Why Eating Meat Is Like Torturing Puppies

Both involve causing extreme suffering for the sake of small benefits

Many years ago, the wonderful Alastair Norcross who was at the time sufficiently spry and youthful to make him still spryish and youthfulish published a paper arguing that eating meat in normal circumstances is super immoral. I think this argument is obviously and irrefutably correct, so I thought I’d explain why.

To start with, imagine a man named Fred who tortures puppies in his basement. He locks them in small crates, castrates them without anesthetic, forces them to live in excrement and filth, all before killing them after just a few weeks of life. Question: is Fred doing something immoral? Answer: yes, unless there’s something we don’t know about.

Now suppose Fred has a justification for his barbaric action. He recently lost the taste for chocolate—a treat he’d enjoyed for many years. The only way to regain the taste for chocolate, enabling great culinary pleasure, is to torture the puppies and extract cocoamone—a chemical which, when consumed, makes chocolate taste good. He’s not a sadist or a monster—he’d love to enjoy chocolate without torturing puppies, often posts on FaceBook about how much he loves animals, and got very upset that Kristi Noem killed a puppy. Question: is what he’s doing wrong?

The answer is obviously yes. It’s wrong to torture puppies for taste pleasure. Suppose, next, that he wasn’t torturing puppies but was, instead, torturing pigs to extract the cocoamone. Would this still be wrong? Obviously it would. Not only is this intuitively obvious, it’s hard to come up with an account of why it would be fine to torture pigs but not puppies that’s not flagrantly irrational and arbitrary.

Okay, now suppose that rather than torturing puppies himself, Fred pays other people to torture puppies to extract cocoamone. Is that wrong? Obviously yes! If he pays his friend to torture puppies, he’s clearly doing something extremely immoral. Even though Fred gets enjoyment from torturing animals, it’s still wrong to do so. The lesson seems to be that it’s wrong to cause animals extreme suffering for the sake of comparatively minor taste pleasure.

But if this is so, then it’s wrong to eat meat. 99% of animals are factory-farmed. Factory-farmed animals live horrifying lives of intense suffering, every bit as bad as the hypothetical puppies or pigs being tortured by Fred. Nearly every animal people eat spends their lives either in cages, unable to spread their wings and turn around, covered in feces and foul-smelling ammonia, or in a tiny shed, unable to move, covered in shit, constantly abused, chronically sleep deprived, in a state of constant terror, agony, discomfort, and misery. Most animals get diseases in this state, unable to move or turn around. 89% of egg-laying hens have osteoporosis.

The day-to-day life of most animals is about as bad as your life would be if you were constantly locked in dark shed, unable to turn around, surrounded by excrement. They never see the sun except when they’re transferred to be killed. During this transport process, about 15% of chickens, for example, are killed, as thousands are packed densely into trucks—all the rest are killed at the slaughterhouse, hoisted by one leg, dangled upside down, before being stunned, beheaded, and dropped in boiling water (notably, about half a million of these creatures, about as smart as young children, miss the stunning and the blades, only to be boiled alive while fully conscious).

The entire life of almost every animal we eat consists of either being locked in a dark cage where they can’t do anything, being immobile in an extremely dense barn, where, because of density and ubiquitous foot injuries owing to their extreme genetic modification making them horrendously large, they can’t move around or do anything enjoyable. Then, after a few weeks of this, they get thrown into a transport vehicle in a process that frequently breaks their frail bones, with thousands of other terrified birds and too little space to move at all, and get shipped to the slaughterhouse, to be killed. This is done to billions of animals so that we can enjoy the taste of their flesh. About as many land animals are killed each year as humans have ever lived, so we can dine on their pleasant-tasting carcasses.

Just like Fred, we pay for animals to be tortured so that we can enjoy pleasant-tasting food. Just like Fred, our demand for pleasant-tasting food causes hundreds of extra animals to be tortured and killed over the course of our lives. The average meat eater causes far more suffering to animals every year than severely abusive vegan pet owners do. So how is what we do any different from Fred?

Several answers could be given. First of all, one might think that a meat diet is needed for good health. But this is flatly false according to the largest group of nutritionists in the world. If anything, the evidence seems to suggest that a vegan diet is better for health. But even if it were a bit worse for health, well, presumably Fred wouldn’t be permitted to torture those puppies even if cocoamone was slightly healthier. So even if, contrary to the evidence, a meat-eating diet is slightly better for health, it’s still wrong to eat (especially if one isn’t doing other things that would improve their health like not eating fast food and exercising regularly. If there are many ways to improve your health, you obviously don’t get to pick the one that involves torturing animals).

Second, people argue that it’s fine to eat meat because it’s convenient. Imagine, however, that torturing puppies was convenient. Perhaps it’s very convenient for Fred to stop at fast food places that sell chocolate shakes, which he’d have been repulsed by if he hadn’t tortured the puppies and extracted cocoamone. Nonetheless, torturing the puppies would obviously be immoral.

Third, people suggest that you have no effect on the industry because the market is too big. The problem is that this is demonstrably false. See the article I just linked for a more thorough explanation but in short, the meat industry may not respond to each meat purchase, but it responds to large numbers of meat purchases (say, they respond to increases in consumption of 1,000). But each time you eat meat, you have a chance of bringing it over the threshold, which makes the expected value the same. This has also been confirmed by the most thorough empirical analysis of meat markets.

You should at least be uncertain about the effect that a consumer has on meat markets. But if you’re not sure if you’re causing an extra chicken to be tortured each time you buy a chicken, you shouldn’t buy it. It would be wrong for Fred to pay for cocoamone from tortured puppies even if there was only a 50% chance he was causing extra puppies to be tortured.

This may seem like a surprising conclusion. But most people find it obvious that you shouldn’t cause animals extreme suffering for small benefit. You shouldn’t step on a puppy’s tail for amusement, because animals’ interests matter more than trivial human pleasure. Unfortunately, each time we eat meat, we are causing animals extreme suffering. It is for this reason that our consumption of meat is seriously wrong. Each time you buy meat, you do something far worse than stepping on a puppy for amusement, for you cause animals to suffer for weeks on end (each animal that people purchases undergoes weeks of mistreatment). While few people recognize the wrongness of eating meat given how normalized it is, the immorality of it is pretty obvious, and follows from basic and trivial ethical principles.

I don’t expect to convince many people, of course. Meat eating is a topic that makes otherwise intelligent people stupid. It’s very difficult to convince people that ethics requires things that are inconvenient for them. Normally people hear the arguments against eating meat, reflect on them for two seconds, and then go back to eating meat, after either admitting it’s wrong to coming up with some deeply confused justification. But hopefully someone will be convinced :(.