What To Do If You Love Meat But Hate Factory Farms?

How to have a positive impact on animals if you eat meat

Billions of animals are caged, confined, and killed in situations that anyone would call torture if the victim was a dog or human. The cages that they live in are so small that they can never turn around or stretch their wings, often being around the size of a piece of paper. Hideous genetic engineering leaves these creatures in constant pain and too large to ever move around, thus lying dormant, pressed against the wire meshing or acidic feces that adorns the floor. Horrifying mutilation is practiced on an industrial scale—animals have their beaks, tails, and testicles sliced off, all without anesthetic. These vulnerable creatures are killed in horrible ways—by gassing, being stabbed in the throat (often while fully conscious), or, in the case of the baby male chicks in the egg-laying industry, simply being ground up in shredders.

Chickens, too large to move comfortably, spend 70-80% of their time inactive. During transport to the slaughterhouse, huge numbers of animals are stuffed thrown together in cramped trucks, killing about 15% of the males and 26% of the females. Because they spend their entire lives in dark, filthy, feces-laden, windowless sheds, without the opportunity to move, they get all sorts of nightmarish diseases—the sort one only gets through total neglect.

Disabling pain is defined as pain that’s so bad that when it’s happening you can’t focus on anything else—examples include the pain of giving birth, a very severe dog bite, or a particularly painful tattoo, wherein your skin is pierced with needles hundreds of times. One report found that chickens reared for meat endure, over the course of their few weeks of life, around 50 hours of disabling pain, and egg laying hens endure over 400 hours. This means the average chicken reared for meat, living only a few weeks, endures 50 hours of pain about as bad as the most painful experience that most people ever have—as bad as giving birth!

This is merciless torment carried out on an industrial scale. Mass suffering is produced in the name of greater efficiency. Tens of billions of beings cry out from within the tiny cages in which they lie, unable to move, never seeing the sun except shortly before death.

Despite this, however, many people continue to eat meat. “I just can’t give up chicken,” they say. So, if you’re someone like that, who continues eating meat while thinking factory farming is very bad, what should you do? How can you help animals without giving up meat?

It turns out, there’s a way you can make sure your life has a positive impact on animals, even while you continue to eat meat. That way is through offsetting donations—donating to effective charities helping animals, so that the harms you cause to animals are outweighed by the ways you benefit animals. In fact, through fairly minimal donations, you can have a positive overall impact on every single kind of animal, even as you continue to eat them.

A site called Farmkind has investigated the cost of offsetting. But this isn’t the traditional kind of offsetting. It’s not the kind where you just help, say, a bunch of chickens, and consider your debt to the cows paid off. Instead, they estimate how much you have to give to the top animal charities on their websites (supported by high-quality research from animal charity evaluators) so that you have a positive or neutral impact on every kind of animal. If you give as much as they recommend, every kind of animal will be better off because of your existence.

The shocking part: doing this only requires giving 23 dollars per month if you’re a standard omnivore. For less than a dollar a day, you can make sure that every kind of animal is better off because of your existence. If you do this, even though you continue eating meat, you’ll have an overall positive impact on animals—of every kind.

Why is it so cheap? Helping animals is really easy. Top charities—pushing for legal and corporate reforms to get animals out of cages, supporting the development of alternative proteins, and doing research into how to make animal advocacy more effective—can help many animals per dollar. As a result, donating to effective animal charities is even more important than being vegan! The impact that one person can make through donations far more than outweighs the harms caused by their eating of meat.

It’s very easy to say that you don’t like factory farms. Talk is cheap. But if you say you’re opposed to them while you pay for factory farms to produce your meat, then that’s a bit like saying your opposed to assassinations, while you hire an assassin to kill someone. If you really hate factory farms—hate the ways animals are caged, mutilated, ground up, and gassed by the billions—you should do something to help their victims. If you love animals, at the very least you should make sure that the animals are not worse off because of you. Merely rhetorically expressing your disapproval of factory farming doesn’t help the animals one bit.

Now, I think we have a duty to do even more. If we can help out multiple animals for just a dollar, having a merely neutral impact on animals isn’t enough. You have a duty to prevent terrible things from happening if you can do so at minimal cost to yourself, even regarding a problem you do not directly facilitate. But at the very least, you should give enough that the animals aren’t worse off because of you. So if you eat meat, at least give $23 a month so that the animals are no longer made worse off by your existence. If you hate the awful things that factory farms do to poor, innocent animals, at the very least make sure that they don’t do more of those things because of you.

Anyone who gives at least a $50 monthly donation to Farmkind in response to this article gets a free paid subscription!

(This was my impact through just a 25 dollar donation, and this wasn’t even taking into account the impact on the shrimp!)