Don't ever see myself going vegan, but then again, I was barely thinking about animal welfare before subscribing. We'll see where it goes. Planning to start donating regularly to animal welfare, possibly every time I eat meat, to be more conscientious about it. I don't believe animal welfare is as important human welfare (or that I should feel as bad about the death of a mosquito compared to an elephant), but the way we treat animals is a reflection of our humanity (or lack). "The righteous care for the needs of their animals..." Proverbs 12:10
I'm guessing that if you were to have the routines and the plant-digesting gut biome already in place, it would seem unfathomable to you to change in the opposite direction. Such is the power of the almightly Status Quo.
Maybe so. But one-year-ago me would've laughed at the thought of giving up any of my meat consumption habits. Maybe I'm moving too slow (see wife-beater reply below!), but I'm currently spending a lot of time and resources on directly making people's lives better. So I'll keep studying animal welfare as I can, becoming more conscientious about my food, and who knows where I'll be in another year.
"Don't ever see myself ceasing my wife-beating ways, but then again, I was barely thinking about my wife's welfare before subscribing. We'll see where it goes. Planning to start donating regularly to domestic abuse shelters for women, possibly every time I beat my wife, to be more conscientious about it."
The pro tip is that not all animal products are equal in how much harm they cause. If you cut out chicken, eggs, and most seafood in favor of more beef and dairy, you've done over 99% of the good of going vegan for much less than half of the work.
Obviously I encourage going all-in but I think the all-or-nothing mentality does more harm than good at the current moment.
recommending more beef and dairy instead of chicken eggs and seafood is so crazy. i would literally say almost the opposite, as someone who reintroduced eggs and select seafoods after 5 years of supplemented veganism for my health. cows and pigs are as intelligent as human toddlers. i would never in a million years trade any amount of fish or insect lives for them. capacity for pain isn’t everything
But contributing to beef and dairy has hundreds to thousands less impact than chicken and eggs. You’d have to value cows hundreds to thousands times more than chickens and fish based on their intelligence, which I don’t think is justified.
that’s blatantly false for eggs. each laying hen can produce up to 600 eggs before the age at which they are typically slaughtered, and in-ovo sexing technology would mean no deaths of males.
additionally, you’re not factoring in their land use at all. farming mammals, especially ruminants, requires the interspecies-genocidal clearing of vast tracts of forest. it is the single biggest source of habitat loss in the world.
even if i had no reason to think it’s a terrible argument, and even if i accepted the premise that people who don’t care to *lower* their meat consumption could somehow be convinced to *change* their meat consumption in any other way, utilitarianism is itself so unserious. like there is no amount of schooling fish lives that should be evaluated as equal to the life of a highly conscious animal like a person or dolphin or even a cow, i’m sorry
Try going to the supermarket clearance shelf, the stuff that is cut down just before its sell-by-date to a tiny fraction of it's prior estimated asking price, as a loss recall rather than a profit, buy meat and dairy there instead
Yep: "This distinction is often treated as nitpicky, but if it’s true then it has significant implications for how we ought to approach animal welfare. I suspect there is a large portion of Americans who would switch their meat consumption from pork and chicken to beef far more readily than they would skip to full-fledged veganism."
Of course, the current amount of meat consumed cannot be met with ruminants living in tolerable conditions, so meat consumption shall be reduced anyway. But there is a massive human welfare difference between "50% less meat" and "no meat".
What are we actually paying for when we buy animal products today? We don’t need to settle every hypothetical before confronting the suffering built into factory farming.
How many times do I have to say ‘99% of meat is produced on factory farms’ is false before you believe it? That is true of the US only. It is not true of the world. Also, the definition of factory farming under which 99% of US meat is factory farmed does not look AT ALL at animal conditions. It only looks at the NUMBER of animals. So any action that has been taken to improve animal conditions is ignored unless it makes farms smaller.
Some terrible practices are universal. Domestic animal treatment in the US is appalling overall. I doubt that ~100% of US factory farms treat their animals extremely badly since there is a lot of large scale cattle ranching and ranches cattle seem to lead pretty good lives. I would be interested in knowing whether there are humane large-scale chicken operations in the US: I suspect there are but I’m not sure. Could be none. My experience is vegans reject any animal operations as unethical regardless of their actual practices, though, so it’s very hard to get good information.
Yes, and I imagine that when people read ‘cattle are below 1%’, they assume you mean 1% of the population, which is at a given time. You can of course privately use the words to refer to different things, but that is misleading
Yeah there are humane large scale chicken operations. Also the factory chickens and factory turkey operations are not really that bad. I’ve seen them and theyre gross and whatnot and I dont really want to eat their meat as a result but theyre pretty stupid and most of their lives are pretty cool. It’s only the last couple weeks that sucks. Does that excuse it? Nope but it isnt the same as the vegans wpuld have you think. Probably the one that gets me is the factory pig farming. The beginning 4 weeks on a turkey factory farm for the chicks is like turkey chick heaven. If you get a chance to see that you should.
Can you share some more info or evidence? Sure, it would be good to go to a farm directly to see it, but many of us won't (and some of us wouldn't trust that we were looking at representative conditions if we could). I'm actually pretty concerned about the *enormous* difference between your claims and BB's, and I'm sure many others are skeptical, so it would help if you could share some evidence that could help us resolve the discrepancy. You and BB are claiming very different realities.
Evidence, I cannot give you, or, wont go to the effort of finding, but I will jot down my personal experience in Virginia at a friend’s turkeyhouse. So when a turkey farm starts a run of chicks, what I observed is that they put the chicks in the house that they will live the rest of their lives in until they get shipped off to the slaughterhouse. Since the chicks are all small and fragile, this means that there is lots of room for them to run around, and there are heat lamps, food, and water scattered around for them to scamper around to. The whole place is pretty clean, fresh shavings, fresh air, etc. The first 6-8 weeks or so of a turkey’s life they will die or get themselves killed at the drop of a hat, so it is setup to be really idiot proof and lovely for them. They smell nice, the birds look like theyre happy with the world, and theyre really cute. As they grow though, their droppings accumulate and they get bigger, until eventually the place is disgusting and theyre pretty crowded. Then, it actually gets *less* disgusting because it is so awful there is an ammonia fog. This is a lot worse in the winter than in the summer, because in the summer it is way more ventilated to keep it from getting too hot. My friend actually raises a few of them outside of that environment so that the meat isnt gross, (they have to neutralize the ammonia at the slaughterhouse), to keep for himself, and has one that just lives indefinitely as a sort of pet to see how huge it can get. The turkeys, at least the factory bred and fed ones, are stupid. Really really really really stupid. They cant live very well outside of that environment or an otherwise protected environment, and I doubt that what they would think was their optimal environment would be something that vegans would approve of. My buddy tried experimenting with that, and he figured that you could create such an environment for about 25 cents more per bird. Probably more like 50 cents. This was in around 2014 so itd be a bit more now. Most farmers struggle to make ends meet, and even another ten cents per bird would make a huge difference. If we all paid a dollar more for a turkey, it would make a world of difference to the farmers and the animals, but since theyre all basically slaves to cargill or tyson or whoever, it isnt really possible, at this time. If the vegan whackjobs put their efforts into making that happen, itd probably succeed, since it isnt actually any skin off of cargill or whoever’s back, and I think the end customers probably would be fine with it. What is a dollar in 2026? (Not a dollar a pound, a dollar a *turkey*, so like ten or 15 cents per lb for finished product). I spent a lot less time in chicken houses but they are gross as shit, and the birds are even dumber. Cornish crosses that are fed until they cant move well and bred to pretty much want that. Their feed dims what little mind they have. That’s how you get 99c/lb chicken instead of $4 chicken. If we all paid $4 for chicken we’d get way better chicken. I mean this in terms of the lowest price you can find without much margin for anyone, a lot of chicken costs more than that now and it is scammy factory chicken still. Anyway, I know an egg farm in VT that isnt organic or anything, but does a really good job striking a balance between animal welfare and production. I get live chickens that have already lain for a season from them sometimes and they do great adapting to life in a more free rangey environment, and seemed very well cared for before. They can fly and run around and fight and evade raccoons pretty well, which is the best you can do as a hen. The eggs cost about double what commodity eggs do. A bigger operation with the same practices and lower margins could get that cost down some I’m sure. But the eggs are still cheap.
Enormous benefit can come from reducing the level of torture, but if it's still torture (which I think describes well over 90% of animal farming) then the job's not done. Does this mean we're ignoring the benefit? No.
I think he was using a factory farming statistic because it's a good proxy for what portion of farming is horrific torture. Of course it's logically possible that the following sequence of events happened:
1. Factory farming was almost universally torture
2. We changed factory farming to make it *much* better for many animals
3. It's still almost universally torture.
I believe 1 and 3 are true, and 2 is arguably true. If you think 3 is false, say so, but what you've been saying is 2, and the validity of BB citing a factory farming statistic depends on 3.
Yes, we're ignoring the benefits when addressing the question "should we radically change or end 99% of farming?" because I don't think those benefits affect the answer to that question. There are many things that have happened in the world that I acknowledge have been enormously good, but most of those don't affect the answer to that question either.
I would just like to be clear and accurate about the actual scope of the problem. 99% of animals are not factory farmed, and factory farms as defined by the statistics BB used may or may not be torturous in the way he describes. Some are! Some aren't. I feel like vegan activists have this consistent habit of being extremely loose with the facts around this stuff, which is counterproductive because it makes people (rightly) conclude that they just cherry pick the worst cases and hence not trust the arguments. But the arguments can stand on their own perfectly well without the hyperbole and sloppy facts! 1.5 billion chickens is a lot: even if only half live in terrible conditions, that's a big deal. But since every time I look at a figure by someone like BB it turns out to be wrong, I end up not being able to trust what I read on the subject by vegan activists like him.
I have come to agree that this is either the single most, or second most, important moral issue of our time. But because the path to accepting this entails a sober look at the facts of meat consumption, I also think it’s important to be precise about the degrees of suffering faced by each class of factory farmed animal.
Cows and other ruminants — as best I can tell — live positive welfare lives in factory farms, and arguably better lives than their wild counterparts; both the limited number of wild ruminants alive today and also those ancestors of the domesticated animals today.
This distinction is often treated as nitpicky, but if it’s true then it has significant implications for how we ought to approach animal welfare. I suspect there is a large portion of Americans who would switch their meat consumption from pork and chicken to beef far more readily than they would skip to full-fledged veganism.
I hope I’ve made it clear that I’m very open to being corrected, as this is a tremendously important moral problem.
They don't. What does this have to do with factory farms? We create, control, and maintain factory farms. We are directly causally responsible for any suffering that directly stems from factory farms. This is not the case for natural environments.
We could eliminate a lot of wild animal suffering if we chose to. Yes, we are less directly responsible for that than for the meat we eat. But if we observe someone else suffering and choose not to help, that is also a moral question.
This whole post was written by a vegan, who has no direct causal responsibility for factory farms, trying to get rid of factory farms anyway. Why did he bother? The same answer applies to wild animals.
Because eliminating the suffering of factory farm animals is much easier logistically and more effective use of resources and because humans bear a much more direct responsibility?
This is kind of like asking, if you beat your own kids, why aren't you trying to stop some parent in Mongolia from beating their kids instead of just stopping your own behavior. The answer should be pretty obvious.
We have finite resources. We can't end all suffering everywhere. So it makes sense to allocate our resources in a generally more effective way.
The post was written by a human. Humans bear responsibility for factory farming. This human has a platform to try to influence others. This human cares about suffering and is trying to influence others in a way to reduce it. The policy being advocated is much more tractable and practical than any current plan to relieve wild animal suffering. I don't want to speak for BB, but presumably that's why they bothered.
Why should one human be responsible for what a different human does against their wishes?
Yes it is probably easier to eliminate factory farm suffering than to eliminate a comparable amount of wild animal suffering. But that doesn't justify the extreme disparity we see here - fanatic concern for ending factory farm suffering (not saying that's wrong) while not even bothering to think about what could be done to minimize wild animal suffering.
I do wonder if veganism would be more successful with regard to its goal of reducing animal suffering if it coupled a focus on factory farming with more of a virtue ethics approach. For instance, when it comes to factory farming, "you don't want to be the kind of person who contributes to this kind of thing," vs. "eating animals is always wrong" in a kind of deontological sense or giving utilitarian calculations about suffering which become very abstract very quickly.
I don’t accept the argument. Maybe because i’ve seen improvement in this arena over my lifetime. I think the 99% stat is suspect, does not correspond with percentage humane certifications and other factors surrounding animal welfare practices. Maybe I exist in a bit of a bubble where there is significant humane animal farming, but that does not change my reasoning in any case.
I suspect the vegans among us will never be satisfied with animal welfare practices that end in slaughter.
In any case, pointing to a 99% stat is not a moral argument. There is undoubtedly lots of meat produced without factory farming (being in the slow food world, I see this up close, visited a few dozen such farms the past decade …would suggest those passionate about the topic take time to visit such places to see firsthand the state of affairs.) Also, not all factory farming is equal or torturous. For example, many huge cattle ranches support wholesome grazing and ethical kill practices … and are humane in my estimation. They are considered factory farms tho because of the scale. Our shellfish farms are likely called factory farms and yet oysters have no brains with which to feel any anguish.
Meanwhile, something like 5% of meat and far more eggs are getting certified as humane. I get that such certifications are not the end-all-be-all of animal welfare. But they are a sign that consumers are paying more attention and demanding humane practices, and the industry is reacting. It is a sign of actual progress! I’m seeing pastured eggs and beef at Costco now even. Not fast enough and all the qualifiers but it is progress.
And it is progress that this thesis seems designed to ignore! Meanwhile, the idea that everyone is going to give up meat and abandon this food supply ecosystem we’ve built is not reasonable if you ask me. We need incremental steps to get to a more wholesome place. And those involve reducing the harm of factory farming and persuading consumers to demand more humane practices
Indeed. Normative beliefs aren't intrinsically motivating, and consequently the psychology of long-term behavioral change needs to remain at the center of the conversation.
I'm convinced that a very large number of current humans, with their explicit normative beliefs unchanged but their background consumption habits being plant-based, would find it instinctively appalling to make a change in the opposite direction, toward beginning the consumption of flesh. Status quo bias is always the final boss.
Same beliefs, different default, opposite behaviour. The belief was never the variable.
Status quo bias sits inside a person. In your two worlds the people are the same. What changes is the shop, the menu, the fridge, and what the family knows how to cook.
Cambridge, 94,000 cafeteria meals. Vegetarian options went from one in four to two in four. Plant-based purchases rose 40 to 80 percent. The biggest shift came from the quartile who had always taken meat.
The strategy of trying to make everyone vegetarian/vegan has been failing for decades and going down this path means more failure.
A more practical path forward is to create sufficient demand for more humanely farmed animals that they start being supplied in serious numbers. It's not perfect -- and some labels are kinda meaningless -- but there are now egg brands that to some degree do offer better conditions.
That will never happen with meat if the message is: you're a bad person if you eat meat. It's hard to get people to make huge changes and people (well non-catholics :-)) will just not live with constant guilt. Whatever the true merits of the situation that choice of talking points isn't helpful.
> There’s a common thought that goes: “why are vegans so obsessed with factory farming, which we all agree is horrible?
Also pretty silly because not everyone agrees factory farming is bad. I, for one, would be perfectly fine if we got more efficient factory farms. It would be great if everyone could eat as much meat as Americans—if they so chose—without paying ruinous costs.
If the country side was dotted with quaint family farms that looked like the ones in my childhood storybooks, would the food supply be any better (or worse)? The extreme language in the substack makes me wonder if any of the researchers have ever stepped onto a working farm. Theirs claims seem second and third hand, exaggerating the one-percent of the one-percent. EVERY working farmer I know has a vested interest in having healthy and vital herds and flocks.
Wow, your writing is clear, probably factually accurate, and will do approximately zero to help. This article won't even convince a rounding error percentage of the people who read it. Better to say: puree 1 can of green beans (or an equivalent of frozen/fresh), mix it with ground turkey, and cook as normal. It saves a ton of money and if it's in, say, a pasta dish, you'll barely notice.
People might agree, and *then do something about it*. Nobody is going to take your moralizing seriously and change. This is why a meat alternative is the only way forward! I eat less meat, per my "one neat trick" above, because it saves me money. That's it. And "it benefits you, financially" is a better way to go over "you support nonstop torture for millions." Why? I mean, c'mon, man. Who wants to internalize the implicit "and you're a fucking monster for participating in this" that follows your argument?
One thing you're right about: people don't want to see the torture. But if you scream it in their faces, it's going to go in the cognitive dissonance-y just don't look at it or think about it part of the brain.
If everyone only ever bought the most ethical item on the shelf, it would create similar market pressures favoring welfare as those you would get from everyone going vegan until conditions vastly improve
Okay, so I agree factory farmed meat is indefensible and you shouldn’t eat tortured meat. But I can go to Whole Foods and buy grass fed pasture raised beef - is it wrong to eat that?
listen to your heart, your conscience. what do you think? would you actually hold a gun to the head of a gentle animal who trusts you, and butcher her apart just to eat a specific food? that’s the question—whether you want to live in a world in which thinking, feeling creatures are treated like objects to be slaughtered at our whim, or one in which they are left to live their lives.
i have to mention also that grass fed pasture raised does not mean they’re grass fed pasture raised their entire lives. they almost always aren’t, which is why you sometimes see rare examples of meat that is specifically labeled “grass finished” instead of simply fed. and even the grass finished animals are ultimately “finished” in the same barbaric slaughterhouses as the tortured animals.
This is all good and well. Your clowning ways interfere when you suggest people can undo the effects of their meat consumption by donating to animal charities. Also, what is the latest Christian miracle looking like? Has there been any miracles since I chimed in here? You should also look into miracles from other religious traditions.
Don't ever see myself going vegan, but then again, I was barely thinking about animal welfare before subscribing. We'll see where it goes. Planning to start donating regularly to animal welfare, possibly every time I eat meat, to be more conscientious about it. I don't believe animal welfare is as important human welfare (or that I should feel as bad about the death of a mosquito compared to an elephant), but the way we treat animals is a reflection of our humanity (or lack). "The righteous care for the needs of their animals..." Proverbs 12:10
I'm guessing that if you were to have the routines and the plant-digesting gut biome already in place, it would seem unfathomable to you to change in the opposite direction. Such is the power of the almightly Status Quo.
Maybe so. But one-year-ago me would've laughed at the thought of giving up any of my meat consumption habits. Maybe I'm moving too slow (see wife-beater reply below!), but I'm currently spending a lot of time and resources on directly making people's lives better. So I'll keep studying animal welfare as I can, becoming more conscientious about my food, and who knows where I'll be in another year.
"Don't ever see myself ceasing my wife-beating ways, but then again, I was barely thinking about my wife's welfare before subscribing. We'll see where it goes. Planning to start donating regularly to domestic abuse shelters for women, possibly every time I beat my wife, to be more conscientious about it."
Maybe someday I'll have the courage to cut off all my wife-beating friends too!
The pro tip is that not all animal products are equal in how much harm they cause. If you cut out chicken, eggs, and most seafood in favor of more beef and dairy, you've done over 99% of the good of going vegan for much less than half of the work.
Obviously I encourage going all-in but I think the all-or-nothing mentality does more harm than good at the current moment.
recommending more beef and dairy instead of chicken eggs and seafood is so crazy. i would literally say almost the opposite, as someone who reintroduced eggs and select seafoods after 5 years of supplemented veganism for my health. cows and pigs are as intelligent as human toddlers. i would never in a million years trade any amount of fish or insect lives for them. capacity for pain isn’t everything
But contributing to beef and dairy has hundreds to thousands less impact than chicken and eggs. You’d have to value cows hundreds to thousands times more than chickens and fish based on their intelligence, which I don’t think is justified.
that’s blatantly false for eggs. each laying hen can produce up to 600 eggs before the age at which they are typically slaughtered, and in-ovo sexing technology would mean no deaths of males.
additionally, you’re not factoring in their land use at all. farming mammals, especially ruminants, requires the interspecies-genocidal clearing of vast tracts of forest. it is the single biggest source of habitat loss in the world.
even if i had no reason to think it’s a terrible argument, and even if i accepted the premise that people who don’t care to *lower* their meat consumption could somehow be convinced to *change* their meat consumption in any other way, utilitarianism is itself so unserious. like there is no amount of schooling fish lives that should be evaluated as equal to the life of a highly conscious animal like a person or dolphin or even a cow, i’m sorry
It’s true that eggs lead to less deaths, but they lead to far more hours of suffering per kg of the product compared to milk.
What is it about cows that makes them valuable in such a way that no number of chickens/fish can matter more than a single cow?
Why not:
Try going to the supermarket clearance shelf, the stuff that is cut down just before its sell-by-date to a tiny fraction of it's prior estimated asking price, as a loss recall rather than a profit, buy meat and dairy there instead
Interested in hearing how effective people think that is, if you could persuade several people you know to do that, thereby reduce demand
Yep: "This distinction is often treated as nitpicky, but if it’s true then it has significant implications for how we ought to approach animal welfare. I suspect there is a large portion of Americans who would switch their meat consumption from pork and chicken to beef far more readily than they would skip to full-fledged veganism."
Of course, the current amount of meat consumed cannot be met with ruminants living in tolerable conditions, so meat consumption shall be reduced anyway. But there is a massive human welfare difference between "50% less meat" and "no meat".
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/L6wdRBCh3izCD244t/farmers-in-the-animalist-coalition
What are we actually paying for when we buy animal products today? We don’t need to settle every hypothetical before confronting the suffering built into factory farming.
How many times do I have to say ‘99% of meat is produced on factory farms’ is false before you believe it? That is true of the US only. It is not true of the world. Also, the definition of factory farming under which 99% of US meat is factory farmed does not look AT ALL at animal conditions. It only looks at the NUMBER of animals. So any action that has been taken to improve animal conditions is ignored unless it makes farms smaller.
I will add a clarification indicating that we're talking about the U.S..
Just in practice ~100% of the large commercial farms treat their animals extremely badly, are overcrowded, etc. And many practices--grinding up of baby males, electric stunning https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032579122007167, fast growing breeds https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9156924/#s3--are used in ~100% of commercial production.
Some terrible practices are universal. Domestic animal treatment in the US is appalling overall. I doubt that ~100% of US factory farms treat their animals extremely badly since there is a lot of large scale cattle ranching and ranches cattle seem to lead pretty good lives. I would be interested in knowing whether there are humane large-scale chicken operations in the US: I suspect there are but I’m not sure. Could be none. My experience is vegans reject any animal operations as unethical regardless of their actual practices, though, so it’s very hard to get good information.
Cattle is below 1%
4.7% according to numbers I just checked: about 86 million out of about 2 billion, 3/4 of which are chickens
That's alive at any given time--cows live longer, so per year it's a lot shorter.
Yes, and I imagine that when people read ‘cattle are below 1%’, they assume you mean 1% of the population, which is at a given time. You can of course privately use the words to refer to different things, but that is misleading
Yeah there are humane large scale chicken operations. Also the factory chickens and factory turkey operations are not really that bad. I’ve seen them and theyre gross and whatnot and I dont really want to eat their meat as a result but theyre pretty stupid and most of their lives are pretty cool. It’s only the last couple weeks that sucks. Does that excuse it? Nope but it isnt the same as the vegans wpuld have you think. Probably the one that gets me is the factory pig farming. The beginning 4 weeks on a turkey factory farm for the chicks is like turkey chick heaven. If you get a chance to see that you should.
Can you share some more info or evidence? Sure, it would be good to go to a farm directly to see it, but many of us won't (and some of us wouldn't trust that we were looking at representative conditions if we could). I'm actually pretty concerned about the *enormous* difference between your claims and BB's, and I'm sure many others are skeptical, so it would help if you could share some evidence that could help us resolve the discrepancy. You and BB are claiming very different realities.
Evidence, I cannot give you, or, wont go to the effort of finding, but I will jot down my personal experience in Virginia at a friend’s turkeyhouse. So when a turkey farm starts a run of chicks, what I observed is that they put the chicks in the house that they will live the rest of their lives in until they get shipped off to the slaughterhouse. Since the chicks are all small and fragile, this means that there is lots of room for them to run around, and there are heat lamps, food, and water scattered around for them to scamper around to. The whole place is pretty clean, fresh shavings, fresh air, etc. The first 6-8 weeks or so of a turkey’s life they will die or get themselves killed at the drop of a hat, so it is setup to be really idiot proof and lovely for them. They smell nice, the birds look like theyre happy with the world, and theyre really cute. As they grow though, their droppings accumulate and they get bigger, until eventually the place is disgusting and theyre pretty crowded. Then, it actually gets *less* disgusting because it is so awful there is an ammonia fog. This is a lot worse in the winter than in the summer, because in the summer it is way more ventilated to keep it from getting too hot. My friend actually raises a few of them outside of that environment so that the meat isnt gross, (they have to neutralize the ammonia at the slaughterhouse), to keep for himself, and has one that just lives indefinitely as a sort of pet to see how huge it can get. The turkeys, at least the factory bred and fed ones, are stupid. Really really really really stupid. They cant live very well outside of that environment or an otherwise protected environment, and I doubt that what they would think was their optimal environment would be something that vegans would approve of. My buddy tried experimenting with that, and he figured that you could create such an environment for about 25 cents more per bird. Probably more like 50 cents. This was in around 2014 so itd be a bit more now. Most farmers struggle to make ends meet, and even another ten cents per bird would make a huge difference. If we all paid a dollar more for a turkey, it would make a world of difference to the farmers and the animals, but since theyre all basically slaves to cargill or tyson or whoever, it isnt really possible, at this time. If the vegan whackjobs put their efforts into making that happen, itd probably succeed, since it isnt actually any skin off of cargill or whoever’s back, and I think the end customers probably would be fine with it. What is a dollar in 2026? (Not a dollar a pound, a dollar a *turkey*, so like ten or 15 cents per lb for finished product). I spent a lot less time in chicken houses but they are gross as shit, and the birds are even dumber. Cornish crosses that are fed until they cant move well and bred to pretty much want that. Their feed dims what little mind they have. That’s how you get 99c/lb chicken instead of $4 chicken. If we all paid $4 for chicken we’d get way better chicken. I mean this in terms of the lowest price you can find without much margin for anyone, a lot of chicken costs more than that now and it is scammy factory chicken still. Anyway, I know an egg farm in VT that isnt organic or anything, but does a really good job striking a balance between animal welfare and production. I get live chickens that have already lain for a season from them sometimes and they do great adapting to life in a more free rangey environment, and seemed very well cared for before. They can fly and run around and fight and evade raccoons pretty well, which is the best you can do as a hen. The eggs cost about double what commodity eggs do. A bigger operation with the same practices and lower margins could get that cost down some I’m sure. But the eggs are still cheap.
Enormous benefit can come from reducing the level of torture, but if it's still torture (which I think describes well over 90% of animal farming) then the job's not done. Does this mean we're ignoring the benefit? No.
Well, you’re ignoring any benefit when you keep citing a misleading statistic that ignores any possible benefit.
I think he was using a factory farming statistic because it's a good proxy for what portion of farming is horrific torture. Of course it's logically possible that the following sequence of events happened:
1. Factory farming was almost universally torture
2. We changed factory farming to make it *much* better for many animals
3. It's still almost universally torture.
I believe 1 and 3 are true, and 2 is arguably true. If you think 3 is false, say so, but what you've been saying is 2, and the validity of BB citing a factory farming statistic depends on 3.
Yes, we're ignoring the benefits when addressing the question "should we radically change or end 99% of farming?" because I don't think those benefits affect the answer to that question. There are many things that have happened in the world that I acknowledge have been enormously good, but most of those don't affect the answer to that question either.
I would just like to be clear and accurate about the actual scope of the problem. 99% of animals are not factory farmed, and factory farms as defined by the statistics BB used may or may not be torturous in the way he describes. Some are! Some aren't. I feel like vegan activists have this consistent habit of being extremely loose with the facts around this stuff, which is counterproductive because it makes people (rightly) conclude that they just cherry pick the worst cases and hence not trust the arguments. But the arguments can stand on their own perfectly well without the hyperbole and sloppy facts! 1.5 billion chickens is a lot: even if only half live in terrible conditions, that's a big deal. But since every time I look at a figure by someone like BB it turns out to be wrong, I end up not being able to trust what I read on the subject by vegan activists like him.
I have come to agree that this is either the single most, or second most, important moral issue of our time. But because the path to accepting this entails a sober look at the facts of meat consumption, I also think it’s important to be precise about the degrees of suffering faced by each class of factory farmed animal.
Cows and other ruminants — as best I can tell — live positive welfare lives in factory farms, and arguably better lives than their wild counterparts; both the limited number of wild ruminants alive today and also those ancestors of the domesticated animals today.
This distinction is often treated as nitpicky, but if it’s true then it has significant implications for how we ought to approach animal welfare. I suspect there is a large portion of Americans who would switch their meat consumption from pork and chicken to beef far more readily than they would skip to full-fledged veganism.
I hope I’ve made it clear that I’m very open to being corrected, as this is a tremendously important moral problem.
I disagree that they have positive lives https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-lives-of-british-animals
Do you think wild animals have positive lives, and if not, what should be done about it?
Not in general. Less obvious for longer lived ones.
They don't. What does this have to do with factory farms? We create, control, and maintain factory farms. We are directly causally responsible for any suffering that directly stems from factory farms. This is not the case for natural environments.
We could eliminate a lot of wild animal suffering if we chose to. Yes, we are less directly responsible for that than for the meat we eat. But if we observe someone else suffering and choose not to help, that is also a moral question.
This whole post was written by a vegan, who has no direct causal responsibility for factory farms, trying to get rid of factory farms anyway. Why did he bother? The same answer applies to wild animals.
Because eliminating the suffering of factory farm animals is much easier logistically and more effective use of resources and because humans bear a much more direct responsibility?
This is kind of like asking, if you beat your own kids, why aren't you trying to stop some parent in Mongolia from beating their kids instead of just stopping your own behavior. The answer should be pretty obvious.
We have finite resources. We can't end all suffering everywhere. So it makes sense to allocate our resources in a generally more effective way.
The post was written by a human. Humans bear responsibility for factory farming. This human has a platform to try to influence others. This human cares about suffering and is trying to influence others in a way to reduce it. The policy being advocated is much more tractable and practical than any current plan to relieve wild animal suffering. I don't want to speak for BB, but presumably that's why they bothered.
Why should one human be responsible for what a different human does against their wishes?
Yes it is probably easier to eliminate factory farm suffering than to eliminate a comparable amount of wild animal suffering. But that doesn't justify the extreme disparity we see here - fanatic concern for ending factory farm suffering (not saying that's wrong) while not even bothering to think about what could be done to minimize wild animal suffering.
I do wonder if veganism would be more successful with regard to its goal of reducing animal suffering if it coupled a focus on factory farming with more of a virtue ethics approach. For instance, when it comes to factory farming, "you don't want to be the kind of person who contributes to this kind of thing," vs. "eating animals is always wrong" in a kind of deontological sense or giving utilitarian calculations about suffering which become very abstract very quickly.
> About 99% of animals are factory farmed.
Just be clear, I think the link indicates that 99% of farm animals (livestock) are factory farmed, not 99% of all animals.
Yes wasn't including animals
I don’t accept the argument. Maybe because i’ve seen improvement in this arena over my lifetime. I think the 99% stat is suspect, does not correspond with percentage humane certifications and other factors surrounding animal welfare practices. Maybe I exist in a bit of a bubble where there is significant humane animal farming, but that does not change my reasoning in any case.
I suspect the vegans among us will never be satisfied with animal welfare practices that end in slaughter.
In any case, pointing to a 99% stat is not a moral argument. There is undoubtedly lots of meat produced without factory farming (being in the slow food world, I see this up close, visited a few dozen such farms the past decade …would suggest those passionate about the topic take time to visit such places to see firsthand the state of affairs.) Also, not all factory farming is equal or torturous. For example, many huge cattle ranches support wholesome grazing and ethical kill practices … and are humane in my estimation. They are considered factory farms tho because of the scale. Our shellfish farms are likely called factory farms and yet oysters have no brains with which to feel any anguish.
Meanwhile, something like 5% of meat and far more eggs are getting certified as humane. I get that such certifications are not the end-all-be-all of animal welfare. But they are a sign that consumers are paying more attention and demanding humane practices, and the industry is reacting. It is a sign of actual progress! I’m seeing pastured eggs and beef at Costco now even. Not fast enough and all the qualifiers but it is progress.
And it is progress that this thesis seems designed to ignore! Meanwhile, the idea that everyone is going to give up meat and abandon this food supply ecosystem we’ve built is not reasonable if you ask me. We need incremental steps to get to a more wholesome place. And those involve reducing the harm of factory farming and persuading consumers to demand more humane practices
You ask readers to pick one of two: almost all meat eating is immoral, or it is fine to pay for torture in exchange for a small pleasure.
A lot of people sit in a third place. They agree with the first one, and they keep buying chicken.
They have heard the facts, they agree with your reading of the facts, and Thursday's dinner is unchanged. Neither of your options describes them.
Which leaves a harder question. What moves someone who already agrees with you?
Indeed. Normative beliefs aren't intrinsically motivating, and consequently the psychology of long-term behavioral change needs to remain at the center of the conversation.
I'm convinced that a very large number of current humans, with their explicit normative beliefs unchanged but their background consumption habits being plant-based, would find it instinctively appalling to make a change in the opposite direction, toward beginning the consumption of flesh. Status quo bias is always the final boss.
Same beliefs, different default, opposite behaviour. The belief was never the variable.
Status quo bias sits inside a person. In your two worlds the people are the same. What changes is the shop, the menu, the fridge, and what the family knows how to cook.
Cambridge, 94,000 cafeteria meals. Vegetarian options went from one in four to two in four. Plant-based purchases rose 40 to 80 percent. The biggest shift came from the quartile who had always taken meat.
Nobody's ethics were touched.
So the final boss is whoever stocks the shelf.
The strategy of trying to make everyone vegetarian/vegan has been failing for decades and going down this path means more failure.
A more practical path forward is to create sufficient demand for more humanely farmed animals that they start being supplied in serious numbers. It's not perfect -- and some labels are kinda meaningless -- but there are now egg brands that to some degree do offer better conditions.
That will never happen with meat if the message is: you're a bad person if you eat meat. It's hard to get people to make huge changes and people (well non-catholics :-)) will just not live with constant guilt. Whatever the true merits of the situation that choice of talking points isn't helpful.
> There’s a common thought that goes: “why are vegans so obsessed with factory farming, which we all agree is horrible?
Also pretty silly because not everyone agrees factory farming is bad. I, for one, would be perfectly fine if we got more efficient factory farms. It would be great if everyone could eat as much meat as Americans—if they so chose—without paying ruinous costs.
If the country side was dotted with quaint family farms that looked like the ones in my childhood storybooks, would the food supply be any better (or worse)? The extreme language in the substack makes me wonder if any of the researchers have ever stepped onto a working farm. Theirs claims seem second and third hand, exaggerating the one-percent of the one-percent. EVERY working farmer I know has a vested interest in having healthy and vital herds and flocks.
Yes lots of vegans have stepped into factory farms. THis is often what makes them vegan.
Yes, very many of us have, and it's why we're vegan. It's also why the animal ag lobby is so desperate to keep the cameras out.
Wow, your writing is clear, probably factually accurate, and will do approximately zero to help. This article won't even convince a rounding error percentage of the people who read it. Better to say: puree 1 can of green beans (or an equivalent of frozen/fresh), mix it with ground turkey, and cook as normal. It saves a ton of money and if it's in, say, a pasta dish, you'll barely notice.
People might agree, and *then do something about it*. Nobody is going to take your moralizing seriously and change. This is why a meat alternative is the only way forward! I eat less meat, per my "one neat trick" above, because it saves me money. That's it. And "it benefits you, financially" is a better way to go over "you support nonstop torture for millions." Why? I mean, c'mon, man. Who wants to internalize the implicit "and you're a fucking monster for participating in this" that follows your argument?
One thing you're right about: people don't want to see the torture. But if you scream it in their faces, it's going to go in the cognitive dissonance-y just don't look at it or think about it part of the brain.
If everyone only ever bought the most ethical item on the shelf, it would create similar market pressures favoring welfare as those you would get from everyone going vegan until conditions vastly improve
this is fantastic
Okay, so I agree factory farmed meat is indefensible and you shouldn’t eat tortured meat. But I can go to Whole Foods and buy grass fed pasture raised beef - is it wrong to eat that?
listen to your heart, your conscience. what do you think? would you actually hold a gun to the head of a gentle animal who trusts you, and butcher her apart just to eat a specific food? that’s the question—whether you want to live in a world in which thinking, feeling creatures are treated like objects to be slaughtered at our whim, or one in which they are left to live their lives.
i have to mention also that grass fed pasture raised does not mean they’re grass fed pasture raised their entire lives. they almost always aren’t, which is why you sometimes see rare examples of meat that is specifically labeled “grass finished” instead of simply fed. and even the grass finished animals are ultimately “finished” in the same barbaric slaughterhouses as the tortured animals.
This is all good and well. Your clowning ways interfere when you suggest people can undo the effects of their meat consumption by donating to animal charities. Also, what is the latest Christian miracle looking like? Has there been any miracles since I chimed in here? You should also look into miracles from other religious traditions.