasons for avoiding meat other than concerns about factory farming. Are there posts where you've written about that reasoning?
I love your advice! Just one note regarding wild caught fish versus farmed fish: isn’t eating wild caught fish what is leading to population collapse across the oceans? At least farm raised fish are sustainable in that they are actively breeding more fish. Ocean fishing has driven entire species to extinction or near extinction.
It’s similar to ostriches, where when they used to be hunted in the wild, they were driving the specie extinct, but now that ostrich farms have proliferated, the individual ostrich may be miserable on the farm, but at least the species as a whole is not threatened with extinction, now that there are millions more ostriches being bred for meat.
Obviously I’m not defending awful farming practices, but I don’t think hunting animals in the wild is a sustainable alternative or even more ethical - it’s what drove and continues to drive species extinction.
Great article. If anyone is looking for a resource on animal welfare certifications, ASPCA has created a database: https://www.aspca.org/shopwithyourheart/consumer-resources/shop-your-heart-grocery-list
Find Humane is a free website & app that mirrors ASPCA's Shop With Your Heart Grocery List (and also its Farms List) and provides a map, detailed inventories, and a list of frozen delivery services. We've received two grants from the ASPCA for this work: https://findhumane.com/
The ASPCA has three levels (matched by Find Humane): Pasture, Outdoor Access, and Indoors with Enrichments. We have a toggle to easily switch between the three levels. We default to Outdoor Access and above, but for this crowd, I recommend the highest Pasture setting.
That’s awesome. I just downloaded it. Thank you!
I setup reoccurring monthly donations to FarmKind (and GiveWell) yesterday, in large part because of your writing. Thanks for everything you do and I can't believe I missed my chance to use code bentham!
That's so awesome!
Good post, but I'd swap points (3) and (2) in order of importance (like, I seriously think that shifting demand to beef and lamb would be a huge win for animal welfare!)
I also think we're pretty much entirely in the dark about the valence of eating wild-caught fish (see: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oms5N5K5HxL2KJcmb/the-moral-ambiguity-of-fishing-on-wild-aquatic-animal)
Thanks (not used to you agreeing with my posts :))! I wasn't really listing in order of importance. I also think if people ate mostly pasture raised animals that would eliminate most of the suffering so doesn't seem obvious which is more important.
I agree there's lots of uncertainty about eating fish. I think the most detailed thing written on the subject is from Tomasik. The arguments that struck me as most convincing overall against fishing:
1) Fish turnover produces more births and deaths to replace them.
2) Suffocation is actually just super bad!
3) It prompts some shift towards R-strategist fish.
4) We're eating mostly big fish leading to overpopulation of some small fish.
Overall, these make me highly uncertain but a bit negative about wild fish, though I could easily see changing my mind. Also the more uncertain you are about whether fish live negative lives, the more clear it seems that fishing is bad.
>not used to you agreeing with my posts :)
I agree with many of your posts to be clear!
>I also think if people ate mostly pasture raised animals that would eliminate most of the suffering so doesn't seem obvious which is more important.
I think I disagree (what's the equivalent of pasture raised for marine animals, and how good is it?)
I was imagining that if there was no equivalent of pasture-raised for marine animals then a person who only eats pasture raised would stop eating marine animals. Or perhaps only eat wild-caught fish.
> Unfortunately, many terms that you’d think mean the animals are pasture-raised don’t really
Farm Forward's Humanewashing report is a must-read: https://www.farmforward.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Farm-Forward-Report-The-Dirt-on-Humanewashing.pdf
>> Labels that really mean animals are pasture-raised are: Certified Animal Welfare Approved by AGW, Certified Grassfed by AGW, Certified Non-GMO by AGW and Certified Regenerative by AGW. While Certified Humane doesn’t require all animals to be pasture-raised [to receive the] label, they have an optional pasture-raised standard that some of their certified farms use.
In addition, I suggest reviewing animal welfare non-profit label guides:
* American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA): https://aspca.org/labelguide
* The Animal Welfare Institute (AWI): https://awionline.org/sites/default/files/publication/digital_download/AWI-Consumers-Guide-Food-Labels-Animal-Welfare.pdf
* Farm Forward: https://www.farmforward.com/label-guide/
In addition to AGW & Certified Humane + "pasture raised"/"grass fed", there's a general consensus that G.A.P. Step ≥ 4 is in the same ballpark (mostly found at Whole Foods).
> Other labels mostly don’t mean much but are usually better than nothing.
That's not at all clear. As discussed in the above resources, other labels have little grounding or legal teeth. The three broadly accepted independent labelers (AGW, CH, GAP) are all non-profits and some have very low costs as they're subsidized, so there isn't much of an excuse for companies to avoid getting certified.
> Organic also means that they can be wildly overcrowded and mutilated so long as they’re fed the right kind of diet.
Organic in the United States means USDA Organic. There have been recent animal welfare changes to the organic certification: https://www.aspca.org/shopwithyourheart/advocate-resources/usda-organic-label-and-farm-animal-welfare
However, organic still lacks many welfare improvements.
After working in this space for a few years, unfortunately, the choices are limited. We recently ran the statistics and the median grocery store has about 7 items certified at the pasture level for the certifications noted above (usually just eggs). It's very difficult to find restaurants that use such certified products (especially with labeling and comingling issues). Frozen delivery services offer many more products and are available nationwide but they obviously cost more and are less convenient. A general heuristic might be to find a small, local farm that you can tour and get to know; however, even then, a farm that looks ostensibly bucolic might have a terrible process for slaughter (this is one place where the certifications really help). Sometimes it's not even the farmer's fault as they don't have many slaughterhouse choices.
If anyone wants to eat meat just eat mussels. They don't experience pain or suffering.
Interesting stack.
FWIW, from someone who has studied animal welfare, developed and managed animal welfare programs and trained auditors for the last 15 years, and, as someone who would be happy to pay more for products that assured better welfare, I will tell you: There is not a single animal welfare certification out there that I would be willing to pay for or support in anyway.
From the standards to the audit tool, to the training, calibration and oversight of the auditors to a complete and total lack of reporting and transparency they are all a joke.
If one is going to answer the call to "eat bigger" then I would also advocate that folks donate to organizations actively working to improve the lives of those bigger animals. Most of the organizations endorsed by ACE are focused on legislation, corporate campaigning, shrimp, fish and now insects.
I will admit my bias here. This is the space that I work. Kinder Ground. Organizations like Kinder Ground are not big enough (yet) so we are not even considered in the ratings of ACE.
I work with farmers to improve the lives of farmed animals in the systems we have today. If you want to make a difference stop elevating meaningless certifications and donate where it counts, look at: https://kinderground.org/
Or if you want to see some of our latest work with pigs, check this out: https://youtu.be/iW7v0KfsooA
Cheers
Dr. Jen
Might I cause less suffering by putting a bullet through the heart of a deer—preventing it from suffering horrible death in the wild—and eating it, nose to tail? I haven’t heard this kind of scenario addressed by EAs. Every day an insane number of deer are painfully mauled by mountain lions and the rest. Isn’t it humane to hunt them?
Why not just kill the mountain lions?
Why does the deer have to be killed because a blood thirsty carnivore would likely consume it?
As for hunting in general, if all humans took up hunting, all wildlife, atleast the herbivorous mammals, would go extinct in a matter of months.
If these mammals were to go extinct, then that would definitely eliminate their suffering.
Humans will eventually make all those animals extinct indirectly anyways through habitat destruction and displacement.
Yes, it's a sad sad world. Humans really do not care about animals.
The superiority complex lives on
This is a much more reasonable and livable approach to the issue of animal product use! I appreciate it for that reason. 🩵
I still think you should look into the potential benefits of hunting for one’s own meat. It allows the animal to live in the wild and then be killed in seconds. (If you take a good and responsible shot—which I think you are obligated to!)
I strongly disagree with the claim that larger animals are better. Cow brains are 180x larger than chicken brains and a cow yields about the same factor more meat than the chicken. But the cow suffers for a much longer duration than the chicken. Also the degree of consciousness is probably a power law on neuron number with some exponent greater than 1 but not much more than 2. With an exponent of 1.5 and a chicken lifespan 30x shorter than a cow lifespan, the cow suffers about sqrt(180)*30 times more than the chicken per pound of meat.
I don't think neuron count is a good proxy for moral importance https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/why-neuron-counts-shouldnt-be-used-as-proxies-for-moral-weight/
This is a thoughtful critique, but a few points:
(1) Cows only have about 13 times as many neurons as chickens, not 180x. And the cortical neuron count, partially eliminating the confounder that cows are bigger and have a bunch of extra neurons just for controlling the movements of their larger bodies etc., and presumably more directly involved in pain processing, is only 6x as large for cows as chickens.
(2) I expect the scaling (capacity to suffer vs neuron count) to be sub-linear, for various reasons and having thought about this a fair amount. However, I also think we basically don’t know, so can’t be too confident either way (and am curious about your reasoning). There is enough uncertainty that I think we really need to be working with probability distributions over these various parameters. (But not in a blog comment, to be fair!)
(3) Using your assumptions about increasing returns to neurons in capacity to suffer, and the best numbers I could find, we'd find that the suffering per pound ratio is (animals per pound of meat ratio)*(days of suffering ratio)*(neuron count ratio)^1.5 = (3.5 lbs/480 lbs)*(640 days/45 days)*(3 billion neurons/220 million neurons)^1.5 = 5, i.e., cows are 5 times worse. Using cortical neurons we get that cows are 1.5x worse, and with my estimate for welfare ranges we get something like chickens are 5-6x worse. I think the takeaway here is that it's basically a wash between chickens and cows...
(4) EXCEPT for the fact that conditions for chickens are way, way worse. Adjusting for capacity to suffer, I’d expect chickens to suffer way more per day. In fact I think it’s quite plausible that each chicken suffers as much or more than each cow (though this is clearly very hard to know), so that eating chicken is something like 80x worse than cow under my assumptions about suffering capacity, and something like 10x worse than eating cow under your scaling assumption with cortical neurons.
So in the end, I agree with your point that the mere size isn’t dispositive, but I think when you look more at the details Bentham (and most animal welfare advocates) are right that cows are still better to eat than chickens from a welfare perspective.
How would you weight the climate impacts of eating animals, given that the recommendations for climate conscious eating go exactly in the opposite direction (ie chickens and other small animals are less carbon and energy intensive than large animals, especially cattle)?
Unclear but likely swamped.
Where is your home shrimp aquarium fund?
I'm surprised to see you reference only factory farming when you talk about the ethical downsides of eating meat. Given that it's possible to buy pasture-raised meat, hunt, or even to buy from local farms with visible, known conditions, I'm sure that you have reasons for avoiding meat other than concerns about factory farming. Are there posts where you've written about that reasoning?
https://benthams.substack.com/p/against-eating-happy-animals?utm_source=publication-search
Thank you!
I love your advice! Just one note regarding wild caught fish versus farmed fish: isn’t eating wild caught fish what is leading to population collapse across the oceans? At least farm raised fish are sustainable in that they are actively breeding more fish. Ocean fishing has driven entire species to extinction or near extinction.
It’s similar to ostriches, where when they used to be hunted in the wild, they were driving the specie extinct, but now that ostrich farms have proliferated, the individual ostrich may be miserable on the farm, but at least the species as a whole is not threatened with extinction, now that there are millions more ostriches being bred for meat.
Obviously I’m not defending awful farming practices, but I don’t think hunting animals in the wild is a sustainable alternative or even more ethical - it’s what drove and continues to drive species extinction.
Wild caught fishing is leading to major declines in wild fish populations. But probably the fish would have had an unpleasant death anyways.
But if they have very unpleasant lives this could be a mercy
The volume of wild caught fish is capped, so whether you buy an additional farmed or wild caught fish, your marginal demand is likely increasing the amount of farmed fish: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/capture-fisheries-vs-aquaculture
Many farmed species such as salmon, trout and shrimp are fed wild-caught fish when farmed. According to Vox, around 17 million of the 91 million metric tons of wild-caught fish are diverted to the aquaculture industry annually. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/379564/fish-farming-sustainable-wild-caught
In fact, by one estimate, an average of 440 wild fish are caught to feed one farmed salmon; https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aidan-alexander_%F0%9D%97%99%F0%9D%97%AE%F0%9D%97%BF%F0%9D%97%BA%F0%9D%97%B2%F0%9D%97%B1-%F0%9D%97%B3%F0%9D%97%B6%F0%9D%98%80%F0%9D%97%B5-%F0%9D%97%BD%F0%9D%97%BF%F0%9D%97%BC%F0%9D%97%B1%F0%9D%98%82%F0%9D%97%B0%F0%9D%98%81%F0%9D%97%B6%F0%9D%97%BC%F0%9D%97%BB-activity-7237736521515044865-_dbo?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABNQR3oBixg1zKlILN8eYJFxUkVQFlslC18