Weighing animal minds, part II
An interactive essay for reasoning about animal welfare
Getting an intuitive understanding of what animals go into which diets, and their welfare, is difficult. Last week I shared an interactive essay on the subject.
In this instalment, I’ve updated it significantly to include:
details on how animals live and die when we farm them for food,
a diet calculator showing how different diets fare in terms of raw animal ‘life-days’ that they comprise, and the number of ‘suffering-days’ when weighted by how bad their lives are,
welfare estimates for farmed shrimp, and
a closing section on what these numbers might mean.
[Updated copy for Inkhaven word count purposes]
Different diets translate into very different numbers. Pick a diet to see its totals, and use “Compare to” if you want to see two diets side by side.
Fish consumption dominates the number of life-days in their diets — 90% coming from fish alone.
Americans consume less fish than Europeans, but much more chicken — 46kg per person per year. This makes chicken the single biggest source of suffering.
Brits eat slightly less fish than on the continent, and slightly less chicken than Americans.
Vegetarians don’t eat meat or fish, cutting out much of the suffering in their diets. But 300 eggs a year still produces over a thousand days of suffering. Replacing beef with eggs is probably bad on net from a welfare perspective, which isn’t totally intuitive.
Vegans don’t consume animal products, so their numbers here are zero by definition. Like all diets, crop farming still has indirect impacts on animals (rodents, insects, displaced wildlife) that aren’t modelled here.
These are relatively simple models — they account for how many animals get eaten in a given diet, how many days of each animal’s life that corresponds to, and how much those animals likely suffer. The answers depend on which weighting you trust, and reasonable people will land in different places.
There is a lot we haven’t quantified: the wild fish that get fed to farmed salmon, male chicks which are killed at layer hatcheries, the difference between factory-farmed, free range, and pasture-raised animals, and the thorny question of whether shrimp even feel pain. It’s worth noting that most of these would push the numbers in the direction of _more_ suffering, not less, so the numbers above are somewhat conservative estimates.
Directionally, chicken, eggs and fish make up the bulk of the welfare impact of people’s diets. Beef and dairy make up a much smaller proportion. Switching out chicken, fish and eggs (in decreasing order) will have the biggest impact on one’s diet. Many people switch out beef for chicken for various reasons, including to reduce the climate impact of their diet. But counterintuitively, this is actually one of the worst moves to make in terms of animal welfare.
Eating is very personal and has great cultural significance. A Christmas or Thanksgiving turkey, a Sunday roast, or even a cheese toastie all have strong emotional salience for lots of people. None of the above is intended to be proscriptive. But hopefully it’s given some insight into an otherwise unintuitive — but enormously important — subject.
If the idea that animals’ experiences might differ this much already changes how you think, consider donating to effective organisations which seek to reform the way we raise animals for food, pay for ‘offsets’ to cover the animals you consume, or think about where you could cut back.
Numbers here are tentative.
If the "numbers" reach conclusions that clash with moral intuitions, something is deeply wrong with the numbers, because we aren't discussing about physical systems.
Suffering and pain are hard to quantify when we have no access to exactly what any of those state are. Between humans we can make some inferences from brain structures and behaviors. With mammals we can extend it. But with shrimps?
I find it far more respectable to simply recommend/advocate for vegetarianism or veganism, which resolves the moral calculus, instead of a dubious ordering of animals moral weight. Because once you start ordering other animals, why stop there and not include people and their different levels of cognitive abilities?