Factory farming is wildly uncomfortable to think about, which is why most people avoid it entirely. After finishing A World Appears and listening to a podcast on the topic, this resurfaced as something I’ve been thinking about often.
This post will not be a fan favorite. I imagine most people won’t read it because it’s not fun to read. But with these “Things I Think About” posts, it’s more me wanting to get my thoughts down.
The Facts
To set the stage – Breeding sows (female pigs) give birth in crates so small that they can’t turn around, nurse their babies for ~3 weeks, then the piglets are weaned off and permanently separated while the sows are often bred again within a week. Spending that time in a confined crate is bad enough, but being separated from your offspring and repeatedly rebred is its own form of unnatural torture.
The scale of suffering is incomprehensibly big. When you hear 200 million cows, a billion pigs, or 60 billion chickens annually, the numbers lose meaning. You might as well say a trillion, it wouldn’t make a difference.
This happened over time. Corporations didn’t wake up one day and decide to do this. But gradually, capitalism and the free market worked their magic.
Saving money over time means: more animals per barn, less space per animal, faster growing breeds, limited or no outdoor access, low-quality litter / bedding, less humane slaughter systems, etc. And these corporations are highly incentivized to oppose laws that would raise their costs; most of the time at the expense of the animals.
Seeing it with your own eyes makes the point infinitely clearer than any paragraph could. I’m not including any of the really bad images or videos, but the image below gives an idea, and the more graphic ones are gut-wrenching.
Natural Suffering vs. Preventable Suffering
Unsurprisingly, the suffering hits me hardest.
It’s obvious to anyone who’s spent time with animals that they are fully experiencing the torturous conditions we expose them to.
I imagine all the animals I’ve loved in my life (mostly cats) and the idea of putting them in similar conditions; it horrifies me. Once you see an animal’s ability to love, be it a cat, a dog, a pig, a cow, etc. it seems impossible to knowingly subject them to what we do.
But why is this suffering any different than the natural suffering that countless animals have experienced over the past million years? Because this suffering is preventable. What we’re doing now is very plainly prioritizing money over suffering. We all wince when we see videos of animals in pain or being abused. We’ve developed natural compassion towards them, and what we’re doing goes completely against that.
I’m of the opinion that this will be seen in the coming centuries as utterly unthinkable. It will seem so foreign to future generations that we’ll be viewed as impossibly cold-hearted and callous.
Also, it’s worth a short mention that environmentally, animal agriculture contributes ~12% of human-caused greenhouse gases (who knew?). This is a problem with or without factory farming, but this is yet another negative consequence.
Capacity to Suffer & What About Fish?
I believe that not all animals have equal capacity to suffer. Pigs, for example, seem to experience more than chickens. Chickens more than flies. And so on. I don’t feel moral conflict when I kill a fly.
But where do we draw the line?
When you consider that pigs and dogs are behaviorally and intellectually very comparable, it feels right to start there and say “this is bad“. As you scale down to a chicken, it feels more justifiable, though the raw numbers are just staggering.
Fish are an entirely separate category, though just a little research suggests similar things happening. About half of fish annually come from ‘aquaculture’, or the equivalent of factory farmed, and spend their lives confined in terrible conditions. I don’t know where fish fall on the capacity-to-suffer scale, but it’s not hard to imagine that this is equally wrong.
Animals in Raising Kids
Something that struck me in the first year of having Harrison is how much animals are featured in, well, everything.
Every book, every song, all the toys, everything is animals. Which makes sense!
For thousands of years, humans had this very direct and intimate relationship with all sorts of animals. It makes sense that for all of that time, children were raised with a very loving attitude towards them with plenty of education around what they do and how to treat them. It’s not until the last 100 years or so that in some parts of the world, we’ve turned a corner and animals no longer hold this pivotal role in daily life.
But we haven’t updated how we raise our kids! According to Harrison, animals are amazing, we love them, they love us, and everyone lives in harmony. It feels like this perverse secret that for every one animal we treat nicely, there are a thousand that we torture.
I’m aware that even 100 years ago, we taught kids a very sanitized version of nature – “all the animals get along!” and left out the parts where they rip each other to shreds – but that’s neither here nor there.
The Consumer & Out-of-Sight-Out-of-Mind
These corporations / farmers are only part of the equation! A free market has two sides and farmers are simply trying to meet the demand of the consumer.
People. Want. Meat. And they want it cheap.
There are more humane sources of meat, but they’re a lot more expensive, usually harder to find, and simply put, most people don’t care.
Or I should say, don’t care enough if it means paying a lot more for meat. And frankly, it’s out of sight, out of mind. When it’s not in front of our eyes or impacting our daily life, we just don’t care. I have a hard time arguing against that.
I wrote this post two years ago saying that everyone has their own things they think are important. Problem A is the obvious priority to you, but to someone else it’s not even on their list. So when I say factory farming seems terrible and someone replies “but what about the war in Ukraine!“, I can’t blame them.
What Do I Do?
I’ve circled this for a few years. The only real concession I’ve made is never buying red meat at the grocery store and ordering it less when I’m out to eat. I’ll have a bacon, egg, and cheese or cheesesteak once a month or so. But I still eat chicken and fish regularly (capacity-to-suffer or something).
I manage to sleep at night despite my contributions to the very problem I’m writing about, mostly using the “I’m just one person, what difference does it make?” mindset.
I’ve toyed with being a vegetarian or pescatarian, but only half-heartedly. I don’t think I deserve a pat on the back for that, but it’s something.
I’d strongly consider donating to programs that benefit the animals and have even done so in the past, but minimally. That said, I don’t support throwing soup on paintings (those were climate activists, not animal, but same idea).
Perhaps writing this post will be the most impactful change I make.
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