For many years, I devoted myself to improving human health and wellbeing. But then I shifted to working to prevent suffering for animals. In this post, I will briefly share some considerations that pushed me to make this change.
Violence
The phrase ‘animal welfare’ can sound pretty calm and gentle.
But when we talk about ‘animal welfare’, we are usually talking about preventing direct, brutal, physical *violence* against sentient beings.
Animals in the food system are brutalised, beaten, confined, stabbed, castrated, cut, boiled alive, dragged, gassed, asphyxiated, separated from their mothers/children, violated, skinned.
Imagine being castrated, with no anaesthetic. Having your throat slit while you are still conscious. Violated, and forcibly inseminated. Being crammed into a tiny, tiny space for days on end, where you can’t stretch your limbs, or turn around. Skinned alive.
There is something so…brutal, maximalist, harsh, extreme about the intense physical violence that we subject animals to.
Of course, some human suffering is like this - deliberate torture being the worst example. But in general, human suffering tends to lack the absolute, extreme, consistent, in-your-face, direct *violence* and terror of what we do to animals.
Imagine humans being treated in the way that we treat animals in the food system. We would think of it as a literal, sustained, obscene, mass-scale crime against humanity. This is what we’re doing to millions of animals every day.
For me, the extremity of this violence provides both a psychological motivator to work on this issue, plus a rational consideration that points towards this actually being a higher priority to work on, than promoting human wellbeing. It seems like stopping direct, immediate, brutal physical violence against sentient beings should be able to deliver a tonne of suffering reduction/welfare-improvement, pretty efficiently.
Numbers
The numbers of animals being tortured in the food system, and suffering in the wild, are *huge* - much bigger than the number of humans who are suffering.
This is a consideration that should probably point in the direction of us being able to more efficiently, at the margin, reduce suffering for animals, than for humans.
Neglectedness
Most humans care about helping other humans, to some extent.
Relatively few humans really care, seriously, about reducing animal suffering.
At a societal level, working to help animals is *much* more neglected than helping humans. Lots of people, for centuries, have been working to improve human wellbeing. Relatively few work to help animals efficiently.
Animal charities get a tiny, tiny proposition of the funding that human-focussed charities get.
Therefore, at the margin, we might expect to be able to make a bigger difference helping animals, than humans.
Agency
Most humans - even those who are very vulnerable and are suffering a lot - have *themselves* to try to minimize their pain and suffering.
Most humans are physically able to move away from direct painful stimuli, get food, try to get some medicine/pain relief, etc.
In contrast, most animals in the food system lack even this very basic autonomy. They are totally controlled and dominated by smarter beings, who have zero concern for their welfare.
Support networks
Most humans - even those living in dire poverty - have some support network - from immediate family, community etc. They have someone to try to look after them, protect them.
In general, animals lack this - and thus, they are more vulnerable.
Sights I’ve seen
I’ve seen, with my own eyes, appalling human and animal suffering.
For humans, I’ve spent time:
- with people dying from AIDS, plus multiple secondary illnesses (TB, cancer, etc), and no pain relief
- with desperately malnourished babies and children
- with traumatized people in war zones.
For animals, I’ve been:
- inside slaughterhouses: seeing animals being hung upside down before having their throats slit, then scalded, then plucked, then chopped up into little pieces
- inside illegal slaughterhouses: animals having their throats cut, then *thrown directly into scalding water*, to die from a simultaneous mixture of bleeding out plus drowning
- mother pigs in farrowing and gestation crates, who have gone mad and are desperately chomping at the bars to try to get out
- layer hens crammed into tiny cages
- thousands of sentient beings treated literally as objects, as if they are inanimate, when actually they have an inner life and can feel pain/suffering.
These are all absolutely terrible. I find it much easier to emphasize with humans than with non-human animals. But I think that the brutality and *extreme physical bodily violence* of what we do to animals is, in general, worse than even the terrible human suffering I’ve seen. It’s just so unimaginable, nightmarish, unforgivable.
For me, personally, these types of considerations have pushed me - to my own surprise - to change my mind about what to work on, and to think now that working to help animals is much more important/neglected/urgent, than working to help humans.
I’m actually someone who has a very low level of baseline sympathy for non-human animals: I’m not a pet person, many animals annoy me, I don’t find farm animals particularly cute, etc. I have a much higher intuitive sympathy for humans, rather than animals. I spent over a decade of my life trying to end world poverty and improve health in developing countries. I had a very big impact. (If you are interested in hearing more details about who I am and what I did/do now, do drop me a direct message and I would be happy to chat/share more info.)
But now I am convinced that working on animals is much more leveraged and urgent. What we are doing to animals is *so bad* that we have to take action, now, to stop the pain, suffering, slaughter. This is why I, personally, have shifted to work on animal welfare, rather than human-focussed stuff.
And given the above considerations, I think it’s likely the case that the EA community should shift a tonne of resources/effort away from human welfare and towards preventing animal suffering.
On a personal level, I think that if you are currently donating to human health/development, you should probably stop doing that, and donate to helping animals instead. Your money will likely go (much) further and you will make a bigger positive difference in the world.
If you want to talk about any of this stuff, feel free to direct message me :)
Notes
If you want to start to familiarise yourself with the violence that animals face, here are some videos you could watch (trigger warning - extreme violence):
Factory farming in 60 seconds flat (turn sound on)
On wild animal suffering:
Wild animal suffering: an introduction
Meta note: this post is pretty rough; I time-capped the amount of work I did on it at about 2 hours. I’m conscious that it doesn’t offer a complete, quantified/numerical argument.
Thanks for writing this. I've been interested in the suffering of farmed animals for ten years now, and I'm still discovering terrible things about their fate. One example is the treatment of breeding females chickens in the fast-growing broiler industry. The industry is facing what it calls the ‘broiler breeder paradox’, i.e. the fact that it has developed strains of chickens that put on weight very quickly, which is exactly what they are looking for to produce large volumes of cheap meat, but which has consequences for the reproductive performance of the breeding animals (who obviously share the same genetics). One of their way of 'dealing' with this paradox is to subject breeding females to severe food restriction, which causes them chronic, distressing hunger. The Welfare Footprint Project has written on this.