If You're Going To Eat Animals, Eat Beef and Dairy
And stay far away from eggs
You shouldn’t eat animals in normal circumstances. That much is, in my view, quite thoroughly obvious. Animals undergo cruel, hellish conditions that we’d confidently describe as torture if they were inflicted on a human (or even a dog). No hamburger is worth that kind of cruelty. However, not all animals are the same. Contra Napoleon in Animal Farm, all animals are not equal.
Cows are big. The average person eats 2400 chickens but only 11 cows in their life. That’s mostly because chickens are so many times smaller than cows, so you can only get so many chicken sandwiches out of a single chicken. But how much worse is chicken than cow?
Brian Tomasik devised a helpful suffering calculator chart. It has various columns—one for how sentient you think the animals are, compared to humans, one for how long the animals lives, etc. You can change the numbers around if you want. I changed the sentience numbers to accord with the results of the most detailed report on the subject (for the animals they didn’t sample, I just compared similar animals), done by Rethink Priorities:
When I did that, I got the following:
Rather than, as the original chart did, setting cows = 1 for the sentience threshold, I set humans = 1 for it. So therefore you should think in terms of the suffering caused as roughly equivalent to the suffering caused if you locked a severely mentally enfeebled person or baby in a factory farm and tormented them for that number of days. Dairy turns out not that bad compared to the rest—a kg of dairy is only equivalent to torturing a baby for about 70 minutes in terms of suffering caused. That means if you get a gallon of milk, that’s only equivalent to confining and tormenting a baby for about 4 and a half hours. That’s positively humane compared to the rest!
Now I know people will object that human suffering is much worse than animal suffering. But this is totally unjustified. Making a human feel pain is generally worse because we feel pain more intensely, but in this case, we’re analyzing how bad a unit of pain is. If the amount of suffering is the same, it’s not clear what about animals is supposed to make their suffering so monumentally unimportant. Their feathers? Their lack of mental acuity? We controlled for that by having the comparison be a baby or a severely mentally disabled person (babies are dumb, wholly unable to do advanced mathematics). Ultimately, thinking animal pain doesn’t matter much is just unjustified speciesism, wherein one takes an obviously intrinsically morally irrelevant feature like species to determine moral worth. Just like racism and sexism, speciesism is wholly indefensible—it places moral significance on a totally morally insignificant category.
Even if you reject this, the chart should still inform your eating decisions. As long as you think animal suffering is bad, the chart is informative. Some kinds of animal products cause a lot more suffering than others—you should avoid the ones that cause more suffering.
Dairy, for instance, causes over 800 times less suffering than chicken and over 1000 times less than eggs. Drinking a gallon of milk a day for a year is then about as bad as having a chicken sandwich once every four months. Chicken is then really really bad—way worse than most other things. Dairy and beef mostly aren’t a big deal in comparison. And you can play around the numbers if you disagree with them—whatever answer you come to should be informative.
I remember seeing this chart was instrumental in my going vegan. I realized that each time I have a chicken sandwich, animals have to suffer in darkness, feces, filth, and misery for weeks on end. That’s not worth a sandwich, no matter how tasty. But if you are going to eat meat, at least lay off the chicken.
I was thinking about this topic earlier today. What a remarkable coincidence! As always, this is an excellent article.
In the most convenient world, form all the creatures on planet Earth only humans are sentient and have ethical worth. I really hope that we live in it, it would mean that there are so much less sufferings to alleviate but it's quite unlikely. There are no reasons why the universe would be so convenient. Most likely there are other sentient creatures that we are torturing with our actions to feed ourselves. And, therefore, veganism is most likely morally correct. But there are obviously less and more evil stances in between. So the idea of estimating "moral worth" of a creature based on the probability that it's sentient makes a lot of sense.
However, these numbers look crazy. In a space of all possible minds sentience may be orthogonal to intelligence, but among the kind of minds that are produced by evolution through natural selection these qualities seem to be highly correlated. And when a report estimating moral weight claims that highly intelligent octopuses, capable of solving complex puzzles, are *less* significant than chickens with tiny brains - this is a clear signal that the methodology is ridiculously off.
The fact that a chicken can in principle live longer doesn't make it more morally valuable while evaluating the evils of factory farming chickens compared to octopuses. If two creature have a life full of torture for half a year and then killed, what matters is how sentient these creatures were during this time, not how long they could have lived counter-factually. If anything, shorter life cycle of octopuses should mean that they are more likely to be sentient from earlier age, while chicken have more probability not to be conscious at the time of the slaughter.
Likewise, Tomasik calculator default values gives a chicken half the moral weight of a pig, which is bizarre if we take into account the difference in the brain size. We also need to take into account that suffering doesn't add up linearly. And the huge second order effect of climate change, towards which beef/milk industry contributes much much then poultry/eggs one.
So in the end, I don't think that the title of the post is correct. I suspect that it's quite likely that eating chicken is, in fact, more ethical than eating beef. On the other hand, turkeys seem to be about as likely to be sentient as chickens but produce more meet per death. So eating them instead of chickens seems a much safer bet.