The Bone-Chilling Evil of Factory Farming
Crosspost of my blog post.
Factory farming is evil.
I know, I know, I’ve made this point before. I’ve described, in depth, the way we treat animals. I’ve described that we stuff billions of chickens into tiny cages where they can’t turn around or flap their wings—where their frail bones are broken three times on average over the course of their brief lives, where they inhale nothing but feces deposits from the caged birds above them.
I’ve described the results of a report which estimated that egg-laying hens spend about an hour a day in distress as intense as the most intense distress most humans ever experience. That they never see the sun except immediately before slaughter—that one of the most distressing things that can happen to a hen, being unable to perch, happens to nearly all the egg-laying hens in the world.
They live in filth and acidic feces, getting horrific lung and skin conditions at alarming rates. They stand on painful wire meshing all the time. The chickens sold for meat can barely move because of their hideous sizes, and so they simply lie dormant against the wire meshing. They have no room to sleep and cruel artificial lights keep them awake, leading to chronic sleep deprivation (we call that torture when it’s done to a human). A century of genetic engineering has made it so that their mere existence causes them agony.
And that’s just a select few of the tortures we inflict annually on tens of billions of chickens. I haven’t even mentioned the pigs that we force into crates, the cows we hold down and inject with bull semen, the baby piglets slammed against concrete until their skulls crack and their brains come oozing out.
I haven’t mentioned the millions of animals boiled alive (think for a moment about what it would be like to be boiled alive—to have your skin removed by the scorching heat of water—the next time you dine on your delightful meal of chicken. One Tyson employee summarized “The chickens scream, kick, and their eyeballs pop out of their heads.”). Their tails, beaks, and horns are sliced or burned off. The chickens are dangled upside down by their legs—a process that routinely breaks their frail bones—and then slaughtered sometimes while fully conscious.
Nor have I mentioned the sexual abuse—the way that chickens, turkeys, and cows are held down and injected with semen to produce new offspring. Nor the way that when there are excess pigs (smarter than dogs mind you!) or chickens, they’re choked and roasted to death on boiling steam over the course of hours. Seriously take a moment to imagine what it would be like to slowly suffocate on boiling steam—hotter than boiling water, often reaching temperatures of 170 degrees—over the course of about an hour. Then remember that we routinely kill around 100 million birds that way, because killing them in a less torturous way would be a bit more expensive.
It’s already clear, from what I’ve said, that factory farming is torture. I didn’t even need to mention the routine starvation of millions of egg-laying hens or the cruel, overcrowded transport process where about 26% of egg-laying hens keel over and die. Nor have I mentioned the way the baby male chicks are ground up alive. I could go on until I’m blue in the face, but I think the point is clear—we treat animals like expendable byproducts and inflict on them cruelties that resemble campy horror movies in their depravity.
This is the cost of cheap meat—99% of which comes from factory farms. We don’t pay the cost with our wallet but with our soul. The rest of the cost is paid by others, with their lives.
If you enter a factory farm, multiple senses will be accosted. Your nose will be accosted by the smell of the piles of feces and ammonia that the animals are breathing in all the time. Your eyes will be accosted by the sight of dejected, miserable animals. Your ears will be accosted by their cries.
Entering a factory farm is rather like entering certain old age homes. You feel somewhat sickened by the smells and the sights. Then you feel bad. If this is what it’s like to witness it as an outsider, imagine what it’s like to be a resident. And this is to say nothing of the significantly more unsettling blood-soaked slaughterhouse where the animals are killed.
I know, I know, I’ve made all these points before. I’m not treading any new ground. But when one considers the degree of the misery, of the depravity, it can seem like a person should talk about nothing else. The problems that concern humans in their daily life begin to look rather paltry compared to this breathtaking agony—a scale of agony that plausibly annually outstrips all the suffering humans have ever experienced.
Yes, I’ve made all these points before, but since I last made it—17 days ago—about 3 billion chickens were slaughtered. 64 million pigs died in agony and terror. More total farmed animals were killed since I wrote that post than humans are alive today. Cows are far less numerous than the other animals, yet even they have perished in astonishing numbers—over 15 million have died since I wrote that article.
Extreme suffering is bad. Anyone who has been tortured, beaten, or severely hurt in some other way knows that. Its badness doesn’t go away just because the victims aren’t smart. Babies aren’t very smart, and there are some mentally disabled people whose cognitive capacities are similar to animals. No one would seriously claim that if we inflicted the grievous tortures on babies and the cognitively disabled that we inflict on animals, it would be anything other than an unspeakable atrocity. So neither can we claim that the suffering of animals isn’t a big deal because of their cognitive deficiencies.
Every year, more animals are cruelly slaughtered on factory farms than humans have ever lived. Animals epitomize the Stalinist quote “one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” If someone tortures a dog in a basement, they’re universally condemned. But when the factory farms cruelly slaughter 200 million chickens every single day, no one cares much. If you complain about it, if you call it the crime that it is, you’re thought of as a nutty extremist—a vegan radical. The sane and moderate position is to look away and ignore the nightmarish holocaust that goes on every minute.
But we shouldn’t look away from the death and torment that exists on such a staggering scale that one can scarcely grasp it. We have built hell and condemned hundreds of millions of innocent beings to a fate worse than death for their entire lives, all for the crime of having flesh that tastes nice. If you wanted a definition of wickedness, a clear example to help someone grasp the concept of wrongdoing, you couldn’t do better than showing them a factory farm.
We have mechanized mass murder. We do it out of sight and out of mind, using euphemistic phrases to cover up the carnage. Our society is powered by blood and flesh and bone. As Sam Wong noted, “When humans have vanished from the planet, one of the most enduring marks of our impact on Earth will be the sudden appearance in the fossil record of copious chicken bones.”
We must reckon with this fact. The world is engaged in animal cruelty on a scale that can barely be fathomed. If you lived the life, back to back, of every organism who ever lived, you’d spend far more time being tortured in a factory farm than living as a person. To one who was forced to endure both the pleasures of meat and the suffering it causes, veganism would seem obviously obligatory, and vegan histrionics about factory farming would seem, if anything, understated.
So what should we do about this fact? I have two main suggestions.
First, we should stop paying the factory farms to torture and murder more animals. It is wrong to hurt others for trivial benefits. This is what we do when we purchase meat. We should stop doing that.
But second, and even more importantly, we should donate money to reduce suffering on factory farms. Every dollar donated stops about 10 years of factory farming. This means if you give, say, 1000 dollars, you can prevent about 10,000 years of factory farming—10,000 years of horrendous suffering.
is currently running a fundraiser that matches donations. If you donate a dollar to the fundraiser, in total you’ll raise about 2 dollars and stop around 20 years of factory farming. This means that Dwarkesh is on track to spare animals from around 11 million years of extreme suffering.
Every day an animal spends in a cage is a horrific crime. The best days in the life of a factory farmed animal are worse than the worst day of your life. And you can prevent multiple days in a cage for a cent. If a bird would be trapped in a cage unless you paid a single cent to free it, paying to free it would be a no-brainer. And money given to Farmkind is just as good.
Please, if you can, I’d encourage you to give some money via groups like Farmkind (which Dwarkesh’s fundraiser is for) that are working to end this enduring nightmare. As usual, if you give at least 200 dollars in response to this article or at least 30 dollars a month, you can have a free paid subscription!
Something that may be relevant for some readers: The sorts of facilities depicted in these photographs are not legal in the state of California, under laws that go back to the Schwarzenegger administration (and were passed by ballot initiative with very comfortable majorities). However, the current regime in DC has been attempting to have California’s standards ruled illegal for conflicting with federal law.
It’s worth noting that factory farming isn’t just coincidentally out of the limelight, in some (many?) areas it’s illegal to document. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag
While many of these laws seem somewhat reasonable on the surface, since they’re billed as strengthening trespass law, you can’t gather video evidence of a moral crime taking place on private property without at least some form of trespass.
I wonder how much worse is every incremental year of this is as a % of all suffering experienced in this way throughout history
To my mind it will likely decrease and disappear slowly at first and then all at once as alternatives get better and cheaper
But I wonder if it’s at all time high capacity and it every incremental year or 10 years of it is some large % of total suffering caused in this way
I’ll watch this podcast, but briefly, can you state how this number is calculated?
What are those dollars doing? How could they possibly do that much? Do you mean 10 person-years of factory farming?
It refers to animal-years, yeah. (IMO the choice of words is okay, even though it could have been clearer; 10 years = 10 animal-years is is the only reasonable interpretation, so I don’t think there was any intent to mislead.) I’m not sure it’s quite right, though; it’s actually an underestimate, according to the Lewis Bollard quote that it seems to be based on, but on the other hand Bollard seems to be referring to the costs and benefits of one specific campaign, rather than to anything that could reasonably be taken to apply to ‘every dollar donated’. So I’m not sure if it’s just a rough ‘averaging out’ of those two factors, or if it’s based on more details that I missed when I looked at the transcript.
In the transcript of the podcast, the relevant section is at around 32 minutes. The specific claim seems to be that they spent <$200 million on a lobbying effort that directly caused reforms that so far have spared 500 million hens (and are continuing to spare 200 million per year) from battery cages and have improved the lives of billions of broiler chickens (>1 billion per year), over lifetimes that aren’t exactly specified but that result in “a ratio that is far less than one to 10 of a dollar per year of animal well-being improved”.
edit: a quick search suggests that the lifespan of a battery hen is a little under a year and a half, and the lifespan of a broiler chicken is a month to a month and a half. So I’m not sure exactly how those numbers work out; maybe the <1:10 ratio depends on the assumption that the benefits will continue into the near future.
Right, my understanding had been that there weren’t obvious ways to spend dollars to prevent factory farming, and that the most cost effective interventions are about increasing the welfare of animals within the factory farming system via eg corporate campaigns to remove battery cages.
This is part of why I’m unimpressed by offsets for eating meat, which seem to rely on apples to oranges comparisons, that don’t fly in my personal deontology. (It’s a bit like if I directly owned slaves, acknowledged that was an immoral thing to do, but “offset” that by spending some money each year to pay for better living conditions for many slaves somewhere else.)
(There are also interventions that use various methods to get people to go vegan, but I’m skeptical of those for other reasons.)
If there was a way to spend money to reliably and linearly delete years of factory farming, 1) I would be much more excited about offsets based on that mechanism, and 2) I would at least spend a fwer hours working through the details and considering rearranging my life to make “maximizing money going to factory farm-year deletion” as a primary priority (even with AI risk).
If “a ratio that is far less than one to 10 of a dollar per year of animal well-being improved” is being summarized as “Every dollar donated stops about 10 years of factory farming”, that seems very disingenuous? Stopping a year of factory farming is not the the same as stopping an animal-year of factory farming, which is not the same as “improves one year of chicken life, from torturous to extremely bad.”
So the $1 → 10 years is based on estimates for historical funding of advocates vs impact of those advocates?
Seems nice but not sure about the marginal use.
Your article generally seems confused/hysterical when it comes to eating meat, which weakens the vibe for factory farming.
This is unfortunately common, people who care about factory farming enough to make it an issue are also against earing meat period, and it simply confuses the issue.
Same as the crusade against meat for health reasons, infested with moral-based vegans and vegetarians who are clearly not unbiased
Where is it confused/hysterical when it comes to eating meat? The only part that seems to fit that description is:
I suppose there are also the parts that encourage you to imagine what the process of obtaining the meat you’re eating looks like, which frankly seems valid in context? i.e. you should be aware of what is the cost of the things you utilise.
You could say that the article could be more explicit that the criticisms of eating meat apply to factory farmed meat, but seeing as the article also claims that 99% of meat is factory farmed, this seems like a valid assumption to make?
I understand frustration with mixing “factory farming is bad so avoid it” with “killing animals is bad so don’t eat meat”, but this article does a good job of avoiding that, focusing on the factory aspect and suffering, not the death part. All the examples are about suffering, not eating meat.
I might have confused this post with another of his, he actually did an ok job here.
The “mechanized mass murder” and the call to action to stop paying for the “murder of more animals” do make the article seem much less serious and a bit confused.
Killing millions of animals is a positive that people are happy to pay for so they can eat those animals.
Torturing those same animals makes people unconfortabke
Mark this, anyone who wishes to align AI by training it on human values. What might an intellectually superior AI conclude, is the appropriate way to treat intellectually inferior beings?
If you want a future that isn’t hell, reckoning conclusively with this issue, and all issues like it, is an absolute necessity.
The farmkind website you linked to is unable to provide a secure connection and both my browsers refuse to go to it. If you are involved in the setup of the site or know the people who are, it’s worth trying to fix that.