Prolonged Intense Agony

Dentistry and animals

At the time of writing this sentence (several weeks before posting this), I’m going to the Dentist today and not very happy about it. I’ve always found the experience of going to the Dentist—and particularly of the vibrating toothbrush used by the Dentist at the start of the appointment—to be deeply unpleasant. It’s the sort of thing I dread for weeks in advance.

It isn’t painful, just deeply uncomfortable. Something about the experience is deeply unpleasant—a bit like being forced to endure several minutes of a nails-on-a-chalkboard orchestra. Of the things I endure semi-regularly, it is by far the most unpleasant—far worse than getting a shot, having blood drawn, or even being sick.

The unpleasantness of the experience has nothing to do with my higher faculties—it’s not because of my tremendously powerful brain or my ability to figure out that thirding is correct in sleeping beauty that the experience is unpleasant. While during it I can sort of sometimes distract myself by thinking about other things, this does not do much to change the quality of the experience.

It’s often supposed that we can eat animals because they’re not very smart. Even though eating a single meal of chicken causes many days of prolonged, intense suffering, because animals are less intelligent than we are, it is thought that eating them is fine. But the badness of intensely unpleasant states isn’t blunted by not being very smart.

If every time I ate a chicken sandwich, I caused other people to endure hours of experiences as unpleasant as the dentistry teeth-cleaning with the electric toothbrush, doing so would clearly be wrong. But eating chicken is much worse than that! It causes similar prolonged intense unpleasantness—but living in a factory farm is much worse than teeth cleanings and it goes on for much longer. The badness of their experience doesn’t depend on their smartness; unpleasant experiences don’t grow any less unpleasant simply because one can’t do calculus.

When you eat animals, it’s roughly as bad as it would be if the meal caused a human to endure many hours of the most unpleasant experience you’ve ever endursed—perhaps recovery from a surgery. As it would be wrong to eat animals if it caused humans to endure that kind of experience, so too is it wrong to eat animals. When animals suffer intensely, it probably feels roughly like it does when you do.