Ezra Klein: ‘We will look back on this age of cruelty to animals in horror’
How we treat farm animals today will be seen, I believe, as a defining moral failing of our age. The overwhelming majority of these animals are raised and killed in conditions with no analogue in history, and they suffer terribly.
EZRA KLEIN: It’s hard to know where your charitable dollars will do the most good. This year, I’ll focus most of my giving… to the world’s poorest people, without attaching strings, conditions or complexity… But about 10 percent of my donations every year goes to easing, or ending, the suffering of factory farmed animals, which is mind-melting in its scale. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that about 80 billion — yes, billion — land animals are slaughtered each year for food, and, according to some estimates, between 51 billion and 160 billion farmed fish join them.
The overwhelming majority of these animals are raised and killed in conditions with no analogue in history, and they suffer terribly. But farm animals are often an afterthought even in animal-related giving, in which two-thirds of the money goes to shelters… How we treat farm animals today will be seen, I believe, as a defining moral failing of our age. Humans have always eaten animals. We’ve hunted them, bred them, raised them and consumed them. What’s changed over the past century is that we’ve developed the technology to produce meat in industrialized conditions, and that has opened vast new vistas for both production and suffering.
In past eras, we didn’t have the antibiotics and sanitation chemicals needed to keep so many animals crowded so closely together, nor the preservation and transportation technologies needed to ship them en masse. Disease would rip through thick flocks, and carcasses would spoil across long trips. Today, the factory farms that produce the overwhelming majority of meat, both globally and domestically, are dark marvels of technology, as are the carefully bred and managed animals inside them.
Since the 1950s, broiler chickens have roughly quadrupled in size, and it now takes them six weeks, not 15, to grow to slaughter weight. These are inventions, not just chickens. But the cheap meat they made possible sent demand skyrocketing: In the United States alone, the available amount of chicken meat per person has shot from about 10 pounds in 1910 to about 65 pounds in 2018…
In live shackling, which remains the dominant method, workers turn chickens upside down to shackle them by their legs to a conveyor… The conveyor is supposed to drag them through electrified water, stunning them before their throats are slit. But the panicked, spasming birds sometimes miss the bath, and their throats are cut while they are conscious and terrified. If the kill isn’t clean, they are pulled through boiling water that defeathers them while still conscious…
The Humane League, and others, are trying to persuade chicken producers to simply gas the birds to death. But amelioration won’t reduce the number of animals being raised in industrial facilities for food. Substitution might. Do you really need a chicken to make a nugget? Or a cow to make a burger? When we slaughter a cow to produce ground beef, we used the cow as a machine to turn the plants the cow ate into meat.
The question is whether we can replace the cow with something else that turns plants into meat. For now, I’d say the plant-based burgers, sausages and nuggets are pretty good, and they’re getting better, fast. There’s no reason a Happy Meal nugget should ever involve a chicken. But there’s a long way to go in mimicking more texturally demanding meats, like bacon or fatty tuna or even steak.
Perhaps those meats can one day be grown directly. This has passed from the realm of science fiction into reality, and I’ve swallowed the evidence. A few months ago, I went to Upside Foods and tried “cultivated” chicken. When I said, a bit awed, that it tasted just like chicken, my hosts laughed and said that’s because it was chicken. They just took chicken cells and grew them into a chicken breast rather than an entire bird. The question is whether this can be done at scale, for the hundreds of millions of tons of meat we eat…
But the benefits to directly growing meat, at scale, would be incalculable — and not just for animals. Meat production is a huge driver of climate change, of deforestation and of pandemic and antibiotic risk. Having the meat we love without the health and environmental consequences it now imposes would prevent vast human suffering, too. This should be a moonshot we’re making as a society, but it’s being left, instead, to private capital, and so there’s too little basic science being done, and too many advances are patented and protected…
Technological advances, as well as the global desire for cheap meat, have turned this into an age of animal cruelty. But we can also see glimmers of how it might, one day, end. Perhaps we live in the lag between when it became possible to treat sentient animals as industrial inputs and when it will become unnecessary and perhaps even indecent to do so, because we will be able to grow or mimic most meat with less animal involvement, and abusive treatment of animals will be easier to abhor. SOURCE…
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