Must We Hurt Even The Little Animals?

"With eyes that watch the world and can't forget"

1

Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
Look out on a summer's day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul

In a sane world, she would be cared for. In our world, she is tortured for her entire life so that we can eat her flesh.

We torment hundreds of billions of animals every year.

We do it because we enjoy the taste of their flesh. Though it would be far easier to feed the world if we did not eat them, we continue to eat them. Most people eat them multiple times a day, paying for gratuitous torment so that they can have a tasty meal. They routinely cause a great deal more mistreatment than the cruelest abusers do. Worse, though they can prevent thousands of land animals or millions of sea creatures from languishing with minor donations, virtually no one gives to these insanely effective charities.

The animals we eat are born into a world overflowing with trees and beauty and joy. Yet they never see or experience such things, never witnessing the outside except immediately before slaughter. They do not understand what is going on, what we are doing to them. They know nothing but brutality and cruelty, nothing but viciousness and exploitation and agony and mistreatment.

They are just babies when we begin hurting them. We drop the baby male chicks in the egg industry into macerators that shred them up, or we suffocate them in bags. The males do not lay eggs, so they’re useless, and are swiftly disposed of. I wonder how many turns of the blade it takes to kill them. I hope it’s not too many.

In some sense, they are the lucky ones—while their lives are brutal and painful, they have the mercy of being short. Other creatures endure months or years of mistreatment and exploitation.

We genetically modify these creatures so that no matter how they are treated, they will know nothing but pain. Their entire bodies become warped, grotesque, hideous abominations, because such bodies are more financially lucrative. Egg laying hens and broiler chicks have been genetically modified to produce more of their respective product, though it makes it hard for them to breathe or move and causes them to be in constant pain. They spend most of their time dormant, for moving hurts too much.

We stuff tens of thousands of birds into dark, windowless sheds, where they routinely go crazy and injure each other because of the brutality they face daily and the unnaturalness of their environment. They live in constant filth and feces, developing sores and painful leg injuries at alarming rates. We cram thousands of them in compressed transport that kills 15% of them on the way to the slaughterhouse because it’s cheaper. They endure tens or hundreds of hours of pain as intense as the most intense pain a typical human experiences.

The cows are subject to similar abuse. They’re branded, a process where they’re given third degree burns so that they can be demarcated from other creatures. Artificial lighting leads to chronic sleep deprivation, and the conditions in the ghastly farms makes them unable to express their natural behaviors. Physical abuse and a life spent in feces and filth is routine.

In the dairy industry, cows are repeatedly artificially inseminated—held down and injected with bull semen—so that they produce milk. Then, so that their baby, who their milk was meant for doesn’t consume it all, parents and babies are separated. Both often cry out for weeks. Like with humans, it causes cows profound psychological distress to be separated from their babies.

These beautiful creatures, capable of a profound range of emotions and complex tasks—that care for their children—are separated from their children and subjected to torturous conditions. Must we be so cruel?

2

Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now

I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones!

—The Brothers Karamazov

The animals we eat are mostly babies.

We eat chickens after a few months of life. When we eat baby cows subject to a lifetime of torment, we call that veal. When we eat baby chickens subject to a lifetime of torment, we call it chicken.

The worst kinds of evil—the ones that make one wonder whether the world has all been worth it, that pose the greatest challenge to belief in a loving God—are those done to creatures that are too naive and innocent to understand what is being done to them.

Crimes against children are particularly grotesque. Children are fragile and vulnerable, and we are in a position of power over them. We are instructed to care for them, and yet some choose to torment and abuse them. Such crimes are particularly egregious, exhibiting the most profound sadism, the most profound drought of compassion.

Cruelty to animals is a similar type of crime. This is something we recognize in other contexts—when people stomp on little animals to produce content to satisfy their fetish, we recognize that what they are doing is the embodiment of pure evil. Even those who do not believe in hell feel a temptation to proclaim that there’s a special place in hell for such people. Rather than being compassionate towards animals, they chose to hurt them.

Yet most people aren’t substantially different in their actions, even if the mechanism by which they hurt animals for their pleasure is less direct. When a person eats meat, so long as the meat was raised in the typical way, they abuse animals for their own pleasure, knowingly or not. Hundreds of times more cruelty occurs in the raising of meat—the industrial scale torture industry—than the act of those lone sadists.

Institutional power has always been a more potent force for evil than individual sadism. In Nazi Germany, it was not individual German sadists that killed most of the Jews. Instead it was the lever of state power dedicated to mass extermination that systematically murdered millions. It was individuals who owned most of the slaves, and contrary to the comforting falsehoods we might tell ourselves, they were not substantially different from modern people. The gravest atrocities aren’t carried out by psychopaths, but by normal people following social convention.

In our society, it is not the sadists causing most of the animal cruelty.

It is you.

3

Colors changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now

You really can’t get people to care.

Convincing people that meat eating is wrong is easy enough. Most of the time merely describing how we torment these little ones is enough to get people to agree that it’s wrong. After a few minutes of describing how we mistreat chickens and cows and pigs—how we lock them in sheds so that they roast in 150 degree steam, how we boil them alive, how we slaughter them by hanging them by their leg until their throat is slit, how we make them live in a tiny cage—they’ll agree that it’s wrong.

It doesn’t take long to explain to people that the main objections to veganism are all bunk: more animals die in the meat industry than from plant production; the fact we’ve been eating meat for a while doesn’t mean it’s permissible, especially given that we haven’t been engaged in factory farming for a while; and so on, and so on, through all the desperate rationalizations.

It’s easy to convince most people, most of the time. What’s impossible is getting them to care.

Once you convince people that eating meat is a grave wrong, a horrific injustice that inflicts hundreds of years of torture on others, many times worse than merely abusing a dog, or even 1,000 dogs, they keep doing it. Though you tell them that they are hurting animals and convince them that it’s wrong, they keep doing it, despite their ostensible commitment to ending animal cruelty. Though there are effective animal charities that can keep animals out of a cage for around five years per penny, people don’t give to them.

You inform them that they can do immense amounts of good for animals at minimal cost and that they are currently causing thousands of animals to be tortured. They agree. You inform them that it’s wrong, and they agree. Yet none of these facts are enough to change their actions in the slightest. There is no limit to how much cruelty people will inflict through a practice, so long as the practice is socially sanctioned. If galaxies full of animals were tortured for each meal, I have no doubt that most people would still eat meat.

4

For they could not love you
But still, your love was true
And when no hope was left in sight on that starry, starry night
You took your life, as lovers often do
But I could have told you, Vincent
This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you

Starry, starry night
Portraits hung in empty halls
Frameless heads on nameless walls
With eyes that watch the world and can't forget

The other thing that you cannot get people to care about is the suffering of the gross-looking, non-photogenic animals. While many on substack, enmeshed in the world of arguments and ideas, were convinced to give to the shrimp welfare project (enough to help almost half a billion shrimp!) almost no one cares about fish or shrimp or bugs.

These creatures can most likely suffer. And suffering is bad, even if one is dumb and weird looking. Were a human to be born with the cognitive incapacitation of a shrimp, hurting them would still be wrong. But because shrimp look weird, almost no one cares about their suffering.

Imagine being one of these creatures—a shrimp, say. You’d be unable to have complicated thoughts about anything. Most of your life is dominated by simple hedonic states of pleasure and pain, though often you have desires directed towards some goal. Though you cannot understand, you can feel.

You can feel the cold temperatures as you’re thrown on a big thing of ice. You gasp for the water that you’re used to, but it’s gone, replaced with air. For you, this feels like drowning. Achingly, over the course of about 20 minutes, you pass out and die, though perhaps it lasts many hours if, as some have suggested, the cold has not rendered you unconscious, but just immobile.

It is drowning, but slower.

Really imagine what it’s like to be one of these creatures. As Dawkins has suggested, because these creatures can’t understand, perhaps they evolved to suffer more, for that was needed as a motivator. The most detailed report on their suffering generally had a mean estimate of their suffering as 19% as intense as hours, and this may be an underestimate.

Despite this fate happening to trillions of beings, almost no one cares. While there are many more shrimp being farmed than people on Earth, so that if you lived the life of every conscious being, you’d spend more time as a shrimp than a person, and you’d suffer far more in a year as a shrimp than a person, people don’t give a shit.

We’ve created underwater torture chambers for the fish and the shrimp. The shrimp are frozen and suffocated to death; the fish suffocated, crushed, or disembowled, often in barrels full of rotting and dying fish. They live in filth, where disease is common, where every natural behavior is thwarted, where these creatures, used to swimming all across the ocean, are penned in by a small net. It’s so filthy that it’s not uncommon to see the bones of live fish, for their flesh has been eaten by parasites. About a quarter of them stop swimming around and float docilely towards the top, in behavior quite similar to depression.

These creatures are the ultimate example of vulnerable creatures in our care. They are like small children and dogs, only more primitive. To an even greater extent, they cannot understand what is happening. They do not know why we hurt them. As they freeze, as they suffocate, they cannot understand why. An abused child might ask why they are being hurt: these creatures cannot even ask that.

Our moral circle has expanded historically. It began with people only caring about their tribe, then they began to care about others of the same race, then gradually, eventually, progress expanded so that we began caring about all humans. If things go well, one day we will extend our care to all the beings we currently abuse and torment.

Hopefully one day, we won’t just pay lip service to our opposition to animal cruelty, but instead end the industrial scale torment of trillions. Though they are not like us, though they are in many ways weird and alien, they matter. These creatures that we have power over are vulnerable and deserve care, not torment and abuse. Can we ever learn to care for the aliens that evolved alongside us, yet do not look like us, that, like babies and the mentally disabled, are too cognitively impaired to do anything when we hurt them?

Like the strangers that you've met
The ragged men in ragged clothes
The silver thorn, a bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow

Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they're not listening still
Perhaps they never will