Every day, without thinking much, we make decisions that affect billions of beings capable of feeling pain. We do not do it out of cruelty, but out of habit, convenience, and a set of inherited prejudices that we rarely question.
Animals feel pain and fear. We cannot fully understand their thought processes, but there is ample evidence that they have complex inner lives. But how do we know if animals feel pain? Pain is invisible because it is a “mental event” that cannot be observed. Because pain is invisible, we must infer its presence from behaviors such as writhing, screaming, or withdrawing limbs from sources that cause pain. We can also assume that animals feel pain using a brain imaging machine that shows what is happening in the relevant areas of the brain. In 2012, a group of leading neuroscientists signed the Cambridge Declaration on Animal Consciousness, which confirmed that:
“…humans are not the only ones who possess the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.”
What We Eat and Who Pays the Price
Is it right to cause enormous suffering to animals so that we can satisfy our fleeting desires? A person who eats meat might say that they don’t kill or cause pain. But in fact, when they buy meat at the supermarket, they pay for someone else to kill in their place. So, indirectly, this person participates in the killing of animals by supporting it financially.
Many justify the consumption of animal products by the fact that animals have “inferior intelligence”. But no cognitive trait clearly separates all humans from all animals. Infants and people with severe mental disabilities may have levels of consciousness lower than many of the animals we eat. If indeed the reduced intelligence of animals justifies our behavior toward them, then we should have no qualms about treating less intelligent humans similarly: fattening them up and eating them, if we so choose.
What is Speciesism?
Speciesism (species discrimination) is a prejudice or bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species over those of other species, based solely on membership in that species. This prejudice is deeply rooted in traditions that have shaped people’s attitudes toward nature for centuries—animals are merely tools for human use.
The ethical failure of speciesism is most evident when we weigh the trivial interests of humans against the vital interests of animals. The pleasure derived from a particular culinary experience is trivial; the interest of a conscious animal in continuing to live is vital. But people often decide that their trivial interests are more important than the vital interests of nonhuman animals.
A secondary form of speciesism occurs when we give more importance to some animals (dogs, for example) than to other animals with the same needs and capacity to suffer (such as pigs) simply because they belong to a different species.
Behind the Animal Industry
Globally, humans kill more than 100 billion terrestrial vertebrates per year for food. In the United States alone, more than 10 billion terrestrial vertebrates are killed annually. Aquatic animals are harder to count accurately because the industry measures production by weight, not number, but estimates suggest that up to 2.2 trillion fishes are killed each year. These figures do not reflect the quality of life these animals had, nor the manner in which they died. But given what we know about the conditions of industrial production, we can safely conclude that the vast majority lived and died in pain. However, not because farm operators are particularly cruel, but because market forces, demanding greater productivity at lower cost, made suffering structurally inevitable.
The small family farm is now the exception. Industrial agriculture is dominated by a small number of giant farms. These concentrated animal feeding operations are designed to transform animals into what the industry calls production units; living organisms that turn grains and soy into animal protein. Animal welfare is considered only insofar as it affects productivity.
Many believe that animals raised for food are treated well because it is in the producers’ interest that the animals are healthy and do not die, otherwise it would not be profitable for agribusiness. Dr. Bernard Rollin explains the logic of poultry farms: “From an economic point of view, it is much more efficient to cram more birds into each cage … Chickens are cheap, but cages are expensive.” Producers calculate that it is more profitable to accept higher mortality than to invest in better conditions.
Industrial chicken farming produces the largest number of animals of any industry. A typical modern farm houses 20,000 to 30,000 birds in large, windowless buildings where feed, water, and lighting are automatically controlled to accelerate growth. And for the first week or two, bright lights may be on for twenty-three or even twenty-four hours a day to stimulate rapid weight gain in the chicks.
Added to this is the build-up of ammonia from the manure. The University of Georgia notes that “reusing litter for one, two, or more years of production…has become the industry standard”. Animals in these conditions commonly develop chronic respiratory diseases and chemical burns to their skin from lying on corrosive bedding. Because a single worker may oversee hundreds of thousands of birds, identifying and treating sick birds is virtually impossible.
Slaughterhouses
Today’s slaughterhouses are designed to process thousands of animals per hour, a rate at which individual attention and precision are structurally impossible. The stunning process (intended to render animals unconscious by means of a captive bolt gun or electric bath before slaughter) frequently fails due to the pace of the processing line. Peter Singer in Animal Liberation Now writes that many animals are hung and bled while still fully conscious. Beyond the moment of death, the animals go through a prolonged period of terror: they are herded through noisy, blood-smelling corridors, subjected to the stress of witnessing the deaths of those in front of them.
Most factory farms do not perform slaughter on site. Animals are often transported long distances to specialized facilities. Within the European Union, modern agriculture is highly fragmented: piglets may be born in Denmark, transported to Poland for fattening, and then transported back to the Netherlands or Italy for slaughter. Each journey adds layers of stress to an already torturous existence.
Conclusion
Humanity is currently making the lives of billions of animals on Earth torturous, on a scale unprecedented in history. This would be logically unjustifiable if we were to remove the speciesist assumption (the premise that membership in a species entitles us to ignore the interests of animals) that underpins our food system.
Animal exploitation is a market-driven system that responds directly to consumer choices. Let’s make the right decision at our next meal.