The Animal Holocaust
It was once said that a single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. How much less morally comprehensible is the statistic of hundreds of billions of deaths? How do you even make something like that real to the mind? Current best estimates have it that humans slaughter over 70 billion land animals per year, not including marine animals or male chicks slaughtered by egg-laying hen hatcheries. This number is an order of magnitude greater than the total human population of Earth. With marine animals and chicks included, the yearly kill count easily exceeds the sum total of humans who have ever lived on Earth at any time in history—over 120 billion. Year after year this continues, and year after year the number grows larger.
The vast majority of these animals lived out their short lives on factory farms, where outright abuse is common, and which are, at best, overcrowded, filthy prisons where animals are either virtually immobilized in small cages or crammed together in large warehouse-like barns. All of them end up in the same place, the slaughterhouse, where they will be killed in one of several ways. They are marched to the "kill floor," stepping through the blood of their predecessors, coaxed by yelling men with electric prods or giant swatters, where they will then either be electrocuted, or bolt gunned in the head, or simply have their throats slit without any such "stunning" in the case of kosher or halal slaughter. Some are forced into gas chambers filled with concentrated CO2, which burns the lungs and mucous membranes.
For smaller animals like birds, they're killed on an even more efficient, industrial scale, in what can only be called "death machines." They're hung by the legs, alive, on an ever moving conveyor, which first drags their heads through an electric bath meant to stun them. Many survive this step by lifting their heads or are otherwise simply ineffectively stunned. On the next step along the conveyor their necks are dragged against automated circular saws to bleed them out. Some are cut ineffectively and still alive reaching the last step. This final step is another bath, this time in boiling water, to remove their feathers. And these are the accepted, "humane" methods in which humans convert other animals into chops, cutlets, and drumsticks. The death machines will never be featured on "How it's Made" but they hum away with the regularity of any factory floor, that number constantly ticking upwards.
If, as Descartes thought, animals are mere automata, without experiential consciousness, then these statistics are only trivia, bereft of moral significance. But if, on the other hand, each of the beings killed did have experiential consciousness, its own subjective experience of life, the issue takes on such a weight of moral significance that it is scarcely comparable to anything else. What does modern science have to say about the question of animal consciousness?
In 2012, a group of cognitive scientists, neurophysiologists, psychologists, and other related specialists gathered at Cambridge University for the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and Non-human Animals to review the bulk of contemporary research on the neurological substrates of conscious states and emotions in humans and other animals. The conference resulted in a joint declaration that became known as the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. Among the consensus findings, the declaration included the following:
We declare the following: “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.
It’s worth pausing to ask what we mean here by ‘consciousness’ and what its significance is. When philosophers and cognitive scientists speak of animals being conscious in this manner, they mean experiential consciousness, subjective experience, or as Nagel put it, that there is something it’s like to be that individual animal. Consciousness no doubt takes many forms, but there is at least one feature of conscious experience of the sort that animals, including humans, possess that makes such consciousness morally salient. Valence encapsulates the notion that conscious experiences can be positive or negative for the being that experiences them. Among negatively valenced experiences would be included such states as pain, fear, hunger, unfulfillment of preferences, etc., and among positively valenced experiences would be classed states like joy, comfort, safety, fulfillment of preferences, etc.
Even without lengthy explanations, we intuitively recognize consciousness and valence as morally relevant features when we consider the difference between someone kicking a rock and someone kicking a dog. There is nothing it’s like, either good or bad, for the rock to be kicked. The rock has no experiential consciousness at all. The dog, on the other hand, experiences both pain and emotional distress from being treated in an abusive manner. So, too, do pigs, cows, chickens, some fish, and many other animals subjected to the processes and practices of animal agriculture. Each one added to the tally of the dead was an individual, a subject of a conscious life. Perhaps not one quite like ours, without the same complexities of language and abstract thought, but nonetheless one with its own set of pleasures and pains, joys and sorrows, victories and defeats. Each life had its own story, its own set of unique experiences in the world. Each one was once an individual being, reduced to a number, then a barcode on a package to be purchased for the fleeting pleasurable experience of a human.
Many might acknowledge the mass mistreatment and slaughter of non-human animals as a great tragedy, but nonetheless think there is nothing for it. It’s simply a fact of life that humans need to eat meat, eggs, and dairy, right? Well, no, it isn’t. Not only is a well-planned plant-based diet healthful, it may also reduce the risk factors for the top causes of human mortality. The position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics states that:
appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes.
It goes on to note that:
Vegetarians and vegans are at reduced risk of certain health conditions, including ischemic heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, certain types of cancer, and obesity.
It is ultimately a false choice between the ethical treatment of non-human animals and the pursuit of human health. The real choice, at least for all of us living in the relative affluence of developed countries, is rather between the ethical treatment of non-human animals and the fleeting satisfaction of a particular taste preference. We make this fateful choice every time we go to a market and choose between the products of humanity’s unethical treatment of non-human animals and alternative products.
As of now, there is a large and ever-expanding range of such alternatives, not to mention whole food staples, with enough culinary variety to satisfy all tastes. So, it is also a false choice between taste pleasure and animal ethics. It does not require a grand sacrifice or the fortitude of a saint, merely a conscious choice to learn, to change ingrained habits, and a willingness to experiment to find new favorite foods and develop new dietary habits. Where do the ethical scales balance when the cost of the temporary, one-time inconvenience of learning new dietary and culinary habits is weighed against the suffering and death of the numerous animals that would otherwise be consumed over the future time-course of a person’s life?
Many ethical questions are difficult, if not nigh intractable, with good arguments that can be adduced for each side, and with each position often involving uncongenial tradeoffs that leave their proponents only partially satisfied in their conclusions. This, however, is not among those difficult questions. A clearer, more one-sided issue could hardly be found among the issues considered in applied ethics. Despite this, habit, culture, and status quo bias are powerful forces indeed, and so the death machines hum on.