>free from cruelty.
Do you mind if I ask what your requirements for this are? At the end of the day, isn't ending life cruel, no matter the means?
Do you mind if I ask what your requirements for this are? At the end of the day, isn't ending life cruel, no matter the means?
I read this story [1] by Glenn Greenwald (of Snowden interview fame), and I realized that I was not ok with gestation crates for pigs, or the practices espoused by the industrial farming of any animal.
I do not object to raising animals and eating them, but I do object to essentially keeping them in brutal, squalid conditions. Animals should have access to the outdoors, be allowed to pursue their own social connections, have enough space to stretch and exercise, have feed that's natural and high quality, and generally exist in a comfortable way.
Totally acknowledge that's my own definition. It's an arbitrary line in the sand to say, "Killing an animal is ok, causing suffering to an animal before killing it is not".
I just... read the article and couldn't stomach letting any of my money flow to companies that would think that sort of behavior was ok.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...
[1] https://www.ciwf.org.uk/our-campaigns/ [2] https://www.ciwf.org.uk/our-campaigns/live-animal-transport/
Find a local farmer and source a whole animal to split with your friends. Visit the farm, meet the farmer. A whole beef is a few thousand dollars, and splits nicely into 8ths. We spent, I believe, ~$6.50/lb for organic, grass fed beef.
It's more time and cost up front, but now we have a freezer full of meat to draw from when we need to. If I eat meat, it's from that one animal. We don't eat meat often at home.
I'm not trying to make any points here; just freewheeling in conversation with what I know about myself.
I think the 'bashing it with a rock' is sort of the thing I'm trying to avoid. My farmer brings a USDA butcher to his site to kill the animal (the kills are done away from the pasture space). The offal is removed there. If you want the tongue, heart, liver, etc. you show up on slaughter day and cart them away.
The carcass was then taken to a local butcher shop, where it was processed into steaks, ground beef, roasts, etc. at my direction -- how thick did you want steaks, how big did you want roasts, etc.
Being involved in this way is surprisingly intimate -- seeing the animal, being on the farm the day of it's slaughter (though I did not witness the slaughter), and working with the butcher to define how it will be broken down taught me so much more about how my food is prepared than anything you'd get from the grocery store.
I just put together a spreadsheet with all the farms within 50 miles and visited a few websites/made a few calls. Some farmers had already sold their beef for the season, others weren't grass fed, etc. Eventually I narrowed the candidate pool down to two or three and asked if I could come see their farms. One farmer said no, so I went with one of the others.
For a more personal connection, I'd start at the local farmers' market.
I agree. The farmer's market was my entryway. At ours, local ranchers are present and selling their meats. There is a huge wealth of knowledge about what exists in your area at a farmer's market. Not just for meat, but for everything.
I've yet to kill or process a whole cow, though I've broken down primals/subprimals.
I'm not sure how I would do if it was an animal I had raised. If I'm a farmer or rancher with a few dozen or hundreds of heads of cattle, probably no different. If it was a single cow... I might have trouble.
Everyone is different, though. Even some people I know who eat plenty of meat can't stand to look at processed carcass.
I think that's an excellent point. I suspect that nearly everyone, if faced with actual starvation, would be able to kill their own food.
So would I, but maybe for different reasons. Aside from the method of killing (bashing the poor thing with a rock seems unnecessarily cruel to me), killing my food would be something better done well in advance of mealtime, not once I've sat at the table.
In general, though, I don't think that I'd have an issue killing my own food. That's hypothetical, of course, since (outside of fishing) I've never had to do that.
I personally would likely struggle to convince anyone I know to enter some kind of cooperative livestock purchase/kill/process/store arrangement. As a matter of curiosity, how willing is the average livestock farmer to enter into such an agreement with private individuals?
I agree, but I don't think they were doing much beyond stating their own goals and methods. As a guide to what you can do and how you can attempt to go about it, I think it serves well.
> I personally would likely struggle to convince anyone I know to enter some kind of cooperative livestock purchase/kill/process/store arrangement. As a matter of curiosity, how willing is the average livestock farmer to enter into such an agreement with private individuals?
I imagine some butchers might provide cows where you can check the providence, at least in more populated areas. It wouldn't be quite as cheap as a cooperative project, but it would almost definitely be less time consuming, and supporting a free market for this good has additional benefits.
With my friends, it was "Hey, anyone want to buy 50lbs of meat? It's $XYZ dollars per 50lbs. 50lbs is about one medium freezer full."
I put out the call to about 20 people, and got 5 very interested people, and about 5 maybe next times.
They taste better than grocery store meat too.
A free range animal that's being humanely put down by a farmer has a much more pleasant life.
If you go down this rabbit hole deep enough you can begin to question whether life itself should exist.
>A free range animal that's being humanely put down by a farmer has a much more pleasant life.
I don't think we can objectively say this. We have no idea what these animals want. Our humanity for these animals lives is nothing short of projection, purely because we have no idea what they want.
Animals like chickens lack self awareness and the ability for future planning. They operate on instinct. We can prove this. Thus, they also don't know what they want--outside of the immediate satisfaction of an instinctual urge.
They do feel pain and hunger however. In the wild, these animals suffer more pain and hunger. In free range "captivity" they suffer less. It's as simple as that.
I swear most of the arguments against proper free range farming are grounded in either:
a) A fallacious appeal to nature, ie. the false presumption that just because something is "natural" it is automatically better or b) Projection of human awareness and emotional intelligence onto other species
Are factory farms more cruel to animals than proper free range farming? Yes. Is nature more cruel to animals than proper free range farming? Yes.
Well, take a monkey, orca, elephant, dolphin, etc. and it would be hard not to. Sure, many farm animals fall below that level, but they're not bugs either. Many mammals have some basic language, care for their young, give distress calls, migrate, find shelter, etc. which seems to indicate at least some level of future planning whether innate or not. And many intelligent mammals have been seen grieving the dead or rescuing animals from danger.
> In free range "captivity" they suffer less. It's as simple as that.
Yet philosophy courses still exist... Because it's not as simple as that. For some, life is more than just the reduction of suffering. And there are a million other ways to answer "why we exist" or "how we should live".
For animals, we don't know. I think it's absurd to say we're giving them a better/easier/happier life on a farm or out in the wild. We don't know.
Taking zoos as an example though (which is a similar form of captivity, except they don't kill their animals), most people don't think it's a better life, except in the case where the animal is so weak, sick or unable to care for itself that it couldn't hunt in the wild.
Tons of prey animals are reintroduced to the wild, without concern that they might be eaten (some will), but in the hopes that many will survive and reproduce.
So, I guess if your goal is to ensure that the most number of animals lead a somewhat confined life away from predators until they're done growing, farms make sense. If your goal is to ensure that animals get to experience life in their native habitats including the ability to mate and get eaten, then farms aren't so good.
Not only mammals - corvids are known to do that too.
This falls under A) fallacious appeal to nature.
You're suggesting that living is nature is the better way to live simply because it is natural.
But if your goal is to let animals roam free in their native habitats then captivity on farms probably doesn't seem like the better option to you.
How? Just because they demonstrate instinctual behaviour in some circumstances doesn't mean they lack self awareness or the ability for future planning. Humans also demonstrate instinctual behaviour.
And if we consider animals equal to humans, do we send them to jail if they behave badly? Do we prevent them from being murdered by other animals? Isn't it utterly hypocritical to let animals die by starvation in the wild while preventing farming? What is even the natural habitat of farmed animals like a cow?
Cows as we know them wouldn't exist without farming (for leather, meat, milk). As meat eating reduction is something that will never happen over night, they simply are going to become protected, nearly extinct species that live in few sanctuaries (charity).
Without artifical insemination numbers are very manageable. Remaining, existing population would be eaten till numbers are low enough.
"If animals like free-range cows have lives that are not worth living, almost all wild animals could plausibly be thought to also have lives that are worse than non-existence. Nature is often romanticised as a well-balanced idyll, so this may seem counter-intuitive. But extreme forms of suffering like starvation, dehydration, or being eaten alive by a predator are much more common in wild animals than farm animals. Crocodiles and hyenas disembowel their prey before killing them[1]. In birds, diseases like avian salmonellosis produce excruciating symptoms in the final days of life, such as depression, shivering, loss of appetite, and just before death, blindness, incoordination, staggering, tremor and convulsions.[2] While a farmed animal like a free-range cow has to endure some confinement and a premature and potentially painful death (stunning sometimes fails), a wild animal may suffer comparable experiences, such as surviving a cold winter or having to fear predators, while additionally undergoing the aforementioned extreme suffering[3]."
-Thomas Sittler. "How Should Vegetarians Actually Live?"
I think this is more an argument for an eventual plan to deal with wild animal suffering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering), not an argument that whatever we do to free-range animals is acceptable because it's no worse than the suffering wild animals experience. Of course it's not very pragmatic for humanity to make a dent in that problem in the near future, especially without causing externalities, but just because it's hard doesn't mean the alternative is to say "they all have shit lives anyway, who cares what we do with them?"
The idea is is as follows. Might be worth just reading the article:
"If ethical vegetarians believed animals have lives that are unpleasant but still better than non-existence, they would focus on reducing harm to these animals without reducing their numbers, for instance by supporting humane slaughter or buying meat from free-range cows.
I will argue that if vegetarians were to apply this principle consistently, wild animal suffering would dominate their concerns, and may lead them to be stringent anti-environmentalists."
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2016/03/oxford-uehiro-p...
But really the point, at least for myself as a vegan is that "Vegans are against the suffering of animals at the hands of humans."
Often vegans are also environmentalists in that human effort has put additional major stressors on wildlife - deforestation, oil spills, human-accellerated climate change, plastic pollution, etc. Factory farming by humans happens in addition to wildlife suffering.
Wildlife suffering happens with or without humans, but humans active choose to breed and kill animals when we don't necessarily need to. We could just not do that.
You don't support humane slaughter or buying meat from free-range cows, because you think not being brought into existence is better than a happy life with an abrupt ending? What if supporting humane slaughter led to less animals being factory farmed, which is agreeably relatively better conditions for the farmed animal population as a whole? That would then be lessening the suffering of animals in the hands of humans.
>Often vegans are also environmentalists in that human effort has put additional major stressors on wildlife - deforestation, oil spills, human-accellerated climate change, plastic pollution, etc. Factory farming by humans happens in addition to wildlife suffering.
That's great for keeping a clear conscience. But realistically is it believable that this will slow down the impending climate change?
It seems to me that a vegan's idea of helping animals/climate is to disconnect from the situation entirely. That might allow for avoidance of responsibility and a moral high-horse, but economically, it isn't realistically helping to lay the groundwork for lessened suffering and a cleaner environment.
I'm always amazed when this argument is raised. I can't fathom anyone actually believes more life, for the sake of life, is "better". It strikes me as a bad faith argument. There is a colossal difference between ending a life and preventing one from happening.
> That's great for keeping a clear conscience. But realistically is it believable that this will slow down the impending climate change?
About 21.8% of the world's population is vegetarian [1]. Let me flip your question: Do you think if those billions of people began consuming meat, the world would be the same? Of course not. Assuming meat production could rise to fit this 21.8% increase in demand (it likely couldn't), the planet would be much worse off. So, yes. Although an individual's choice to not eat meat doesn't do much, in aggregate, it's massively important. "The inactive must justify their sloth by picking nits with those making an attempt"
There are indeed such people. Depending on your particular flavor of utilitarianism, it's a pretty reasonable to conclude that the best things you can do in your life are to A) ensure that there if more life in the future; and B) work to make sure that life is happier than present life.
It basically comes down to how much weight you place on two factors. The first factor is the weight of pleasure (aka happiness, contentment, joy, pick your favorite single word) vs suffering. The second is the weight of present vs future beings.
If you think pleasure outweighs suffering and you are future-oriented then the best possible world is achieved done by increasing the number of happy sentient beings in the universe.
If, OTOH, you believe, as I do, that the negatives of suffering are much stronger than the positives of happiness and you heavily discount future not-yet-existent beings, then you want to focus on eliminating suffering in the present and you should be fairly skeptical of future increases in sentient beings.
My point is NOT "if everyone practiced vegetarianism, climate change would be unaffected." I completely agree with you that the world would be a better place if "everyone were to suddenly switch to being vegan." The point is that in aggregate, not much is ever going to change in the short term, and to believe otherwise is wishful thinking. We have a large sample size of folk who simply don't care about the well being of animals, and a smaller portion of folk who do. That portion hasn't actually changed much over time, even though information about animal farming practices has because much more readily available [1]. It can thus be assumed that changing the way animals are raised and delivered will have a bigger impact on their well-being, than will those who do not eat meat continuing not to eat meat.
> "The inactive must justify their sloth by picking nits with those making an attempt"
A disingenuous attempt at mocking me, considering I have taken large steps in my own life toward vegetarianism. I just hold realistic rather than idealistic hopes for the future of omnivores and the environment they derive their food sources from.
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2018/08/03/you-m...
How does social change happen? It is slow. But it has been happening. Not only are people becoming vegetarian or vegan, but those options are increasingly seen as valid, occasional choices for meat eaters as well.
> It can thus be assumed that changing the way animals are raised and delivered will have a bigger impact on their well-being, than will those who do not eat meat continuing not to eat meat.
This is a much different argument than you have been making. You're (now) saying people can't be persuaded not to kill animals, so we should do so in a more humane way.
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2018/08/03/you-m...
Yeah, but that article doesn't exactly undermine our points because the poll was only for 1,000 people, and even then the actual Gallup poll says:
1) Vegetarianism is slightly higher among Americans under 50 than among those who are older.
More younger people are vegetarian. This will shape social attitudes for decades.
2) Sales of plant-based food grew 8.1% in 2017 alone and exceeded $3.1 billion last year, and plant-based alternatives to dairy products are soon expected to account for 40% of dairy beverage sales. [...] it appears Americans are eager to include alternatives to animal products in their diets but are not willing to give up animal products completely.
Every single plant-based product people choose to buy means slightly less demand for animal products.
Can you help me to understand where i contradicted myself?
The article isn't seriously suggesting to euthanize /sterilize as many animals as possible; I would suggest you reread it. It's using that as an example to point out the moral conundrum that vegetarians undertake when they become vegetarian rather than just "anti-factory farm".
Regardless, I don't claim to align with the article in its entirety - just the idea that animals which have much better lives than their wild counterparts are morally suitable for eating. But yes in continuation of this we should strive for the best lives possible for said animals.
There's no reason we can't do both!
> A disingenuous attempt at mocking me, considering I have taken large steps in my own life toward vegetarianism. I just hold realistic rather than idealistic hopes for the future of omnivores and the environment they derive their food sources from.
I'm sorry. I'm not trying to mock you. I interpreted your argument as a classic "make perfection the enemy of good" argument. It's fantastic you are making efforts to do your part.
You're forming the question again in the same way as the article:
"You think not being brought into existence is better than a happy life with an abrupt ending?"
When really the question is:
"You think it's better that humans choose not to bring animals into existence in order to kill them is better than humans choosing to bring animals into existence in order to kill them?"
And yeah, I think it is better not to breed animals just to kill them, when we could also not.
> What if supporting humane slaughter led to less animals being factory farmed, which is agreeably relatively better conditions for the farmed animal population as a whole?
False dichotomy: poor factory farm conditions vs. better factory farm conditions. There is also the option of no factory farms at all, which would be the least amount of suffering at the hands of humans.
> That's great for keeping a clear conscience. But realistically is it believable that this will slow down the impending climate change?
Actually, it's in the top global climate change causes, so, yes. And there's an avalanche effect of not having to grow 9 times the crops to feed the livestock: less pesticide runoff, less land needed to grow food so less incentive for deforestation and overall habitat destruction, less hauling and shipping required which burns less fuel...
Honestly: do you really think you're doing the animals a favor by raising them in factory farms? You really care about these cows and pigs, so you eat them? Would you be willing to pay the cost - the real cost, not including subsidies funded by taxpayer dollars - for them to have long, nice, natural lives? Because meat is already expensive, and it's artificially cheaper, and the animals only live about 10% of their natural lives. Chickens can live about 8-10 years but are killed at about 18 months when their egg laying starts to diminish. Cows are killed around the same time, but can live up to 20 years.
Would you choose to be fed okay food, in a pen, until you were about 15, then killed?
When it comes down to it we can just agree to disagree on this point. I believe in a more intermediate future where meat comes from animals that, yes, while being bred for consumption, are happy animals that lived happy lives; lives which would be better than any lack of existence. I believe most meat eaters would realistically support this future as well - if not through their purchasing power then at least potentially by law. Lastly, I believe that getting to this future is through strong support of farmers who have already achieved it.
>Would you choose to be fed okay food, in a pen, until you were about 15, then killed?
This might surprise you but actually I would be inclined to say yes. I would absolutely chose that life over no life [1]. Have you raised farm animals before? They generally feel safer and less agitated in a "pen" of sorts because they view it as protection. They get to socialize all day - and don't usually have to worry about predators or food. Humans aren't motivated by the same environmental dynamics as cows or chicken.
So you would choose to live a happy 15 years and then die. Unfortunately most animals that we farm cannot and do not live happy lives, and they don't get a choice. You would more realistically be living to 15 until slaughter with torture, rape, and your children being taken away to further the cycle. Never existing seems better. There is another option though, not raping, torturing, and slaughtering for humans to consume. Humans won't wither away without animal products.
In the not so distant past slaves were given "happy" lives by there owners. They were lesser beings so they should be happy to be alive at all right?
I'm not in disagreement with this...just because you're cynical about the future of husbandry doesn't mean I can't be optimistic about it. I'm unsure how repeatedly stating facts about the worst of the current state of factory farming is going to change my mind about how we can potentially lessen demand and migrate production from factory farms through not supporting them. It's actually the exact same concept as becoming a vegetarian but with different expected results.
Even if I was optimistic about farming being able to have animals leading happy lives, it would still ignore many negative factors dealing with animal consumption:
1. The environmental impact from animal consumption would increase if all animals lead happy lives and consumption stayed the same.
2. Dairy products could no longer be produced as that would lead to unhappy animals
3. The sustainability of eating animals, we produce feed for them, and then we eat them. It would make much more sense to only produce feed for us.
The consideration that animals may become extinct if they aren't useful seems a more worthy one, but less valid in the modern world.
Also, I'm not vegan or vegetarian - I am internally content with my moral and ethical choices regarding meat and have carefully considered them.
[1] If not, see this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
[2] Assuming that person's motivations are opaque, if we know they want to save or specifically kill someone then the problem gets miles more complex - if it makes it easier, maybe imagine a piece of china on the track that the train will go down - so your choice is five people or five people and some nice china.
That would make sense, since GP said:
> If lacking life is what's cruel, then vegetarianism doesn't really solve that problem.
So if vegetarians used the argument that lacking life is cruel, then vegetarianism would be cruel, right? It makes perfect sense (given GP's point) that they don't use that argument.
You're the third replyer that writes as if they disagree about this while making the same point. I'm wondering if I'm reading this wrong, or if GP edited their comment just before I loaded the page.
How do you measure this? How do you know for certain that what you're eating had no idea it was about to die when it did?
How do you know animals don't experience existential suffering, similar to how humans experience it? Why do you believe that humans are in control of their livestock's emotional state, even when they provide the best environment for them?
You can observe animal behavior and say, "They appear not to be suffering from existential dread beyond what they would in the wild", you may be able to measure cortisol levels in the meat. But you'll never know for sure.
Nobody's arguing this, are they?
If you do believe this, then I hope you're breeding rats, rabbits, and insects as fast as possible!
I'm saying it's a pointless statement and trying to demonstrate its ridiculousness.
That being said there are quicker and better ways of taking an animals life, the quicker and less painful the better. I will categorically state that for me how they live is more important than how they die. I don't agree with many of the practices in the production of chicken, pigs, cows, and yes even farmed fish and generally try to avoid them.
The fact is it's completely unnecessary. We don't need meat and we waste far too many resources rearing cattle and other animals just to kill and eat them.
To continue down your slippery slope, you'll find the only proper way to live is to revert to the woods and live as a hunter-gatherer society.
Where you chose to draw the line is just as arbitrary as where the OP chooses to draw the line. To claim yourself as morally superior is ridiculous.
Not growing meat? The big disadvantage to that would be we'd no longer be able to enjoy the taste of meat and the farmers would probably need to find something else to farm.
1. Not only does everything die, many things naturally die as food. Being a victim of carnivores is a perfectly normal thing in nature. So even if you don't feel comfortable justifying killing animals in general with "everything dies," it should certainly justify killing animals for food. (BTW, my understanding is that halal- or kosher-certified meats are slaughtered very humanely/painlessly, so if you're worried about suffering and not death, sticking to those isn't a bad choice.)
2. Although things happen in nature, that doesn't mean they're not cruel, and as humans, we have the option of being more humane than nature. While many early humans would also have starved, frozen to death, or been eaten alive, we think it's pretty not great for modern-day humans to be subject to such a fate and we often think it's a moral obligation for society to prevent that from happening. So why should we not also save animals from their fate in nature instead of perpetuating it?
Is that the least cruel option?