The post-meat future for cows will presumably look some like the current age for horses.
Prior to cars, humans kept a gazillion horses and mules. NYC was chockablock with horses, and of course manure everywhere. And the life for horses was really bad. Wars in particular saw horses and mules dying in droves.
Now? Many fewer horses. Average life of horses (at least in first world) much better.
Not sure that people will keep private stables of cows after meat, or that Preakness will introduce chicken races. But the huge drop in horse population gives us a hint of how it will go.
"By the same token, keeping pigs in “gestation crates” so narrow they can’t turn around is obviously not great for the pigs. But it does dramatically increase the number of pigs and also benefits privileged elites — which in this case is not the assembled nobility at Versailles, but all the human beings who eat meat or dairy products."
Dude, you've got to stop eating dairy products made from pig's milk. This is like a Scrabble triple word score of kosher violations.
There's a political parallel between the animal welfare and climate change issues, it seems to me. Matt suggests that with the right regulations, the price of animal meat could be pushed so high that it surpasses the cost of alt-meat and people switch because they've been made worse off. This sounds to me exactly like taxing fossil fuels to stop global warming: i.e., not a thing that's going to happen.|
I think Ezra Klein got it right not too long ago in the NYT. What we really need is more government-funded research to reduce the cost of alt-meat (and improve its quality) so that it falls below the current price of animal meat and people switch because they've been made better off. That's exactly what happened to the competitiveness of photovoltaic power, and it worked.
I also think it's great that there's an animal welfare NGO called The Humane League.
It's really sad and scary that we've left our morals get so out of whack on farming. IMO there's nothing inherently wrong with raising animals for slaughter, as humans have done for thousands of years, but the conditions we're raising animals in are now are really indefensible - much worse than they've been in the past and clearly so bad for the animals that not being born at all would be better.
I'm a big believer in "progress" so it's tough to see how terrible it's been for farm animals. Technology has been laser-focused on efficiency, and markets have forced famers to optimize relentlessly for cheap meat - which they've done very well, with no regard for animal welfare.
Surprised you didn't touch on the environmental effects of switching away from eating meat. Animals require far more land and food to grow than plants do, and animal "emissions" (particularly from cows) increase the methane in the atmosphere. This, rather than overall animal welfare, seems to be the purpose of plant-based meat substitutes.
The wall I always run into when thinking about more humane farming practices is the cost tradeoff implication that poor people shouldn't eat as much meat. Talk about making regular meat more expensive driving consumption down is just another way of saying that only the more well off will have meat.
I think making alt-meat cheaper and better is the best option, but still, I can't help feeling a little...icky if in 30 years the lower classes can only afford Synth-Meat while the rich get a real porterhouse. Very...scifi dystopian, like when the crew of the Serenity lose their minds over getting real apples one time.
Yeah if you double the price of eggs, and ostensibly the price of chicken as well, some people will starve. Certainly you're hitting the poorest, hardest. Keeping food cheap is a really important way to fight poverty, and the reduction in food prices on an inflation adjusted basis has helped reduce poverty substantially over the past 50 years.
Factory farming produces a real surplus, inputs are much smaller than outputs of a pretty important thing. If you reduce that real surplus, you have to make up for it in some other non-magic way. That's very difficult to do, so the people who bear the brunt of the pain of that choice are the people with the least amount of political claim on the remaining surplus.
There are so many options for rich people who want to sate their moral appetites and their hungers, and I think that's the better path than forcing industry-wide changes by political will.
Do you subscribe to the idea that the sentience of the animal matters in the discussion? It’s always bugged me that pigs seem like super smart animals, very aware of their own suffering, whereas chicken (and fish especially) seem much further from consciousness.
I'm skeptical that there's really such a thing as well treated farm animals. At least not at any scale. The combination of the huge power difference between animals and farmers, the profit motive where efficiency equals cruelty equals profitability, and how easy it is to hide the cruelty to the public is just too much for any ruleset to overcome.
You point out some particularly egregious practices, but even meat sold as "humane" uses practices that objectively seem pretty cruel. The rules around things like "free range" chicken are more like a sick joke in practice. How much energy, focus, and resources are we willing to put into developing this elusive "ethical meat industry" when we have the much more straight forward solution of simply not using sentient creatures as a source of food?
If you can afford it, I strongly urge you to buy pasture raised chicken and eggs (and ethically raised beef, which is cheaper relative to pasture chickens). Cage-free/free range are meaningless terms — basically, they open a tiny door and it never occurs to the chickens that they could go outside and explore.
Whole Foods has the “Step” system. Buy Step 4, 5, or 5+.
I believe you can humanely slaughter animals. But they should have good lives beforehand.
EDIT: Also… I suggest trying not to eat pork. I know, I know, bacon. But speaking as someone who ***loves*** meat, I gave it up twenty years ago, and have had maybe one moment where I was sad I couldn’t eat bacon. Pigs are smarter than dogs, and are also highly social. If they didn’t poop so much, we’d probably keep small ones as pets.
I am not sure if there is any type of humanely slaughtered pork. But I think pigs are smart and social enough that you’re getting into dolphin/whale territory.
I’m of the opinion that every little bit helps. If you eat a lot of bacon, try “fake-on.” Or eat it less frequently.
One other thought on this- the animals are kinda fucked. Even if the US and Europe are willing to pay more for better animal welfare and beyond meat substitutes, the real issue is that emerging countries are for sure not. As emerging market countries continue to develop a middle class, the demand for meat will continue to grow. It’s got some parallels to the energy crisis with much fewer potential solutions. Affordable lab grown mean is much further out than green energy.
If agricultural animal husbandry is more correctly conceptualized as not being purely about the efficient production of chattel property, but as also involving an element of caretaking for sentient beings, then it's possible to draw analogies to, and perhaps lessons from, other situations where we have to mitigate the economic efficiency with an imperative of treating the creatures who are being taken care of well. Nursing homes, orphanages, long-term psychiatric institutions, prison, etc. We have statements of ethics, binding rules like staff-to-patient ratios, etc, to try to mitigate and push against the logical conclusions of efficiency from the operators point of view.
In the days before industrialized agricultural, on family farms embedded in a a community and culture, this was handled through cultural norms and practices that just were the water and air farmers lived in, without having to think about it or analyze it. But we're long past that point.
Matty, you could elaborate here on the side effects of such large animal cultivation. Many people know about the carbon footprint of beef. But in this year of covid, more people should know about the ways intense cultivation of poultry and pigs specifically is the main way we’re getting new flu variants, including potentially catastrophic bird flu ones.
Somewhat related, I enjoy cooking and learning to cook new things. Recently, the wife and I have befriended our first vegan person (and I don’t know that we knew any vegetarians either, none come to mind). It has been a fun challenge to learn how to prepare enjoyable vegan dishes, and even though I probably won’t stop eating meat altogether, it has made it much easier to plan for meatless or even vegan meals because I’ve figured out a few things I like.
As a vegan, I genuinely don’t understand the word humane describing a life that ends in slaughter. It strikes me as a bunch of lipstick on a pig.
I’ve never been an activist vegan, I don’t think it’s my business what you put on your plate, but I don’t think you can talk about raising an animal to kill it for no reason other than you think they taste good as humane anymore than humane cannibalism or human sacrifice is okay. I don’t think it’s realistic to describe them as happy cows just because they get to eat grass for a bit. So much of their lives will still be exploitative in ways few humans would accept even for treatment of others let alone themselves.
The post-meat future for cows will presumably look some like the current age for horses.
Prior to cars, humans kept a gazillion horses and mules. NYC was chockablock with horses, and of course manure everywhere. And the life for horses was really bad. Wars in particular saw horses and mules dying in droves.
Now? Many fewer horses. Average life of horses (at least in first world) much better.
Not sure that people will keep private stables of cows after meat, or that Preakness will introduce chicken races. But the huge drop in horse population gives us a hint of how it will go.
"By the same token, keeping pigs in “gestation crates” so narrow they can’t turn around is obviously not great for the pigs. But it does dramatically increase the number of pigs and also benefits privileged elites — which in this case is not the assembled nobility at Versailles, but all the human beings who eat meat or dairy products."
Dude, you've got to stop eating dairy products made from pig's milk. This is like a Scrabble triple word score of kosher violations.
There's a political parallel between the animal welfare and climate change issues, it seems to me. Matt suggests that with the right regulations, the price of animal meat could be pushed so high that it surpasses the cost of alt-meat and people switch because they've been made worse off. This sounds to me exactly like taxing fossil fuels to stop global warming: i.e., not a thing that's going to happen.|
I think Ezra Klein got it right not too long ago in the NYT. What we really need is more government-funded research to reduce the cost of alt-meat (and improve its quality) so that it falls below the current price of animal meat and people switch because they've been made better off. That's exactly what happened to the competitiveness of photovoltaic power, and it worked.
I also think it's great that there's an animal welfare NGO called The Humane League.
It's really sad and scary that we've left our morals get so out of whack on farming. IMO there's nothing inherently wrong with raising animals for slaughter, as humans have done for thousands of years, but the conditions we're raising animals in are now are really indefensible - much worse than they've been in the past and clearly so bad for the animals that not being born at all would be better.
I'm a big believer in "progress" so it's tough to see how terrible it's been for farm animals. Technology has been laser-focused on efficiency, and markets have forced famers to optimize relentlessly for cheap meat - which they've done very well, with no regard for animal welfare.
Reminds me of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/, about the dangers of too much optimization. I wonder what will happen to humans, if we ever run out of growth.
Surprised you didn't touch on the environmental effects of switching away from eating meat. Animals require far more land and food to grow than plants do, and animal "emissions" (particularly from cows) increase the methane in the atmosphere. This, rather than overall animal welfare, seems to be the purpose of plant-based meat substitutes.
The wall I always run into when thinking about more humane farming practices is the cost tradeoff implication that poor people shouldn't eat as much meat. Talk about making regular meat more expensive driving consumption down is just another way of saying that only the more well off will have meat.
I think making alt-meat cheaper and better is the best option, but still, I can't help feeling a little...icky if in 30 years the lower classes can only afford Synth-Meat while the rich get a real porterhouse. Very...scifi dystopian, like when the crew of the Serenity lose their minds over getting real apples one time.
Yeah if you double the price of eggs, and ostensibly the price of chicken as well, some people will starve. Certainly you're hitting the poorest, hardest. Keeping food cheap is a really important way to fight poverty, and the reduction in food prices on an inflation adjusted basis has helped reduce poverty substantially over the past 50 years.
Factory farming produces a real surplus, inputs are much smaller than outputs of a pretty important thing. If you reduce that real surplus, you have to make up for it in some other non-magic way. That's very difficult to do, so the people who bear the brunt of the pain of that choice are the people with the least amount of political claim on the remaining surplus.
There are so many options for rich people who want to sate their moral appetites and their hungers, and I think that's the better path than forcing industry-wide changes by political will.
Do you subscribe to the idea that the sentience of the animal matters in the discussion? It’s always bugged me that pigs seem like super smart animals, very aware of their own suffering, whereas chicken (and fish especially) seem much further from consciousness.
I'm skeptical that there's really such a thing as well treated farm animals. At least not at any scale. The combination of the huge power difference between animals and farmers, the profit motive where efficiency equals cruelty equals profitability, and how easy it is to hide the cruelty to the public is just too much for any ruleset to overcome.
You point out some particularly egregious practices, but even meat sold as "humane" uses practices that objectively seem pretty cruel. The rules around things like "free range" chicken are more like a sick joke in practice. How much energy, focus, and resources are we willing to put into developing this elusive "ethical meat industry" when we have the much more straight forward solution of simply not using sentient creatures as a source of food?
If you can afford it, I strongly urge you to buy pasture raised chicken and eggs (and ethically raised beef, which is cheaper relative to pasture chickens). Cage-free/free range are meaningless terms — basically, they open a tiny door and it never occurs to the chickens that they could go outside and explore.
Whole Foods has the “Step” system. Buy Step 4, 5, or 5+.
I believe you can humanely slaughter animals. But they should have good lives beforehand.
EDIT: Also… I suggest trying not to eat pork. I know, I know, bacon. But speaking as someone who ***loves*** meat, I gave it up twenty years ago, and have had maybe one moment where I was sad I couldn’t eat bacon. Pigs are smarter than dogs, and are also highly social. If they didn’t poop so much, we’d probably keep small ones as pets.
I am not sure if there is any type of humanely slaughtered pork. But I think pigs are smart and social enough that you’re getting into dolphin/whale territory.
I’m of the opinion that every little bit helps. If you eat a lot of bacon, try “fake-on.” Or eat it less frequently.
One other thought on this- the animals are kinda fucked. Even if the US and Europe are willing to pay more for better animal welfare and beyond meat substitutes, the real issue is that emerging countries are for sure not. As emerging market countries continue to develop a middle class, the demand for meat will continue to grow. It’s got some parallels to the energy crisis with much fewer potential solutions. Affordable lab grown mean is much further out than green energy.
If agricultural animal husbandry is more correctly conceptualized as not being purely about the efficient production of chattel property, but as also involving an element of caretaking for sentient beings, then it's possible to draw analogies to, and perhaps lessons from, other situations where we have to mitigate the economic efficiency with an imperative of treating the creatures who are being taken care of well. Nursing homes, orphanages, long-term psychiatric institutions, prison, etc. We have statements of ethics, binding rules like staff-to-patient ratios, etc, to try to mitigate and push against the logical conclusions of efficiency from the operators point of view.
In the days before industrialized agricultural, on family farms embedded in a a community and culture, this was handled through cultural norms and practices that just were the water and air farmers lived in, without having to think about it or analyze it. But we're long past that point.
Matty, you could elaborate here on the side effects of such large animal cultivation. Many people know about the carbon footprint of beef. But in this year of covid, more people should know about the ways intense cultivation of poultry and pigs specifically is the main way we’re getting new flu variants, including potentially catastrophic bird flu ones.
Somewhat related, I enjoy cooking and learning to cook new things. Recently, the wife and I have befriended our first vegan person (and I don’t know that we knew any vegetarians either, none come to mind). It has been a fun challenge to learn how to prepare enjoyable vegan dishes, and even though I probably won’t stop eating meat altogether, it has made it much easier to plan for meatless or even vegan meals because I’ve figured out a few things I like.
Matt! I'm am unironically proud of you for this essay.
As a vegan, I genuinely don’t understand the word humane describing a life that ends in slaughter. It strikes me as a bunch of lipstick on a pig.
I’ve never been an activist vegan, I don’t think it’s my business what you put on your plate, but I don’t think you can talk about raising an animal to kill it for no reason other than you think they taste good as humane anymore than humane cannibalism or human sacrifice is okay. I don’t think it’s realistic to describe them as happy cows just because they get to eat grass for a bit. So much of their lives will still be exploitative in ways few humans would accept even for treatment of others let alone themselves.