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This post has been a long time coming. I'm still not happy with how it turned out, and I think it's both less formal than my usual posts and probably worse-written. I also don't feel like it goes into the depth that this important topic deserves. So be it. It's stuff that I need to get off my chest.
The human treatment of animals is an abomination.
We love and pamper dogs and cats (except all the ones deemed "undesirable") while gleefully chowing down on untold numbers of cows, pigs, chickens, and goats. The cognitive dissonance here is absolutely surreal. I'll spare you the standard Slaughterhouse Shock Facts, but the simple fact remains that the factory farming system is a vast crime against thinking and feeling beings - persons deserving of consideration.
The numbers here are staggering. Roughly thirty-five million cattle per year, over one hundred million pigs, almost ten billion chickens, over two hundred million turkeys, and hundreds of thousands of goats are slaughtered annually in the US alone. I can't wrap my head around those numbers. I can imagine a herd of one thousand cattle. I can't imagine thirty-five thousand of those herds being wiped out every year, in the company of countless other animals, so that someone can eat a fucking Big Mac.
The large majority of these animals live their lives in hell. They are created to die, and their welfare is not a concern of their creators and destroyers. They are product. If they get sick or injured, that is a problem only insofar as it has potential to decrease the almighty Yield.
I have seen many argue that animals are not persons - or even that they are not conscious. Automatism is long-dead among anyone serious. I can't imagine how anyone who has ever *met* an animal - a dog, a cat, a cow, even a reptile - could dispute their consciousness. For this reason, I find claims like those of Eliezer Yudkowsky - that animals are mere Things, no more worthy of consideration than an AI language model[1] - perplexing and upsetting.
Stranger still are people who acknowledge that their dog or cat is a person, deserving of love and respect, but cannot make the leap from that to cattle or pigs. I can at least comprehend the idea of extending personhood only as far as mammals (though I strongly disagree with it), but I can't understand how anyone could decide that the only mammals that are persons are ones that are culturally normative companion animals. Personhood of a being is innate, not culturally dependent.
Beyond that, the evidence for personhood beyond mammals is pretty good. Birds are conscious, sentient, beings. They have their own preferences, likes, dislikes, emotions. Some of them even mourn their dead. Their clade-mates, reptiles, have likewise been demonstrated to have emotional reactions, excellent memory, and the capacity for social learning. Fish have been considered automata even after automatism was discarded for so-called "higher" animals, but the evidence is strong that even they experience pain and emotions.
I'm less confident regarding crustaceans and insects - but I feel it's relevant to the crustacean question that it's pretty much impossible to wild-harvest them without significant bycatch, and crustacean farms often have very poor environmental characteristics. It's best to err on the side of caution regarding harm. Let them do Crustacean Stuff in peace.
I've lived almost my entire adult life in the southwestern US. Water depletion is an issue that casts a shadow over almost all other questions of governance. The Colorado River has been progressively depleted over decades of overuse and climate change, and the river flow levels that existed when the Colorado River Compact was signed now seem like a myth out of another era.
The overwhelming majority of Colorado River use is agricultural, and over half of the total is specifically used for growing livestock feed - primarily cattle.[2] It's well-documented that cattle are an unusually water-intensive food animal.[3] The river that seven states in the US and two in Mexico depend on is dying, but beef production is politically untouchable. The same factors are driving the collapse of Great Salt Lake - low inflow caused by overuse for cattle feedstocks, especially alfalfa.
These issues are not specific to beef, though it is the worst offender; animal agriculture in general has unfavorable water and land use characteristics in a time where drought is becoming a larger and larger problem.
This is not good, and it's not tenable.
It's not just food production driving these moral and practical problems. The scale is smaller, but the pet trade and animal testing are culpable too. While the reptile trade is what I have the most knowledge of, I'm told the pet trade is similar regardless of animal - mass production of "charismatic" animals in terrible conditions to be sold through apathetic pet-store infrastructure to people who may not understand their needs. We are a culture that views fish and reptiles, especially, as acceptable low-maintenance "starter pets" for kids, and, well, if they die in a year or two, that's just the way of things.[4]
I don't have the knowledge of the animal testing domain that would be necessary to speak to it in-depth. However, I think it's clear that animal experimentation without a very good reason is grossly immoral. I won't buy makeup or hair products that have been tested on animals. Pharmaceuticals are a harder question, but the US recently passed legislation allowing alternative, animal-free, methods to demonstrate drug safety before human trials. It seems like the public tolerance for animal experimentation is quite a bit lower than for meat, and there have been several meaningful legislative wins on this in the US in the last decade.
I'm not going to end this with the default "go vegan or you're a bad person" take - though I think veganism is laudable and beneficial. I'm not one yet myself, though I'm a vegetarian with minimal use of animal products and aim to hit zero (except perhaps honey) by the end of the year. I am, in other words, a flawed person and maybe even a hypocrite. All I can say is that I'm working on it.
Meat eating, at least in America and the other parts of the world I've visited, is culturally normative. It's ingrained. It's "just a thing we do." Everyone does it. Hamburgers loom ominously on billboards. Simply finding vegetarian or vegan options at restaurants is hard. There's no innate need for meat, though. We aren't obligate carnivores. We just have habits, and those are hard to break.
Here is the challenge I present to you - meat eaters and vegetarians alike. I invite you to reduce your animal-product consumption by a noticeable and meaningful amount in the next month. Then, do it again, and again. See how far you can get. Exercise some discipline. Try new things. Cook foods you wouldn't have thought of before.
And maybe, just maybe, you'll realize you didn't need that animal stuff as much as you thought.
This seems to me like an indication of fundamental contempt for living things, but to be honest I think it's basically on-brand for TESCREAL "discard our physical bodies and explore the universe as immortal digitized beings" eschatology.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/22/climate/colorado-river-water.html
The precise numbers vary a bit by source, but it's undisputed that beef is higher water-use than both common human-consumption plant crops and other meats.
[4] Pay no attention to the fact that species of reptile and fish commonly kept as pets can live decades in the wild or when taken care of properly. Even goldfish, probably the pet that society sees as most disposable, can hit thirty years old.