Some readers will say that animals awaken fantasy, if not heresy, in those who attach moral significance to them. Yet often I think it is the more violent among us who are living out the fantasy, some delusion in which everything in nature is nothing and all is permitted.

As sentimentality toward animals can be overindulged, so, too, can grim realism, seeing only the things we want in animals and not the animals themselves.

— Matthew Scully, Dominion (all other quotes in this post from the same book)

A trigger warning that this post will talk about extreme suffering. I won’t show any unpleasant images.

I’ve written about animal ethics before. That was much more of a structured argument. This post will be me gesturing aggressively at what I see as an important fact about the world.

There’s a very simple but subtly difficult intuition about animal ethics I think people often miss: animal suffering isn’t pretend. Getting this across in conversations is often surprisingly challenging, but critical for helping people see the world clearly.

In conversations about animal welfare I sometimes get the feeling that the other person doesn’t think animals have experiences at all. To them, caring about animal suffering is kind of like caring about robots. The robots have sad faces. I want to switch them to happy faces because I have an irrational emotional reaction to the robot. The idea that there’s some deeper experience the robot is having is just anthropomorphizing it.

Maybe people don’t consciously believe animals are robots, but deep down they seem to think that animals don’t have some special spark of consciousness that makes their suffering actually bad, or their suffering is so dulled by their stupidity that it never gets worse than mild human suffering.

A lot of people imagine vegans and animal welfare activists as very emotional and easily overwhelmed by cute images of animals. From the inside, it feels like the opposite. If you take a cold clear look at brute reality, and believe there’s no such thing as magic, humans don’t have souls, and evolution is true, it’s hard not to think animals can suffer in similar ways to us. This has wild implications for animal ethics.

Extreme suffering matters a lot

It’s very hard to think directly and seriously about extreme suffering. It makes sense that our brains are designed to avoid it. I mostly don’t think about what extreme suffering is actually like, but it can be useful to try to build up some basic intuitions about it being real and bad, because we’re so easily lulled into ignoring it.

Imagine that you found out that a doctor were going to cut you open and disfigure you without pain medication or anesthetic. You learned that this doctor did not behave as if they thought humans were really conscious or that their pain was worth considering. A lot of people who came to them died during the procedure. When you were cut open, you would feel the searing pain of the knife. You would live with your disfigurement after.

Really try to spend a minute thinking about what that would be like. Not in an abstract thought experiment “adding up happiness and suffering points” way. What would you feel in your bones? Try to think “I’ve found out this is going to happen to me in a week. There’s no way I can avoid it. I’m stuck in this timeline where I’m about to feel really horrible pain.” What would you feel as the minutes and hours passed? What would the experience of the pain itself be like?

I can enter this world for a little while, but it’s hard for me to hold the idea in my head for long.

There are pieces of media that do an especially good job of communicating a little of what extreme suffering is actually like. Movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Come and See, and Threads. Brian Tomasik’s blog post on the horror of suffering.

I’m pretty weak to this stuff. I have a limit that I can watch or read or think about before I feel very bad. The world goes extremely gray, I feel a little sick. I ease myself out of it.

I think the fact that suffering can get this bad is one of the most important facts about the world, and one that almost everyone is very good at playing pretend to avoid. I don’t think it would be healthy or good to try to constantly hold in our minds what extreme suffering would be like, but it’s very important to coldly intellectually adjust our beliefs to prioritize extreme suffering as a problem. If someone’s belief system doesn’t include the fact that things can get really really really bad, and that this should be a pretty core action-guiding idea, it becomes hard for me to take them seriously.

It seems very likely that extreme suffering, the same basic type of thing that’s depicted in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, probably happens in the minds of animals in factory farms (and in nature), and that everyone (including me) uses a lot of mental tricks to avoid this fact.

Animal consciousness

Animals probably have first-person experiences like ours. There is “something it is like to be them.” There are a lot of reasons to think this:

• Humans are animals. We evolved. It would be strange if what we feel as the experience of pain and suffering only appeared when the first humans appeared. We’re on the very very very very end of a very specific recent evolutionary line.

• All the signs that other humans are conscious and aware show up in a lot of other animals. It’s hard for me to watch videos of pigs doing tasks or a cow playing fetch without thinking the pig or cow has conscious awareness of the world, beyond just unfeeling information processing.

• The consensus of scientists and philosophers of mind seems to be that most animals have first-person conscious experiences of the world.

• The ideas in philosophy of mind I find most convincing (physicalism and functionalism) very strongly imply that whatever’s going on in human brains is probably happening in animal brains as well. There’s no magic spark in human brains that gives us souls animals are missing.

It seems likely then that when I see animals (at least mammals) in extreme pain, what I’m seeing is effectively another human mind going through that I-can-barely-even-think-about-this level of extreme suffering, just with fewer mental capacities in other areas. Internally, extreme pain might not feel too different to a person than it would to another mammal. A knife cutting into a pig without anesthetic (which happens regularly) probably doesn’t feel that different to the pig than it would to a person. This goes against most of my intuitions. The suffering a person would experience at being cut with a knife without anesthetic is horrifying for me to think about. When I think about the same thing happening to a pig, there’s a large part of my emotional reaction that says “Well that’s natural, a pig is an animal, it doesn’t really feel things in the way we do.” I don’t see any rational argument for why my emotional reaction actually lines up with reality. It seems much more likely that the suffering that causes me horror to think about in people is also happening in the mind of the pig. It just happens that the pig has a different outer appearance and an inability to reason. Neither of these should matter. If the person being cut had a different outer appearance or inability to reason, that wouldn’t affect my sense that this is a drastic emergency. It shouldn’t matter for the pig either.

If this is the case, it’s pretty clearly one of the most important facts about the world.

Animals can’t form higher level thoughts about suffering in the way a human can. For me, higher level thoughts don’t matter much when I’m experiencing pain. If anything, they help me manage and cope with pain and suffering. If someone turned off my capacity to think and reason, pain and suffering would be much more overwhelming for me, not less.

We might also ask how many of our own pains are felt on that grand, Shakespearean scale of tragic suffering…. A kick in the shorts does not send a man into an existential crisis or exquisite agony of the soul. It just hurts, and like animals, we scream. When injured or abused, animals shriek, squeal, squawk, bark, growl, whinny, and whimper. Some shake, perspire, and lose breath when in danger. Others get listless and refuse food in abandonment and separation. For all we know, their pain may sometimes seem more immediate, blunt, arbitrary, and inescapable than ours. Walk through an animal shelter or slaughterhouse and you wonder if animal suffering might not at times be all the more terrifying and all encompassing without benefit of the words and concepts that for us, after all, confer not only meaning but consolation. Whatever’s going on inside their heads, it doesn’t seem “mere” to them.

Some people imagine that animal pain must in some ways be “dulled” or “lesser” because they’re not human. The animal’s consciousness is somehow turned down, like there’s a dial that dims it:

This doesn’t make sense. Pigs don’t behave as if they have dulled experiences. They behave as if they have very rich experiences of the world, and just lack the higher level reasoning abilities humans have.

This also wouldn’t make sense from an evolutionary perspective. Pain and suffering exist to send extremely strong signals that something about an animal’s situation needs to change fast, to the point that they need to override everything else. It wouldn’t make sense for a pig’s inner experience of extreme pain to be dull and flat compared to a human’s. They have just as much evolutionary reason to experience and react to extreme pain.

A world where pigs have human-like experiences of pain when they’re cut open or otherwise mistreated seems uniquely bad. It’s as if we’re torturing billions of beings like us because they happened to be born stuck in bodies we don’t empathize with, and minds that can’t reason well enough to try to convince us to stop. It’s very hard for me to find convincing arguments in philosophy of mind implying this isn’t the actual situation in the world, or at least very likely to be.

It’s hard to understand how people identify as gritty realists when they say they don’t believe animals can suffer in meaningful ways, who talk as if animal suffering is secretly pretend. If anything this seems to be a pretty straightforward denial of evolution, or a claim that there’s something in a human mind that’s uniquely magic that only appeared at the very very very end of a specific evolutionary line. Gritty realists who sneer at animal welfare arguments usually seem to imagine that animals are basically robots: there to put on a show for us, but having no inner “what it’s like to be them” first-person experience. All of nature exists to entertain and be used by us.

I do not need to be reminded that rabbits are often a nuisance to farmers and gardeners. My point is that when you look at a rabbit and can see only a pest, or vermin, or a meal, or a commodity, or a laboratory subject, you aren’t seeing the rabbit anymore. You are seeing only yourself and the schemes and appetites we bring to the world—seeing, come to think of it, like an animal instead of as a moral being with moral vision.

In a lot of conversations about animal welfare, my biggest hurdle is often trying to convince these gritty realists that between the two of us, their vision of the world seems like the one that’s based on an unthinking emotional reaction. Our felt sense that animals are basically animatronics seems to run really deep, but that’s not a final argument that it reflects reality. If evidence and reason both strongly point in the opposite direction, we’re obligated to override our emotions to figure out what’s true.

Why is this felt sense that animals are robots so strong in the first place? It seems to be humans’ default emotional reaction to animals, including my own. Why? I think I know the culprit.

Evo psych

Why is it so hard for so many people to really on a gut level believe that animals can experience extreme suffering? I have to admit I also often struggle to think this. When I see a pig in distress, I sometimes have the same reaction as seeing something animatronic flail and scream. It’s often hard for me to internalize that it’s another conscious being like myself.

I suspect I evolved to respond this way.

In the evolutionary environment, there would have been basically no reason to evolve an empathetic reaction to other animals. Empathetic reactions matter a lot for human tribes. They help form bonds, mediate conflicts, make you a reliable trading partner, etc. An early human who empathized with animals too much would have been an untrustworthy ally to other humans. Easily distracted. Not a super successful strategy for passing on your genes. It seems likely that we’ve evolved to assume animals are so unfeeling that they’re insignificant to our concerns. The sense that nature is actually just a huge pile of animatronics is probably hard-wired into us.

This evolutionary vestige doesn’t tell us anything about whether animals can actually suffer in meaningful ways. We also evolved to believe that if there’s no force on an object, it naturally comes to rest. Newton helped us see that’s fake news.

Conversations about animal ethics

The narrative I believe about animal suffering is kind of the inverse of the animal welfare skeptic’s narrative.

For the skeptic, animal welfare advocates are blinded by their emotional reactions to animals and need to rise above them to notice that we can use animals however we like, because animals basically don’t have inner experiences in the way we do. Caring about animals is an evolutionary misfiring.

For me, animal welfare skeptics are blinded by their evolutionarily hard-wired intuitions about animals, and need to rise above their immediate emotional lack of reaction to animals to intellectually accept that animals can very likely suffer in ways similar to humans. They very likely have inner experiences similar to ours. Their sense that animal suffering is pretend is an evolutionary vestige, not something that reveals the truth about the world.

This core misunderstanding leads to hours of wasted time in conversations about animal ethics. I often have people say “Oh, well veganism is a personal choice. You wouldn’t tell other people what to do, right?” and I say “Well here I would. I don’t think this is a personal choice we’re making, because our choices affect animals. My choosing to harm another person also isn’t just a personal choice.” The other person then talks exactly as if I’d said “It’s not a personal choice, because it involves harming a toy robot” and goes into how what other people do with animals isn’t really my business. I’ve seen a lot of animal welfare conversations get bogged down in the back and forth here, where it’s not made clear that the main disagreement is that animal suffering is real in the same way human suffering is, and that our felt sense that it’s not real is a bad guide to reality. Clarifying that more directly could save a lot of time.

The core animal welfare intuition about factory farms is basically “Animals are conscious beings like ourselves, lacking some mental capacities but not others, and they can most likely experience many of the same forms of extreme suffering we correctly treat as an emergency when humans experience it. It would be good to not have an unimaginably vast underclass of conscious beings like ourselves who we regularly subject to nightmarish suffering with basically no positive experiences to make up for it only because they have unsympathetic outer appearances and can’t reason or think complexly enough to convince us to stop.” Call that an evolutionary misfiring if you want. I think of it more as stepping out of our illusions in the same way that physics as a science allows us to transcend our evolved intuitions about movement to see the bare truth of the world. F = ma, and animal suffering isn’t pretend.

This article was written 100% by ChatGPT in a single deep research response. It took me about 15 seconds of typing to generate. You can read my prompt and the original conversation here. The only way I edited the response for this post was turning links to ChatGPT’s sources into hyperlinks in the text itself. ChatGPT also seemed to have trouble generating two images it included in the report, so I removed those. As you read this article, consider ways deep research might be useful to your own learning.

I aimed for this article to follow my basic standards for good animal welfare communication:

• Minimal emotional language, just sober presentation of the facts. Let the reader decide what these facts mean.

• Focus on total numbers and percentages of animals in the situations described. Too many articles about animals in factory farms focus on specific bad practices without making it clear how common the practices are or how many animals they’re affecting.

• No gruesome images of factory farms. These have their place and can be extremely important, but I think too many people experience them as emotionally manipulative. If you’re on the market for footage of factory farms, watch Dominion. I could only make it about 10 minutes through and really respect people who can look at this stuff directly. For me images of animals in factory farms is often so disturbing that it’s incapacitating and demotivating. More positive examples of how we could treat animals are more motivating for me.

If after reading this you feel more motivated to work on and think about animal welfare, I’d strongly encourage you to read more about the problem (this is my favorite starting point), set up a donation to an effective animal charity, think about ways you can communicate the problem to others, and (only if your life and dietary needs allow) consider becoming vegan or reducing your meat consumption (with a focus on reducing the lowest welfare animal products: fish, chicken, eggs, and pork roughly in that order).

I also plugged this article into Google’s NotebookLM, which creates a podcast where two AI hosts discuss the post. You can listen to that here:

The State of Pig Welfare in U.S. Factory Farms

Introduction

The welfare of pigs in U.S. factory farms has become a growing concern as the scale and intensity of pork production have increased. Pigs are intelligent, social animals capable of complex behaviors and emotions. Yet, on modern industrial farms, their lives are tightly controlled from birth to slaughter, often in ways that severely constrain natural behaviors. This blog post provides a comprehensive overview of pig welfare in U.S. factory farming. We will walk through the typical lifecycle of a factory-farmed pig – from breeding sows in gestation crates, to piglets and growing pigs in confinement, through transport and slaughter – and examine standard industry practices. Along the way, we will highlight key welfare issues (both physical and psychological), present data on the scale of the industry, and review recent legislative developments like California’s Proposition 12. The goal is to present a neutral, evidence-based picture of what life is like for the majority of pigs in U.S. factory farms, and to consider whether these animals experience more suffering than well-being.

The Scale of U.S. Pig Farming

U.S. pig farming today is dominated by large industrial operations. Each year, over 120 million pigs are raised for food in the United States. At any given time, the national swine inventory is around 75 million hogs and pigs. The vast majority of these animals are raised in high-intensity, indoor confinement operations commonly referred to as factory farms. In 2022, more than 90% of U.S. pigs were raised on mega-scale farms (operations with over 5,000 pigs). This represents a dramatic consolidation of the industry – for example, Iowa (the top pork-producing state) now has far fewer pig farms than a few decades ago, yet houses more pigs than ever due to larger farm sizes.

The trend toward industrial-scale production means that most pigs live in densely populated facilities with controlled environments and automated systems. According to USDA surveys, over 99% of pigs in nursery and grow-out phases are kept indoors with no outdoor access, typically on concrete or slatted floors. Only a tiny fraction of U.S. pigs are raised in alternative systems. One estimate suggests that 98.6% of pigs in the U.S. live on factory farms as opposed to small or pasture-based farms. In short, industrial farming is the norm for American pigs, and understanding their welfare requires looking at conditions inside these facilities.

The Life Cycle of a Factory-Farmed Pig

To understand pig welfare, it’s helpful to follow the life of a typical factory-farmed pig. The process can be divided into stages: breeding and gestation (mother sows), farrowing and nursing (sows and piglets), weaning and growing (young pigs raised for meat), and finally transport to slaughter. At each stage, standard industry practices affect the animals’ well-being in specific ways.

Breeding Sows and Gestation Crates

The journey begins with breeding sows – adult female pigs who are repeatedly bred to produce litters of piglets. In industrial systems, breeding is typically done via artificial insemination on a strict cycle. A sow’s pregnancy (gestation) lasts about 114 days (roughly 3¾ months). During this time, the prevailing industry practice has been to confine each pregnant sow in a gestation crate: a narrow metal stall usually about 2 feet wide by 7 feet long (≈0.6 by 2.1 m). These crates are just barely large enough for the sow’s body. Sows can stand up and lie down, but cannot turn around or walk more than a step forward or back. The floor is often bare concrete or slatted, with no bedding. Each crate typically has an automatic feeder and water source, and sows are kept side by side in rows of stalls inside a windowless barn.

For decades, gestation crates have been the industry standard because they allow efficient space use and individualized feeding of sows. However, the welfare trade-offs are severe. A sow in a gestation stall experiences extreme movement restriction – she cannot engage in normal activities like exploring, nest-building, or even turning to scratch her body. Scientific consensus holds that such confinement leads to poor welfare. Crated sows commonly develop stereotypies – repetitive, stress-driven behaviors such as bar-biting or “sham chewing” (chewing nothing) for hours on end. Studies have documented crated sows spending 5–30% of their day bar-biting and over a third of the day rooting or chewing with no food present. These behaviors indicate frustration and chronic stress, as the animals attempt to cope with an environment that denies their basic needs. In fact, virtually all sows confined long-term in gestation crates develop some form of stereotypic behavior over time.

Another observed effect is learned helplessness or apathy. Sows crated for long periods may become lethargic and unresponsive to stimuli, a sign of psychological depression. In one experiment, crated pregnant sows barely responded when cold water was poured on them (many did not bother to stand up for over 20 minutes), whereas group-housed sows reacted much more actively. Researchers concluded that the lack of responsiveness indicated the animals had to severely suppress normal reactions to cope with their environment, “so its welfare is bad”.

Physical health problems also arise. Sows in stalls suffer more urinary tract infections (from inability to move and fully empty the bladder), weakened bones and muscles (due to inactivity), and pressure sores on their shoulders or bodies from constant contact with the crate bars and floor. One veterinary report noted that lack of bedding plus limited space prevents normal postures, causing discomfort and higher risk of injury. Shoulder lesions (ulcers) are common in crated sows, especially during late gestation; herd surveys have found anywhere from 0% up to 20% of sows with shoulder ulcers, depending on management. Because a crated sow must eat, sleep, and defecate in one small spot, her hygiene and comfort are often compromised – she cannot move away from waste, and temperature extremes are harder to avoid.

It’s also important to note that breeding sows are often kept on restricted feed. To prevent excessive weight gain (which can cause problems in pregnancy and birthing), industrial sows are typically not fed as much as they would freely eat. They live in a state of perpetual hunger; studies confirm that conventionally fed pregnant sows show signs of chronic hunger and high motivation for more food. This hunger drives much of their obsessive chewing and bar-biting behaviors. In short, the breeding sow’s experience – confined in a tiny crate, unable to move, often hungry, and showing stress behaviors – raises serious welfare concerns.

It’s estimated that historically 60–80% of U.S. breeding sows have been kept in gestation crates during pregnancy. A 2012 industry survey found about 82% of sows on farms with 1,000+ pigs were spending their gestations in crates. By 2021, this number had shifted somewhat – the USDA reported roughly 58% of breeding sows still spend at least part of their lives in gestation crates, while about 40% of sows were in group housing for pregnancy. This gradual trend toward group housing (driven by welfare concerns and new state laws) means some sows now get to live in pens where they can move and socialize between pregnancies. Still, even on many “crate-free” gestation farms, sows may be placed in crates briefly for breeding or other handling. And nearly all sows, even those pregnant in groups, will end up confined for farrowing (giving birth), as described next.

Farrowing Crates, Piglets, and Mutilations

After about 16 weeks in gestation, a sow is moved to a farrowing crate to give birth. The farrowing crate is similar to a gestation crate in restricting the sow’s movement – she still cannot turn around – but it includes an attached pen area for her newborn piglets. The design aims to protect nursing piglets from being accidentally crushed when the sow lies down. A typical farrowing crate gives the mother just enough room to lie on her side to nurse, while piglets can move in a small area alongside her and access her teats through bars. The crate usually has heated floor pads or heat lamps for piglets, since the sow has no bedding to provide warmth.

Piglets are usually born indoors on these crate floors (often slatted or coated concrete). A modern sow gives birth to a large litter – on average 11 piglets are born, of which about 10 survive to weaning. Mortality in the farrowing phase can be significant; roughly 10% of piglets die before weaning on U.S. farms (common causes are being crushed, starvation of runt piglets, or disease). The surviving piglets remain with the sow for a very short period by natural standards. Weaning typically occurs at around 3 weeks (20 days) of age in industrial systems. This is an early weaning, done to allow the sow to recover and be bred again quickly (industrial sows produce about 2 litters per year). In contrast, piglets in natural conditions might nurse for 8–12 weeks. Early weaning is stressful for both piglets and the sow – it abruptly breaks the maternal bond and removes the piglets from sow’s milk before they would naturally self-wean.

During those first 2–3 weeks in the farrowing crate, the sow faces additional welfare challenges. She has strong instinctual drives to perform maternal behaviors like nest-building before birth and careful nursing after. Farrowing crates prevent sows from building nests (e.g., gathering straw – there is none provided) and limit their interaction with piglets to nursing through bars. Sows often show frustration prior to birth when unable to nest, and may show defensive aggression if they perceive piglets are threatened, yet they themselves cannot move freely. After the piglets are born, the sow still cannot turn or leave the confined spot, which can lead to discomfort (she must lie in one position often) and pressure sores, especially as piglets grow and compete for nursing. Some sows bite or chew the bars (another stereotypy) even in farrowing crates, or exhibit restlessness, indicating stress.

For the piglets, the farrowing house is where they experience the first standard mutilations. Within a few days of birth, factory-farmed piglets are subjected to several painful procedures, typically without any anesthetic or pain relief. The common practices include:

• Tail Docking: The piglets’ tails are cut off (usually with a clipper or hot blade). This is done to prevent tail-biting behavior later when pigs are kept in crowded, stimulus-poor pens. A pig will sometimes bite others’ tails out of stress or boredom; docking the tail short supposedly makes it less of a target and may reduce serious injuries. Tail docking causes acute pain and can lead to chronic pain or sensitivity (neuromas) as the tail stump heals. In the U.S., tail docking of piglets is routine on most large farms – effectively nearly all pigs in confinement have docked tails. No analgesia is provided in almost all cases.

• Castration: Male piglets (roughly 50% of the litter) are surgically castrated, usually within the first week of life. This involves cutting open the scrotum and removing the testes by hand or scalpel. The purpose is to prevent “boar taint” (an off-odor in meat from mature males) and to reduce aggressive and sexual behaviors when males grow. Virtually all male pigs in U.S. farms are castrated, and this is typically done with no anesthesia or painkillers. Studies show piglets emit high-pitched squeals and physiological signs of pain during and after castration, and the pain can persist for days, yet the industry has not widely adopted pain mitigation for cost and practicality reasons.

• Teeth Clipping/Grinding: Piglets are born with “needle teeth” (sharp canine teeth). On many farms, these teeth are clipped off or ground down soon after birth to prevent piglets from biting each other or injuring the sow’s udder while nursing. This practice causes short-term pain to the piglet and is usually done without pain relief. Some farms have moved away from routine teeth clipping if not needed, but it is still common.

• Ear Notching/Tagging: Identification marks might be applied by cutting notches in piglets’ ears or attaching plastic ear tags. Tail tattoos or other identification might be done later for slaughter tracking.

These procedures are performed in assembly-line fashion on hundreds of piglets a day by farm workers. The handling and procedures are stressful – piglets are briefly separated from the sow, restrained, and endure pain. There is emerging research and ethical debate about these practices, but currently there is no U.S. law requiring pain relief for piglet mutilations, and only recommendations (for example, the American Veterinary Medical Association recommends using analgesics for tail docking and castration, but acknowledges it rarely happens in practice).

Once piglets are weaned around 3 weeks old, they are removed entirely from the sow. The sow is typically moved back to a gestation or breeding area to be inseminated again for the next litter. Breeding sows are usually kept for several pregnancies (perhaps 3–5 years of age) before they are culled (sent to slaughter when their productivity declines, often as low-grade meat). Thus, a breeding sow spends the majority of her adult life cycling between impregnation in a gestation crate, farrowing/nursing in a farrowing crate, a brief recovery, then back to a gestation crate. Her opportunities for normal movement or outdoor access are essentially nil in a factory farm system. According to USDA, over 97% of U.S. breeding sows are housed indoors with no outdoor access at all. This intensive cycle raises questions about the sow’s quality of life, as we will discuss later.

Weaning to Finishing: Pigs Raised for Meat

The weaned piglets (now weighing around 10–15 lbs each) are next sent to nursery barns or wean-to-finish barns. Here, piglets from many different litters are mixed together in groups. In a nursery, they are kept in pens (usually concrete floors, often slatted to allow waste to fall through) with dozens of piglets per pen. The environment is kept warm and ventilated, and piglets are fed a specialized diet to transition from milk to solid feed. After several weeks, they graduate to the grower/finisher stage, typically being moved to a finishing barn once they are around 8–12 weeks old.

In grow-finish barns, pigs live from roughly 2–3 months of age until they reach market weight at around 6 months of age. These facilities are usually large warehouse-like buildings holding hundreds or thousands of pigs. Pigs are kept in group pens, often separated by age/size. For example, a pen might hold 20–50 pigs of similar weight. Each pig may have only a small amount of floor space – for instance, a typical industry space allowance might be around 8 square feet per pig by the end of finishing (when the hogs weigh 250 lbs each). Stocking densities are high, meaning the pigs can move a few steps and jostle among each other, but space is limited enough that the barn feels crowded with bodies.

Standard finishing barns provide no outdoor access and minimal enrichment. Over 99% of U.S. market pigs are indoors full-time. The pens usually have slatted floors so that manure falls into a pit below; this keeps the pigs cleaner but means air quality can suffer from the buildup of ammonia and gases from the waste pit. There is usually no straw, bedding, or other material for pigs to root in or manipulate – the pen is barren, perhaps with some metal or plastic fixtures and a couple of nipple drinkers or feed troughs. Pigs are highly curious animals that in natural settings would spend hours daily rooting in soil, exploring, and socializing. In the factory farm pen, their only real activities are eating, drinking, lying down, and interacting (or fighting) with pen-mates. This lack of stimulation can lead to problematic behaviors. Even though their tails were docked as piglets, tail biting still sometimes occurs in grow-out if pigs become stressed or ill, and can lead to painful infections or cannibalism. Likewise, pigs may fight, especially when unfamiliar pigs are mixed or if they are crowded. The farm tries to manage these issues by separating aggressors, adjusting diets, etc., but behavioral vices are common signs of boredom or discomfort.

Health problems in these facilities can spread quickly due to crowding. Respiratory disease is a leading concern – many pigs develop lesions in their lungs by slaughter age from persistent ammonia exposure or pathogens in the barn air. To control disease, most industrial pigs receive vaccines and may be given antibiotics in feed or water, especially when young, though antibiotic use in feed has been somewhat reduced in recent years due to regulations. Nonetheless, conditions can be stressful: temperature fluctuations (if ventilation fails, pigs can overheat or get cold), competition for food (if some pigs are weaker), and general handling. The typical mortality rate for pigs in the grow-finish stage is around 4%, meaning many die from illness or injury before reaching market weight. Those that survive to around 6 months (roughly 250–280 lbs) are then ready for market.

Transport and Slaughter

When market-weight pigs are sent to slaughter, they usually travel from the farm to a slaughterhouse (also called a packing plant) on a livestock truck. These transport journeys can range from short (under an hour if a local plant is nearby) to very long hauls across states. Transportation is a stressful ordeal for pigs. They are forced to leave their familiar pen, get crowded up a ramp into a truck, and then endure a jostling ride often in extreme weather conditions. Standard livestock trailers for pigs are double-deck, with narrow aisles. Pigs might be packed at around 200–250 kg per square meter (per EU transport guidelines for example), meaning limited room to lie down. Ventilation in trucks is usually passive (open sides) with no climate control. In hot weather, pigs are prone to overheating and even death from heat stress (since pigs cannot sweat effectively). In cold weather, they can suffer frostbite or hypothermia if not shielded.

Federally, the Twenty-Eight Hour Law is the only U.S. regulation governing livestock transport conditions. Originally passed in 1873 (amended later), it requires that animals not be transported for more than 28 hours without a stop for rest, water, and food. However, this law is woefully outdated and weak: 28 hours without a break is extremely taxing (most countries mandate shorter maximum intervals), and enforcement is very lax. Many trucks do not stop, or if they do, facilities to rest pigs are scarce. The law also doesn’t specify humane handling during loading/unloading, ventilation requirements, or protections from temperature extremes. As a result, transport losses are an expected part of the industry. In 2024, for instance, over 800,000 hogs arrived at slaughter plants unable to walk (non-ambulatory) due to transport stress or injury, according to USDA data analysis . Some pigs die in transit from heat stroke, cold, or trauma. Overall, millions of farm animals (mostly poultry, but also livestock) die each year during transport in the U.S.

Upon arrival at the slaughterhouse, pigs are unloaded (often with workers using paddles or electric prods to move them). If a pig is non-ambulatory (a “downer”), standard practice is usually to euthanize it on-site (since USDA inspectors will condemn animals that cannot walk due to fear of disease; downer adult pigs are not outright banned from slaughter like cattle are, but they often are not processed for human food). For the ambulatory pigs, the slaughter process begins with stunning to render them unconscious, followed by killing (bleeding out) and butchering. Under the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (HMSA), pigs (as mammals) are required by federal law to be stunned prior to being shackled and cut. The two main stunning methods for swine in the U.S. are electrical stunning or CO₂ gas stunning:

• Electrical stunning: Using a high-voltage electric current applied usually via tongs to the pig’s head (or head and heart in some systems). This should induce a grand mal seizure and unconsciousness. It must be applied properly to be effective. Electrical stunning is quick (a few seconds) but each pig must be individually restrained for the shock, which can be stressful.

• CO₂ gas stunning: Many large plants (including nearly all major pork processors in the U.S.) use CO₂ chambers. Groups of pigs (4–6 at a time typically) are herded into a gondola or elevator that is then lowered into a pit filled with high-concentration carbon dioxide gas. The CO₂ induces unconsciousness over ~30 seconds. Industry favors this method because it allows pigs to be stunned in groups without handling each animal individually. However, CO₂ at high concentrations is aversive – pigs often panic, gasping and squealing, as the gas causes a feeling of suffocation before they pass out. Research and welfare audits have noted pigs may experience significant distress during those half-minute in the gas, leading some to call for better alternatives.

If stunning is effective, the pig is unconscious and ideally insensible to pain when it is hoisted and its throat or chest is cut to bleed it out. However, with rapid processing line speeds, mistakes can happen. There have been documented incidents (via USDA reports or undercover footage) of pigs regaining consciousness at improper times – for example, some have been observed still breathing or even screaming while hanging on the bleed rail, or during the scalding/dehairing process that comes after bleeding. Such incidents are considered serious humane slaughter violations. USDA inspectors are stationed in plants to monitor humane handling, but enforcement can be inconsistent. The vast majority of pigs are likely slaughtered without major incident, but even in the best case, the slaughter experience involves fear and stress: pigs are moved through chutes, often hear the screams of those ahead, and can smell blood. Plant employees may use electric prods to force reluctant pigs, adding to the animals’ distress. For instance, a review of USDA enforcement actions found cases of workers excessively electroshocking and dragging pigs that refused to move.

In sum, the final hours of a factory-farmed pig’s life are often filled with stress and fear during transport and lairage (holding at the plant), followed by a slaughter process that, while intended to be humane, can inflict suffering if not perfectly executed. U.S. law covers the act of slaughter itself under the HMSA, but there are no federal laws regulating on-farm handling or conditions, or the specifics of transport beyond the old 28-hour rule. This regulatory gap means much of a pig’s life cycle – from birth to the slaughterhouse gate – is not protected by any specific animal welfare laws (outside of general anti-cruelty laws, which typically exempt standard farming practices).

Key Welfare Issues in Factory Farming

From the above lifecycle description, several overarching welfare issues emerge. These issues have been documented by veterinarians, animal welfare scientists, and even industry experts:

• Extreme Confinement and Movement Restriction: Breeding sows in gestation and farrowing crates are the clearest example – these animals cannot perform basic movements like turning around. This leads to physical problems (sores, weakened muscles, stiffness, injuries) and psychological distress (frustration, boredom, depression). The inability to exercise or change posture causes health degradation over time; for example, crated sows have been found to have lower bone strength and muscle mass compared to group-housed sows, and a higher incidence of lameness and joint problems. The lack of space also prevents normal behaviors like foraging or nest-building, causing intense frustration.

• Behavioral Deprivation and Mental Stress: Pigs are cognitively complex animals – they would normally root, explore, socialize, and build nests. Factory farms largely deprive them of these outlets. Sows on restricted feed experience chronic hunger, evidenced by nearly constant food-seeking behaviors. All confined pigs experience some level of sensory deprivation in barren pens. These conditions lead to abnormal behaviors (stereotypies like bar-biting in sows, or bar-chewing and sham chewing in confined growing pigs) which are widely recognized as indicators of poor welfare. In group pens, pigs may redirect frustrations into tail-biting or aggression. Essentially, the mental welfare of pigs is often poor: studies have even shown signs of clinical depression in continuously crated sows (e.g. showing low responsiveness and possible anhedonia – inability to feel pleasure). The cumulative stress can weaken immune function and make pigs more disease-prone, creating a cycle of health issues.

• Painful Procedures and Injuries: Routine practices like tail docking and castration cause pain. The absence of pain relief makes these procedures significant welfare insults. Piglets may suffer acute pain for days from castration wounds, and tail docking pain can continue if neuromas develop. As pigs grow, some will incur injuries in the pen (fighting wounds, leg injuries on slick floors, etc.). Overcrowding can lead to scratches, hoof lesions, and other ailments that, if left untreated, cause chronic pain. Transport to slaughter frequently results in bruises, cuts, or worse – some pigs sustain broken limbs or internal injuries if handled roughly or if the truck brakes suddenly. It’s reported that a substantial number of market pigs (over 1%) arrive at plants with serious injuries or unable to walk from the transport, necessitating euthanasia. These are all painful outcomes directly related to intensive farming and handling methods.

• Health Problems from Intensive Conditions: Factory farm conditions can foster disease and health issues. Respiratory diseases thrive in enclosed barns with poor air. Gastrointestinal issues (like ulcers) can occur, especially since pigs have little to do but eat – some may engage in abnormal drinking or chewing that can upset their digestive system. Physical comfort is often compromised, as noted by experts: lack of bedding means pigs are on hard surfaces causing discomfort and limb strain. When temperatures are not ideal, pigs may overheat or shiver since they cannot move to a preferable microclimate. The stress hormone levels (cortisol) in pigs have been found higher under some confinement and handling stresses, correlating with lowered immunity. Industrial pigs also often undergo rapid growth (genetic selection for fast weight gain), which can outpace what their joints and hearts can handle, leading to leg disorders or heart failure in some cases. While producers manage gross disease outbreaks (like porcine respiratory or diarrheal viruses) with biosecurity and medicine, the baseline health of pigs can be suboptimal. For instance, it’s not uncommon for slaughter inspectors to find pneumonia lesions in the lungs of market hogs or signs of chronic infection; these reflect living conditions that challenged the pigs’ health.

• Limited Positive Experiences: One way to gauge animal welfare is to ask not just what harms they endure, but what positive aspects their life contains. A factory-farmed pig’s life is largely devoid of enrichment or joy. Unlike a pig in a natural setting that might enjoy mud wallows, sunbathing, rooting for treats, social play, or mothering young, the factory pig experiences monotony. They eat a formulated feed (nutritious but not varied), live under artificial light cycles, and have few interactions beyond shoving pen-mates at the feeder. They do not get to form normal social groups (group compositions change with weaning and sorting), and sexual behavior is nullified (breeding is artificial or constrained). For sows, maternal behaviors like nest-building or extended nursing are thwarted. In short, opportunities for natural pleasures – exploring, bonding, grooming each other, etc. – are minimal. This lack of positive welfare is an important point: even if basic needs (food, water, shelter) are met such that the animals survive and grow, the quality of that life can be very poor.

Laws, Reforms, and Industry Practices

Unlike pets or laboratory animals, farm animals in the U.S. have very few legal protections concerning their treatment on the farm. There is no federal law regulating the daily husbandry of pigs (e.g., no law banning crates or requiring enrichment). The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act provides protection at the slaughter stage (requiring humane stunning), and the 28-Hour Law gives a modest transport requirement, but practices like confinement housing and physical alterations are left to industry standards and state laws. Over the past two decades, however, a number of states have enacted laws to curb the most extreme confinement:

• Florida (2002) was the first state to ban gestation crates via a ballot initiative (for pigs kept in Florida). Since then, at least 9 states including Arizona, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, and Rhode Island have passed laws banning or phasing out gestation crates (and sometimes also farrowing crates) on farms in their state. These laws typically require that breeding pigs be given enough space to turn around and extend their limbs – effectively outlawing the 2’x7’ crate. Most of these state laws pertain to relatively small pork-producing states (with the exception of Michigan and Ohio). Indeed, as of 2022 only about 3% of the national breeding herd was in states with active gestation crate bans . Even when Ohio’s ban and others fully kick in by 2026, it’s projected that under 10% of U.S. pigs will be covered by such state housing standards . In Iowa, North Carolina, Minnesota, and other top hog states, crates remain standard practice.

• California’s Proposition 12 (2018) is a game-changer because it extends beyond state borders. Prop 12, approved by voters, not only bans cruel confinement (gestation crates for pigs, battery pcages for hens, veal crates for calves) within California, but also bans the sale in California of pork (as well as eggs/veal) produced using such confinement. It requires that any whole pork cuts sold in CA come from operations where each breeding sow had at least 24 square feet of space (and was not confined in a crate). This law effectively pressures pork producers nationwide to eliminate gestation crates if they want access to the California market (which is about 13% of U.S. pork consumption). The pork industry mounted legal challenges, arguing Prop 12 interfered with interstate commerce by imposing California’s standards on out-of-state farms. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Prop 12, allowing it to go into effect. This was a landmark decision affirming that states can set such standards for products sold in-state. As of 2023–2024, pork companies have been adjusting supply chains to comply (some have segregated Prop 12-compliant production, while others declared they would stop selling to California). Prop 12 has arguably done more to spur crate-free housing conversions than any other measure in the U.S. to date.

• Massachusetts Question 3 (2016) is similar to Prop 12. It prohibits crate-confinement of breeding pigs in Massachusetts and disallows the sale of pork in MA from crated systems. After some delays and coordination with Prop 12 implementation, MA’s law is also taking effect. Together, California and Massachusetts create a significant market demand for crate-free pork.

• Corporate Commitments: Even before Prop 12, pressure from consumers and animal welfare groups led many major food companies to pledge crate-free sourcing. By the mid-2010s, restaurant chains like McDonald’s, Burger King, and retailers like Costco and Walmart announced plans to require their pork suppliers to phase out gestation crates (often by 2022 or 2025). These voluntary commitments have had mixed follow-through – some companies and suppliers made genuine progress in shifting to group sow housing, while others lagged or found loopholes. However, the trend is that crate-free pork is slowly becoming more mainstream due to both legal and market forces. The National Pork Producers Council (industry group) has pushed back, stating that farmers should have the freedom to choose their housing systems and warning that pork costs could rise if crates are eliminated . Nonetheless, as of 2022, industry reports indicated roughly 40% of U.S. sows were already in group housing for at least part of pregnancy, and this percentage is expected to grow as Prop 12 and similar rules reshape production.

• Farrowing Crates and Other Practices: Notably, most of the state laws and pledges address gestation crates (pregnant sows). Farrowing crates (for nursing sows) are generally not yet banned, even in California’s Prop 12 (Prop 12 did not end farrowing crates, meaning even in compliant operations a sow may still be crated for the 2-3 weeks around birth). Farrowing crates remain a welfare concern on the horizon for reform – alternatives like farrowing pens exist (where sows have more room and piglet protection bars), but widespread adoption in the U.S. is not yet underway. As for castration and tail docking, there are currently no laws addressing these in the U.S. A few pork companies have experimented with immunocastration (a vaccine to suppress boar taint as an alternative to surgical castration), but it is not widely used. Welfare scientists have recommended pain relief for castration and eventually breeding for pigs that don’t need castration, but the industry has been slow to change. Tail docking remains routine, though the EU has technically banned it (yet still does it in practice often); pressure could mount in future for the U.S. to revisit this if consumers demand it.

• Federal Policy or Lack Thereof: Apart from the Humane Slaughter Act (which, as mentioned, covers the slaughter process) and basic transport law, the federal government has not set standards for on-farm pig welfare. Attempts have been made – for example, during the drafting of the 2023 Farm Bill, there was an EATS Act proposal supported by some lawmakers that would prevent states from imposing their own livestock standards on out-of-state products (essentially an attempt to void Prop 12). This was framed as protecting farmers in one state from laws in another, but it drew heavy criticism for undermining animal welfare progress. As of this writing, no federal legislation to improve pig welfare (such as a nationwide crate ban) has been passed. Thus, the playing field is uneven: a pig’s welfare protections depend largely on the state it’s in and the policies of the company raising it. A pig on a farm in Iowa (no state crate ban, no space requirement) could live her entire life in a 14-square-foot crate, whereas a pig whose meat is destined for California must now come from a sow given 24 square feet and no permanent crating. These differences will likely persist until broader standards are adopted.

Are Factory-Farmed Pig Lives “Net Negative”?

One of the profound ethical questions is whether the typical life of a factory-farmed pig contains more suffering than well-being – in other words, if the animal’s overall experience is net negative. This is a complex question, but we can weigh the factors:

On the negative side, as detailed above, factory-farmed pigs endure a lot of hardship:

• Confinement Stress: Especially for breeding sows, spending months immobilized in crates leads to severe mental and physical distress. The evidence of sustained stereotypies and signs of depression in crated sows suggests a poor quality of life. Imagine an animal who for weeks on end can barely move and must lie in its own waste, feeling hungry and isolated – this points to significant suffering.

• Procedural Pain: Every factory pig has body parts amputated (tails, testes for males) with no pain relief, causing acute pain. While piglets may physically heal in weeks, there is evidence that chronic pain or sensitivity can persist from these early injuries. The necessity of these procedures (from the industry view) doesn’t erase the pain caused.

• Social Deprivation: Pigs are social, and while they are kept in groups in grow-out, those social structures are artificial and often fraught (mixing unfamiliar pigs causes fights; high density prevents comfortable social spacing). Sows, which are naturally social too, are mostly isolated in crates except when briefly in group pens on some farms. Isolation or unpredictable social mixing can be very distressing for such gregarious creatures.

• Boredom and Frustration: Lack of enrichment means the pig’s mental needs are never met. Boredom in animals can itself be a form of suffering – it leads to frustration which they express in harmful ways (like chewing on bars till their mouths hurt, or tail biting peers).

• Fear and Physical Discomfort: The processes of handling, transport, and slaughter all involve fear. Pigs have excellent memories and a sense of danger; they squeal when being forced into situations they perceive as threatening (like the stun box or gas gondola). The last day of a pig’s life is likely one of terror, which could arguably outweigh many “better” days they had. Additionally, throughout life, physical discomfort from living on hard floors, in temperature extremes, or with injuries/disease (e.g., untreated infections, lameness, etc.) adds to suffering.

On the positive side, what does a factory-farmed pig get? The industry would point out that these pigs are kept well-fed, protected from predators, and given medical care when sick – things their wild counterparts or barnyard counterparts might not reliably have. It’s true that a factory pig is generally fed a consistent diet and sheltered from the elements. Farmers and farm workers often care about their animals in the sense of wanting to keep them healthy to grow and avoid losses. There may be moments of contentment – for instance, a pig happily eating a meal or resting quietly after satiation, or piglets snuggling together under a heat lamp. These could be considered positive experiences, however basic.

The question is whether those basic comforts outweigh the negatives. Many animal welfare experts argue they do not. The balance of evidence suggests that the average factory-farmed pig experiences far more negative states (pain, fear, frustration, boredom) than positive ones. For example, the UK’s Farm Animal Welfare Council has promoted the idea that farm animals should have a “life worth living.” In the case of crated sow systems, even some industry consultants have acknowledged that it’s hard to defend those conditions from an animal welfare perspective – they exist to maximize production, not to ensure a life worth living for the sow. When pigs are given a more enriched environment (straw bedding, more space, social stability), they exhibit behaviors and moods consistent with well-being – playing, exploring, relaxing without stress. Those behaviors are largely absent in factory settings. Instead, we see coping behaviors (stereotypies) or health issues that signal distress.

Another way to assess is to consider lifespan and health: A factory pig lives only ~6 months (if for meat) or a few years (for a sow) – these are short, accelerated lives. In that time, nearly all will have a significant injury or ailment (surveys show almost all finishing pigs have some limb or body lesions). Many won’t make it to the planned end (given the non-trivial mortality rates at each stage). If an animal routinely tries to cope (chewing bars thousands of times a day) and sometimes just gives up (lying apathetically), one could infer that its existence is not very satisfying.

Ultimately, whether one calls it net negative is a value judgment, but data can inform it. And the data show high levels of stress (physiologically measured via cortisol and other indicators) in many points of factory-farmed pigs’ lives, and frequent outcomes of poor welfare (injuries, illness, abnormal behavior). The presence of severe welfare compromises led the European Union to ban gestation crates after the first 4 weeks of pregnancy (a policy fully in effect since 2013) on ethical grounds, and the EU is now considering a ban on all cages for farm animals in the future. In the U.S., the ongoing debate around Prop 12 and similar laws hinges on the idea that keeping an animal in a coffin-like crate is cruel. When we enlarge our view to the whole life cycle – add the tail docking, the brutal transport, and so on – it strengthens the argument that these pigs endure more suffering than enjoyment.

One could argue that the factory farm pig might prefer not to be born than to live and die in these conditions. For instance, an observer from the Humane Society stated that breeding sows in crates “experience severe physical and psychological disorders”. If an animal is in near-constant discomfort or distress, it raises serious ethical concerns about whether our food production is causing more harm than the goods it provides. Of course, those in the industry might say the animals would choose life under any conditions over death – but we cannot know an animal’s abstract preference. We can only measure signs of suffering and contentment. By that measure, it appears the contentment is scarce.

In sum, the evidence strongly suggests that most factory-farmed pigs have lives that involve substantial, prolonged suffering. While not every moment is agony, the overall state of existence – cramped, unstimulating, and ended in a frightening way – seems to tilt toward the negative. As consumers and citizens learn about these conditions, it fuels the ethical debate: is it acceptable to treat intelligent, sentient creatures this way for the sake of cheap pork? Increasingly, segments of the public are saying no, as reflected in the legislative changes and corporate policies. The hope of advocates is that giving pigs better lives (more space, enrichment, humane handling) would at least make their existence neutral or positive, even if ultimately they are used for food. For now, however, the conditions described in this post remain prevalent, and thus the conclusion that many factory-farmed pig lives are net negative experiences is hard to avoid.

Conclusion

Pigs are remarkable animals – they form social groups, can solve puzzles, and exhibit emotions ranging from joy to sorrow. Yet on U.S. factory farms, the reality for the majority of pigs is bleak. From the sow confined in a gestation crate, gnawing at metal bars out of frustration, to the piglet who endures castration and tail amputation in its first week, to the growing pig living in a crowded pen with nothing to do but eat and sleep, to the final jarring transport and slaughter – each stage of production presents welfare challenges that cumulatively paint a troubling picture. The scale of this system is enormous (over a hundred million pigs yearly), which makes improving conditions both a moral imperative and a logistical challenge.

Recent progress, like the implementation of Proposition 12 in California and the movement by some producers toward group housing for sows, shows that change is possible. These changes aim to eliminate the most egregious practices (like immobilizing crates) and give pigs a bit more freedom. However, many welfare issues remain unresolved, and enforcement of better standards will be key. As of now, a typical pig in the U.S. pork industry still lives a life that most would consider harsh and deprived. The evidence we’ve reviewed – from scientific studies on stress behavior to government statistics on injuries and fatalities – provides a data-driven understanding of why advocates claim these animals have lives “not worth living” under current conditions.

For those new to this topic, it’s important to approach it with a clear-eyed view of the facts. The intent of this overview is not to villainize farmers (who operate within a system that rewards efficiency) but to shine light on the systemic issues affecting animal welfare. There are ongoing debates and research into alternatives: e.g., enriching environments with straw or toys to reduce tail biting, using genetic selection to create docile pigs that might cope better, adopting slower growth breeds, or even exploring emerging high-welfare farming models. Additionally, consumers play a role – demand for humane-certified or pasture-raised pork, though still small, is growing, and food companies are responding.

In conclusion, the state of pig welfare in U.S. factory farms is one of significant concern. The prevailing system, as it currently stands, produces a great deal of pork at low monetary cost, but at the cost of animal suffering. Neutral tone aside, the evidence is clear that standard practices inflict a level of physical and psychological harm on pigs that is difficult to justify ethically. Ensuring that pigs at least have lives with some pleasures and natural behaviors – not just the absence of extreme suffering – will require concerted efforts in legislation, consumer pressure, and industry innovation. Until then, understanding the reality of how pigs live and die for our food is a crucial first step for anyone who wants to engage in the conversation about farm animal welfare.

Sources:

• USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service – Hogs & Pigs Report (inventory data)

• Investigate Midwest analysis of USDA data – (transport losses and non-ambulatory figures)

• USDA APHIS – Swine 2012 Study (management practices data)

• Vox (Bolotnikova, 2023) – Factory farming statistics

• Economic Research Service, USDA (Ufer, 2022) – State gestation crate laws and herd coverage

• Compassion in World Farming USA (2024) – PigTrack Report (sow housing statistics)

• The Guardian (Gunther, 2013) – Industry survey on crate use

• American Veterinary Medical Association – Backgrounders on swine castration and tail docking

• AWI (Animal Welfare Institute) – Comment on AVMA Sow Housing Policy (review of scientific studies on sow welfare)

• Temple Grandin and Livestock Handling Guide – Humane slaughter techniques and issues (via FSIS and animal welfare organizations)

Contents:

• Introduction

• Why it’s wrong to cause animals to suffer

  • Animal suffering is bad

  • We have a responsibility to not cause animals to suffer

  • We probably don’t benefit animals by farming them

  • What about wild animals?

  • A rule for when it’s acceptable to harm an animal

• How big of an ethical problem is animal welfare?

• Ways you can help end factory farming without becoming vegan

• Why veganism is an effective way to support animal welfare

  • Effects of veganism on animals

  • Why not eat eggs and milk?

  • Why not eat ethically sourced animal products?

• Climate change

• Veganism and health

• Suffering is not all that matters

• Arguments against veganism that I do not take seriously but hear a lot

• The end goal

Introduction

In this post, I’ll argue that animal welfare matters and that we need to end industrial animal farming. I’m not trying to convince you to become vegan, but I am trying to convince you that industrial animal agriculture is such a drastic moral emergency that you should do whatever you can to reduce the number of animals in factory farms. If I could convince you to take one action after reading this, it’s to set up a recurring donation to an effective animal welfare charity, which will probably have a greater positive impact on animals than becoming vegan.

I won’t argue that it’s wrong to hunt animals or to raise them for food on traditional family farms. I will argue that it’s wrong to inflict so much suffering on an animal that it becomes preferable for the animal to have never been born, and that it’s wrong to cause more animals to be born into lives with this level of suffering. 98% of animals farmed for food in the United States are in factory farms, not family farms, and most factory farms seem involve this level of suffering.

This chart shows the percentage of farmed animals in factory farms (not traditional farms) split up by species:

Americans eat 10 billion factory-farmed animals each year. My arguments will be framed around chickens because almost all factory-farmed land animals are chickens. The diet of the average American causes about 2200 chickens to go through life in factory farms in total. It causes a chicken to go through 50 days of life on a factory farm for every 15 days of the diet.

Number of animals the average American will eat in a lifetime:

Linear scale graph of yearly global chicken slaughter (note: graph is not cumulative):

Logarithmic scale:

I made a website here that shows each chicken currently alive in a factory farm in the United States as one dot on the main page.

Throughout this post, I’ll use the word “torture” to describe what’s happening to animals on factory farms. This isn’t meant to say that the animals are constantly being intentionally harmed, but it seems like the only word that gets across how bad their lives are as a whole. “Extreme suffering” gets across something similar but I find it more clunky.

I’m not trying to trigger an emotional reaction. I don’t have much emotional reaction to animals. I’ve never had a pet in my adult life. I also don’t have an emotional reaction to the idea of people from Milwaukee. However, if something I were doing were causing people from Milwaukee to be tortured, I would stop doing it. We have a responsibility to not torture animals regardless of whether we have an immediate emotional reaction to them.

Because I’m not trying to trigger an emotional reaction, I won’t show any images from factory farms or go into any detail about how bad they are. I’ll just ask that you accept my claim that they are so bad that it would on average be better for the animals inside them to not exist. If you found out that your pet was going to be taken away to live on a factory farm for the rest of their life, and you would choose to put it to sleep instead of letting it experience that, you agree with me.

Why it’s wrong to cause animals to suffer

Animal suffering is bad

You meet a stranger who has been in an accident. Their brain was damaged, and their mental capacities were reduced to the level of a chicken’s. Would it be acceptable to torture them? No.

I think of chickens as beings like me who happen to have fewer mental capabilities than I do. Like the stranger, they have each been in a terrible accident: they were born with chicken-level minds and chicken bodies. It’s wrong to torture a chicken in the same way that it would be wrong to torture the stranger.

Does it make sense to think of chickens this way? Humans feel many complex forms of suffering and wellbeing that chickens can’t experience, like the fear of nothingness that comes after death, or the pleasure of a good conversation with a friend. However, other more basic forms of well-being (like physical comfort, satiation, affection, belonging to a social structure, nurturing, etc.) and suffering (like physical pain, discomfort, isolation, fear, etc.) may be experienced by both species. If chickens can experience basic forms of suffering and well-being similar to humans, then a chicken mind is similar to the stranger whose mental capabilities have been lost, and torturing a chicken is about as bad as torturing the stranger. It is very possible that chicken experience is nothing like human experience, but that does not necessarily mean it cannot be good or bad. We could imagine plugging a human into a chicken’s mind, so for a few minutes the human experiences things from the perspective of the chicken, and forms memories of what it is like. When they reawaken, they could be asked if it was a good experience and if they would want to do it again. It seems pretty likely that the human could report that some of the experiences were good and others were bad, even if the experiences were nothing like what humans normally have.

Most people accept this argument as valid, but they do not accept the premise that chickens can experience suffering and well-being. The popular belief is that chickens are basically robots without internal experience, so it’s not good or bad when chickens suffer. This belief is probably wrong. The Wikipedia page on animal consciousness is a great summary of the current scientific debate, which leans strongly in favor of chickens and other animals we farm having at least some meaningful form of conscious experience. A majority of professional philosophers polled report that fish are probably conscious, and chickens have more complex brains and social systems than fish. Because the expert consensus seems to be that chickens have conscious experience, torturing a chicken is likely about as bad as torturing the stranger.

What if I’m wrong and chickens are unfeeling robots? There’s no way we can be sure of this, so we need to think about how to act when we’re uncertain. I would guess that the odds are about 30% that chickens are unfeeling robots. That means that if I buy animal products, there is a 70% chance that I’m contributing to the torture of beings like myself. That’s unacceptable. Imagine you have two options:

• Option 1: You eat a tasty meal, and a person rolls a 10-sided die. If the die lands on a number between 1–7, they torture a person with chicken-level cognitive abilities for a day. If it lands between 8–10, no one is tortured.

• Option 2: You eat a slightly less tasty meal, and no one is tortured.

How low would the odds need to be for you to feel okay about taking the chance? 50%? 20%? For me, it would need to be below 1%. We do not currently have nearly enough certainty about animal consciousness to make the mass torture of chickens a morally acceptable risk to take.

Which other species should we be concerned about? It seems that any animal with a brain and ability to suffer deserves our moral concern. This includes fish. People are sometimes surprised to find out that I think fish welfare matters. Fish are especially alien and not relatable to us. I think these are emotional gut reactions that hide the reality that fish can also suffer. Torturing a person with the mind of a fish seems wrong to me. I am not too concerned about traditional fishing since it’s a small amount of pain relative to the fish’s total life, but 70–85% of the seafood Americans eat comes from farmed fish rather than wild fish, and there are good arguments that farmed fish suffer more per kilogram of meat produced than any other animal.

Some people believe that it is not bad to harm animals that cannot form memories because as soon as the suffering stops the animal is unaffected. I think this is wrong. Imagine you were told that tomorrow you were going to be tortured, and then immediately after your memory would be completely wiped, and it would be as if the torture never happened. How worried would you be? Would you be correct to be worried? I would personally worry and think that I would be correct to be worried. It would be bad even if I did not remember it after. We don’t remember our lives after we die, so by the same logic, it would also be acceptable to harm humans because at some point in the future, they will no longer remember the harm.

There is a lower limit of nervous system development below which animals cannot meaningfully be said to suffer because they have so little experience of pain and well-being, so they do not merit our ethical concern. Oysters and other shellfish probably fall into this category, so it does not seem like there is any ethical problem with farming and eating them. A person with the mind of an oyster would effectively be dead, so it would not be possible to harm them. It seems extremely unlikely that chickens are anywhere near this lower limit.

We have a responsibility to not cause animals to suffer

Some argue that we only have moral responsibility to our species, regardless of how much suffering other species can feel. I think this is wrong. There’s no clear boundary between species and no clear reason why the boundary would be morally relevant. A thought experiment: we meet a human whose DNA has been slightly altered, so instead of a mouth they have a beak. It would not be any more acceptable to torture this person. The wrongness of harming them did not decrease at all. We could change the person’s brain so that they have the mind of a chicken. As with the accident victim, it does not become acceptable to torture the person. It might be that this person did lose some morally relevant qualities. For example: we can no longer harm them by insulting them or denying them human social status, because they won’t understand either, but we can still harm them by causing them pain. The drop to chicken-level mental capacities removes this person’s ability to feel certain forms of well-being and suffering, but it does not drop the badness of harming them to zero. We could make it impossible for them to reproduce with humans; one of the basic barriers between species. Again, this does not make it okay to harm them. We could add feathers, chicken feet, and other chicken traits. There is no clear change we could make along the spectrum from human to chicken that would make it acceptable to harm this person, so it seems that the boundary between species does not matter ethically.

Some philosophers used to argue that we can only have moral responsibility toward rational beings who can themselves make moral decisions. This is clearly false. If this were true, it would be morally acceptable to harm babies or people who cannot form abstract thoughts. We have moral responsibility to beings who are not rational enough to have moral responsibility toward us.

We probably don’t benefit animals by farming them

For me, the most convincing ethical argument in favor of animal agriculture is that we benefit animals by bringing them into existence. The argument goes like this:

We are not only responsible for the suffering we cause farmed animals. We are also responsible for all positive experiences they have, because without us the animals would not have been born in the first place. Buying animal products creates an economic demand to create more animals. If the animal lives are more good than bad, creating more is a good thing, so we should buy animal products.

I completely agree with the premise of the argument, but don’t believe it works as an argument for animal agriculture as it exists now, because the suffering of factory-farmed animals so clearly outweighs any fleeting comfort they may have, and 98% of animal products come from factory farms. If we lived in a world where the well-being of farmed animals outweighed their suffering, I would support animal agriculture. We don’t and are so far from that world that it seems preferable to aim to economically demand as few animal products as possible to ensure that the least animals are tortured.

In the graph below, let’s imagine that each unit on the scale represents an amount of wellbeing and suffering that can be traded-off against each other. This is obviously a silly simplification and I’m only using it to make a very specific point. In this case, Life 3 involves so much suffering that there isn’t enough wellbeing to make up for it and make the life good overall. In human terms we could imagine someone being tortured for their whole lives, and receiving a single ice cream cone at the end. I would not want to live this life and think it would be bad to create more people who would have that life. I would support animal agriculture if most farmed animals were in Life 1 or Life 2, but 98% of farmed animals are almost definitely in Life 3.

We cannot measure the exact well-being and suffering of factory-farmed animals, but we need to guess what their overall lives are like to think about whether it is acceptable to bring them into existence. One easy test is to ask what we would want for ourselves. If I were given the choice between being born a factory-farmed animal or not being born at all, the choice seems obvious to me. I would choose to never be born. Another more reasonable test may be to ask what level of suffering a pet would need to go through for us to choose to euthanize them. Most pet owners need to make a choice at the end of their pet’s life about whether the animal’s future experience will be so bad that it would be preferable for the pet to not exist. If I found out that my pet was going to go through the experience of a chicken on a factory farm, I would choose to euthanize it, because non-existence would be preferable to that level of suffering. I would pay a lot of money and sacrifice a lot of time to make sure my pet never experienced a factory farm. I do not think this is just an emotional reaction. I think this reaction is a rational assessment of what the world is actually like that overrides my emotions. Most pet owners at the time they put their animals to sleep have an emotional desire to keep their pets alive, but they use reason to override their emotions because they understand that it would be wrong to allow a conscious being to suffer at extreme levels for the rest of its life. Most people believe that an animal’s life can be so bad that non-existence is preferable, and it seems very likely that the lives of most factory-farmed animals are this bad. Thus, we do not benefit most farmed animals by bringing them into existence, and the ethical argument for producing more farmed animals fails.

What about wild animals?

A common objection to animal welfare arguments is to bring up wild animals:

Animals in the wild also suffer, sometimes to an extreme degree where their lives are net negative. Factory farms play a very small role in the total animal suffering in the world, and we obviously cannot save all animals in nature from suffering, so we do not need to worry about the welfare of animals in factory farms. Because there is so much suffering that cannot be fixed, we may not need to worry about animal welfare at all.

I think this is wrong for three reasons.

The first reason is that if we are mainly worried about terrestrial vertebrate animals, nature basically does not exist compared to animal agriculture:

The second reason is that no matter how much suffering already exists in the world, more suffering is still bad. Could the current level of human suffering in the world make it acceptable to torture a person, because the person’s suffering would be tiny compared to the total of human suffering? The question seems ridiculous. More suffering is still bad, no matter how much suffering is already happening. No matter how many animals are suffering in nature, torturing even more is still extremely bad.

The third reason is that the suffering of wild animals can still be very bad even though we have much less control over it. People worry about the implications of animal welfare arguments because they assume we would also need to worry about animals in nature. I do believe that the suffering of animals in nature is also bad, but also that we do not have any clear way of making their lives better right now, outside of small interventions. If we imagine humans in thousands of years with technology so advanced that they could remove the experience of suffering from animals in nature without harming the natural systems required to keep us alive, it seems silly to not think this would be an amazingly good event. The reason I focus on farmed animal welfare is only because it is much easier to end a lot more suffering there without disrupting natural systems. This article is a good introduction to the problem of wild animal suffering.

A rule for when it’s acceptable to harm an animal

I follow a simple rule for how to treat animals:

It is only acceptable to cause an animal to suffer when the action causes more total wellbeing for animals than suffering.

Here are 5 situations and how I interpret them using the rule:

1. Hunting animals to prevent overpopulation: This is a quick hit of pain, but also prevents many more animals from experiencing much more painful forms of death from starvation and other bad results of overpopulation. It might also save the animal from having a more painful death in the wild. It robs the hunted animal of future potential wellbeing, but because the animal population is kept stable there will be roughly the same amount of animals experiencing wellbeing in the long-term, so on net, it probably does not take away wellbeing. It seems to decrease the total suffering of animals significantly, so it’s very good.

2. Torturing wild animals: This is worse than anything a wild animal would normally experience, and does not do anything to benefit the animal or other animals. It’s clearly wrong.

3. Raising animals on traditional family farms, treating them well, and allowing them to die natural deaths: This causes a lot of animal well-being and relatively low suffering. It’s very good.

4. Raising animals on traditional family farms, treating them well, and painlessly killing them for food: This gives the farmer economic means and incentive to raise more animals with good lives and a quick painless death, so more well-being results from this than not selling them for food, so it’s preferable to letting them die natural deaths.

5. Factory farming: Extreme amounts of suffering for the sake of generating enough revenue to fund processes that will cause a lot of future animals to also go through extreme suffering. Worse than anything else on the list by a wide margin.

While some of these are moral and some aren’t, 98% of animal products come from factory farms, so the relative morality of the others seems unimportant.

How big of an ethical problem is animal welfare?

If my beliefs are correct, about 10 billion conscious beings like us, who happen to have less capacity to reason and form abstract thoughts, are being put through extreme suffering by humans each year in the U.S. alone. I see this as morally equivalent to America torturing 10 billion humans each year who each happen to have chicken/cow/pig/fish mental capacities. This is an unimaginably large ethical emergency and seems to demand a response from everyone. It is not just one small ethical problem among many.

Ways you can help end factory farming without becoming vegan

You do not need to be vegan to have a positive effect on animals. The movement for animal welfare being associated with a specific and very restrictive diet is a giant problem, because it’s a barrier to more people getting involved. Purity does not matter, reducing animal suffering does. If I could convince 1,000 people to become vegan, or 10 people to donate $100 a year to an effective animal charity, I’d probably choose the latter. Money in the right places can do a lot more good than you can as an individual consumer. That being said, I do think veganism is an effective way to combat factory farming (explained below) but here are other highly effective options:

Donations: Donating to the right places is the single most effective way you can help animals. Many animal charities do not do much good with the money they receive, but the most effective animal charities can have massive effects on animal agriculture. As you can see in the image below, there is currently a massive asymmetry between where animals are suffering and which animal causes Americans are donating to:

Charities working on reducing the number of factory-farmed animals need a lot more funding than they are currently getting. Animal Charity Evaluators aims to find which charities are the most promising for permanently changing the food system and ending factory farming. You can donate to their Recommended Charity Fund and they research where to distribute the money to have the biggest impact on animals. To put my money where my mouth is, I appear in their 2022 Top Donors list.

Being vocal: Most people do not know that factory farming accounts for 98% of animal agriculture, how bad it is, or that animals probably have levels of consciousness that have moral value. Being vocal in your community about the reality of animal agriculture is an important step to enacting animal welfare policies and behavior changes.

Non-vegan dietary changes: If two people reduce their animal product consumption by 50%, that has similar effects to a single person reducing their consumption by 100%. Similarly, the moral difference between eating animal products 1 time per week and 0 times per week is about the same as the moral difference between 2 times per week and 1 time per week. If there are certain animal products you just can’t give up, don’t give them up, but try to reduce how much you eat others. There is a large difference between how much suffering different animal products cause. Grass-fed beef cows may lead net-positive lives, whereas egg-laying chickens probably suffer more than any other land animal. If you cannot give up all animal products but want to reduce suffering the most, stop eating farmed fish, eggs, and chicken, but continue to eat beef and milk. This sounds silly, but I know several “beef vegans” who will eat beef and no other animal products. It’s extremely important to emphasize that replacing meat with eggs as a source of protein leads to much more animal suffering. If you want to reduce suffering, you should replace eggs with meat. (source) This is a common and harmful mistake people who care about animals make. Not eating fish, eggs, and chicken reduces animal suffering by 90% compared to veganism’s 100% (source).

Careers: You can use your career to help end factory farming. This is a good overview of careers in animal welfare.

Why veganism is an effective way to support animal welfare

Effects of veganism on animals

I will not stop animal farming by being vegan, but I can still stop a lot of individual animals from suffering in factory farms. There are multiple ways to think about how many animals we can each have an effect on by going vegan:

• View 1: A single individual buyer has basically no effect on supply chains as complex as animal agriculture. Whether I buy animal products does not affect how many animals get tortured. Being vegan does give other people a strong signal that I care about animal welfare, which may cause them to care about animal welfare too. Still seems like a win, but a small one.

• View 2: Each person who does not buy animal products is casting an economic vote to stop producing them and to produce more plant-based alternatives. Each vote may not tip the scales, but we are collectively responsible for collective wins and can divide the wins by the number of people voting to get a sense of our effect. 10 billion animals are factory-farmed in the United States each year. Dividing by the population gives us about 28 animals factory-farmed per person. If we all stopped eating animal products, the 10 billion animals would not be factory-farmed, so each person could be said to save 28 animals per year from being factory farmed. This means that each person who goes vegan now could also meaningfully be said to save 28 animals per year from being born into constant torture, even though the actual numbers may be very random and different.

• View 3: We are only responsible for systems that we participate in and support. You are only responsible for the actions of a group of people if you are a part of that group. If you stop eating animal products, you have washed your hands of the ethical problem of animals and it becomes other people’s problem. The moral problem of animal suffering no longer exists for you.

I agree with View 2 because of my beliefs about ethical philosophy. A lot of strange ethical problems appear if we do not divide consequences by the number of people causing them.

Why not eat eggs and milk?

Eggs probably cause much more suffering per calorie than any meat product. Factory-farmed chickens lay 250–300 eggs per year living in brutal conditions. Each egg represents between 1 and 2 full days of torture.

If I wanted to harm animals the least, I‘d much rather eat a 1000-calorie steak dinner than a 1000-calorie omelet. A person switching from a carnivore to a vegetarian (but not vegan) diet could easily cause much more animal suffering than they had been before if they substitute meat with eggs. If I had the choice between convincing people to give up meat or to give up eggs, I would ask them to give up eggs. Milk seems to require less suffering than meat and eggs, but it is still so much suffering that I could not consider buying it, and it contributes much more to climate change than milk substitutes.

This website has a fun rough calculation of which animal products we should avoid based on our relative concern for animal welfare vs. climate change.

Why not eat ethically sourced animal products?

Would it be bad to raise animals for meat if they lived their whole lives happy on a farm, were well taken care of, and at the end were suddenly and painlessly killed for meat? I do not think this would be bad at all. Many animals do not seem to have enough of a conception of themselves or their future to make it inherently bad to painlessly kill them, as long as killing them does not upset their families or companions. Similarly, forms of hunting where the animal dies a quick, painless death and the hunter keeps the animal population low enough to not be an ecological problem do not seem to be bad at all. If anything, they prevent animals from suffering a more painful death or the consequences of overpopulation.

Should we eat animals raised with happy lives? I have three caveats and two problems with this:

Caveats:

• A lot of meat produced outside of factory farms still involves a lot of suffering, to the point where the animals’ lives may not be worth living.

• If all meat were completely ethically produced, the supply would be drastically lower and meat would be much more expensive.

• The only thing harder than requesting a vegan option at every social event is requesting 100% ethically sourced animal products at every social event.

Problems:

• Ethically sourced meat still contributes to climate change, and in many cases contributes more than factory-farmed meat. Cows raised on grass produce significantly more methane than cows raised on feed.

• 98% of animal products in America come from factory farms. Eating the 2% of meat that does not come from factory farms still sends a social signal that eating animal products in general is acceptable. Imagine that there was a popular brand of hat where 98% of the hats were made by torturing people from Milwaukee. You are concerned about this, and so you make sure to buy the 2% of hats made by ethically treated people from Milwaukee. The hat you buy is indistinguishable from the torture hats, but you know it is ethically sourced. You wear it in public and people see you wearing it, and you see a lot of people wearing the torture hats. You blend in with them. When people ask, you make sure to say that your hat is ethically sourced. It seems like this would be kind of silly. Wearing the ethically sourced hat still seems like a social endorsement and normalization of the hats as a whole, and almost all of them are torture hats. In the same way, when we eat ethically sourced meat, we may socially normalize meat in general more than we realize, and because almost all animal products involve torture, this is a problem.

Climate change

Animal agriculture contributes significantly to climate change, and you can cut your dietary carbon footprint by about 50% by going vegan. Cows produce methane, which absorbs about 80x as much energy from the sun as carbon. Many people have trouble believing that cows could have a significant effect on the environment because they do not see many cows. The reason why cows can have a large effect on the environment is because there are a lot of them. The biomass of cows is currently four times the size of the biomass of all vertebrates that existed 12,000 years ago.

Is it better for the climate to buy local than it is to buy vegan because shipping produces much more CO2 than the ways we produce food? Absolutely not. For whatever reason this idea has caught on in a lot of climate spaces despite being false, as shown in the graph below.

Locally raised meat is much worse for the environment than vegan food shipped from the other side of the world.

I think all the above arguments are correct and worth taking seriously, but I have to admit that climate change has zero effect on how much meat I consume. I try to reduce my emissions where I can, but my vegan diet is entirely motivated by animal welfare, not climate. A few months ago I took an international flight, which has the same carbon footprint as the emissions I saved being vegan for multiple years. While climate change is important to me and I believe that veganism helps with it, my identification with veganism starts and ends with ending factory farming.

Veganism and health

Being vegan and tracking your nutrients allows you to live a normal healthy life. It could be that eating certain combinations of animal products is significantly more healthy than veganism. I could accept that. My motivation for veganism is entirely based on animal welfare and climate change, and as long as I can be normally healthy eating a vegan diet, I am happy.

A lot of people worry about protein. I was personally able to put on a lot of muscle on a vegan diet where I tracked my nutrients. It would have probably been a little easier eating meat, but I did not have much trouble. The consensus seems to be that plant protein is slightly less bioavailable than animal protein, so you should just eat a little more of it to balance out. I do worry about new vegans not eating enough protein. While it is nearly impossible to develop an actual protein deficiency on most normal vegan diets, getting high amounts of protein helps people feel full after a meal, and not feeling full is a big reason why new vegans go back to eating animal products, so I encourage vegans to make sure they are eating enough protein-rich foods.

Vitamin B12 does not occur naturally in vegan diets, and vegans have to take supplements for it. B12 is essential. Going without it for too long can cause permanent nerve damage. The fact that vegans have to use supplements to be healthy is sometimes used as an argument that the diet is by definition not healthy. I think this is wrong for two reasons. The first reason is where the average person’s B12 comes from. Humans in nature used to get a lot of their supply of B12 from eating dirt (their food was not very clean) as well as consuming animals that also received B12 from the dirt. Because humans no longer consume dirt, all the B12 we consume comes from animals who do consume dirt. Or at least it used to. Almost all the animals we eat do not consume much dirt at all, because they are factory farmed and eat special feed. Because they also need B12, they eat feed fortified with B12 supplements. In both cases, B12 is being unnaturally supplemented, it is just coming to us in different vehicles. The second reason is that an unnatural diet is not necessarily unhealthy. Most weightlifters I know supplement protein with powders and are significantly healthier than many people I know who do not use protein powder.

Suffering is not all that matters

I focus a lot on suffering in this essay, but I do not want to imply that eliminating suffering is the only thing that matters in animal ethics. The promotion of wellbeing also matters (good arguments for this are found in this essay by Toby Ord) and it would be strongly ethically preferable to have a world of happy animals as compared to a world with no animals at all. It may be that one day we will live in a world where humans raise all animals in a happy state where their lives are worth living, painlessly kill them for meat at the end of their lives, and do not contribute to climate change. We are so far from that world right now that complete abstention from farmed animals seems like the only viable option for improving animal welfare.

Arguments against veganism that I do not take seriously but hear a lot

We are at the top of the food chain and should eat animals because we ‘won’ evolution and are the dominant species.

Evolution is not a god, it is a label for the coincidence that more genetically viable species also happen to reproduce their genes more. It gives us no useful information about what is ethically right to do. If we want to obey evolution, our first step should be to have as many children as possible or to violently attack other humans as potential competitors for resources. I am not planning to do that and do not see many other people doing that either.

Plants have feelings too!

I do not think so, but even if they do, plants need to be grown to feed animals raised for meat, and animals require a lot more calories from plants than the calories the animals themselves produce. Eating meat causes more plants to be killed than veganism does.

Animals like mice and snakes and bugs are killed in the process of harvesting plants for vegan diets, so no diet is truly vegan.

To repeat the above point, animals require a lot more calories from plants than the calories the animals themselves produce. Eating meat causes more plants (and the animals who die in the farming of the plants) to be killed than veganism does. I do not think it is wrong to kill certain animals as long as the death is painless, but plant farming may still involve a lot of painful animal deaths that it would be preferable to avoid.

The end goal

What would a morally acceptable food system look like? In my ideal world, animals would be farmed to the extent that they had lives filled with enough comfort and well-being to be worth living and contribute positively to the broader food system and environment. This could easily include raising animals humanely for food. Strict laws would make current factory farming conditions illegal. 98% of animal production as it exists now would not exist. Real meat would be much more expensive, and most people would get most of their protein from healthy meat alternatives: either lab-grown meat, alternative proteins, fake meat, or plants. This is a utopian goal in the sense that it would be drastically better than our current world, but not utopian in the sense that it is already technologically and socially possible. This is a problem of individual choice and collective economics and culture that can be fixed. Our goal as people who know that animals have moral worth should be to hasten progress toward this goal and to reduce the number of animals tortured along the way as much as possible.