Electric sheep, obsolete animals, and the moral danger of valuing life only through utility
By Rufaro Daniel Nyakudya
Imagine that the last industrial slaughterhouse does not close because of a protest, a new law, or a sudden wave of human compassion.
It closes because it is no longer competitive.
The supermarket shelves remain full. Burgers still sizzle on grills. Chicken remains part of family meals. Milk still softens coffee, leather-like materials still cover shoes and car seats, and pharmaceutical companies still manufacture products once derived from animal bodies. The difference is that these goods now come from cultivated cells, plants, fermentation tanks, engineered microorganisms, and synthetic biology.
The food has not disappeared. The animals have.
Not all at once, of course. No government opens the gates of factory farms and releases billions of chickens, pigs, and cattle into forests and cities. Instead, farmers breed fewer animals each year. Herds shrink. Hatcheries close. Barns stand empty. The remaining animals age, die, and are not replaced.
Within a few generations, animals once visible across vast agricultural systems could become uncommon.
This is normally presented as a story about the future of food. But the more difficult question is not what humans will eat. It is what happens to our relationship with animals once we no longer need their bodies.
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? imagines a world devastated by ecological catastrophe. Many living animals have become rare or extinct. To own a real animal is to possess something precious: a sign of social standing, moral respectability, and perhaps continued connection to the living world. Those who cannot afford real animals may keep convincing electric substitutes.
Rick Deckard, the novel’s protagonist, owns an electric sheep and longs to replace it with a living animal. His society claims to value empathy, but it also separates beings into categories: those who may be protected, those who may be owned, and those who may be “retired.”
Animals and androids are not merely background details. They expose the instability of the boundaries humans use to decide who matters. Literary scholar Sherryl Vint argues that the novel’s ethical concerns cannot be understood by focusing only on the androids and ignoring the animals. The species boundary is itself political: it helps societies decide whose experiences count and whose exclusion can be justified.
A post-meat society would reverse Dick’s premise.
In his world, technology imitates animals because living animals have become scarce. In ours, technology may imitate the products made from animals so successfully that the animals bred to produce them become scarce.
We might have meat without slaughter, milk without cows, leather without skin, and medicine without animal experimentation. Yet the same technological success that removes animals from production may also remove them from everyday human life.
This could create a strange moral test. Will animals become valuable because they are finally free from economic exploitation? Or will they become irrelevant because the products we wanted from them are now available elsewhere?
One of the most common reactions to the idea of a post-meat society is practical: what would happen to all the farm animals?
The question often imagines an enormous, simultaneous release. Billions of animals suddenly wandering through fields, roads, and forests, unable to feed themselves and threatening local ecosystems.
That is almost certainly not how a transition would happen.
The vast populations of chickens, pigs, cattle, sheep, and farmed fish alive today are not stable populations existing independently of humans. They are continuously reproduced because markets demand their meat, milk, eggs, skin, and other products. When demand falls, farmers do not normally release animals. They breed fewer of them.
The liberation of farmed animals might therefore look, numerically, like their disappearance.
This creates an uncomfortable paradox. Ending factory farming would prevent future animals from being born into systems structured around confinement, rapid growth, and early death. But it would also mean that many domesticated breeds would exist in far smaller numbers, and some might disappear altogether.
Would that be a tragedy?
There is no single answer. Some livestock breeds carry cultural histories, locally adapted knowledge, and forms of genetic diversity developed over generations. Their disappearance could therefore represent a genuine loss to human communities, especially where they are tied to identity, heritage, climate resilience, or traditional ways of life.
But what counts as loss depends on whose perspective we consider. A breed may be valuable to humans while the animals within it continue to live under conditions of confinement, extraction, or early death. From their perspective, the end of such a system may look less like extinction and more like liberation from being bred for human use.
This tension is especially sharp for commercial animals selectively bred so intensively that their bodies themselves generate suffering. Chickens bred for extreme growth can experience mobility and cardiovascular problems, while dairy cattle bred for very high milk production may face serious metabolic and reproductive strain.
The now-extinct turnspit dog offers a telling precedent. Bred to run inside wheels that rotated roasting spits, it disappeared when technology made its labour unnecessary. Its loss erased part of human cultural history, but few would argue that justice required continuing to breed dogs for the wheel. The ethical question is therefore not simply whether a breed should survive, but what kind of lives its continued existence would involve. We may want to preserve cultural and genetic diversity without preserving harmful biological designs or the systems of exploitation that created them.
Market forces should not make that decision alone. Breeds with distinctive genetic or cultural value might be preserved through gene banks or small welfare-centred populations, but only where doing so does not perpetuate suffering built into their bodies or the systems that created them.
Some animals could live in sanctuaries. Others might remain in carefully managed heritage populations. Certain domesticated animals could continue living alongside people without being bred for slaughter. But many would require permanent human care. They could not simply be “returned” to a natural state that no longer exists for them.
Even sanctuaries raise difficult questions. Who pays for decades of food, veterinary treatment, and land? Would the public fund animals it no longer eats, uses, or regards as companions? If private charity falls short, should governments redirect livestock subsidies, or should industries that profited from breeding these animals bear the cost? How many animals can realistically be accommodated? Should they be allowed to reproduce? Are they living for themselves, or have they become educational exhibits through which humans perform their new morality?
There may be no way to undo domestication completely. Humans created animals who depend on us, and that dependence creates responsibilities that do not disappear when the animals cease to be profitable. Perhaps our final responsibility is not to preserve every breed, but to care for the last animals well enough that no more need to be born into a dependence we created.
When imagining this future, we often ask: what role would animals have in society?
The wording reveals how deeply utility structures our thinking.
For most of human history, animals have been defined by what they provide. They are livestock, working animals, laboratory animals, guard dogs, dairy cattle, laying hens, wool-bearing sheep, breeding stock, or companions. Even conservation often describes wildlife through the ecosystem services it provides.
An animal without a function can appear almost conceptually incomplete.
But perhaps animals would not need a new role.
The most radical feature of a post-meat society may not be meat without animals, but animals without jobs.
Animals could exist without having to produce food, labour, materials, entertainment, or profit. They could form relationships, explore their environments, avoid pain, seek comfort, and pursue the forms of life available to them.
This does not mean humans would have no relationship with animals. It might mean relationships closer to those we have with wild populations: based less on ownership and use, and more on coexistence, habitat protection, restraint, and responsibility for the harms we cause. Yet the shrinking place of wild animals in a human-dominated world offers a warning. Animals without obvious utility may be valued in principle while being given very little space to survive in practice.
Former farmed animals could live in sanctuaries designed around their welfare rather than their usefulness to visitors. Humans might share landscapes with animals through forms of multispecies community and responsible stewardship. Some domesticated animals might remain companions, but this would force a distinction between rescuing animals who already exist and deliberately breeding new ones. If breeding ended, even dogs and cats might eventually become rare or disappear. Would that be a loss we should resist, or the gradual end of another relationship built on ownership and reproductive control?
Land released from intensive livestock production could be restored as wildlife habitat, forest, wetland, or grassland, allowing some wild populations to recover. But rewilding would require humility. Removing farms would not guarantee that land is used justly or that animals benefit.
Corporations could buy the land, enclose it for carbon-credit projects, convert it into luxury developments, or use it for intensive crop production. Conservation programmes could also displace communities that have lived on and managed those landscapes for generations.
Preventing this would require more than hope: secure communal tenure, participatory land-use planning, restoration conditions attached to transition funding, and public or community control of strategically important land.
Ending animal agriculture would create possibilities. It would not determine which possibilities society chooses.
It is easy to imagine the transition as a clean technological substitution: bioreactors replace barns, cultivated tissue replaces slaughter, and everyone moves smoothly into a more ethical food system.
But technologies arrive through political and economic systems.
Cultivated meat remains an emerging technology. Producing animal tissue without raising and slaughtering whole animals is technically possible, but large-scale production still faces questions involving cost, energy, growth media, bioreactor design, food safety, regulation, and consumer acceptance. Precision fermentation is already used to produce particular proteins and ingredients, but expanding it into a major component of the food system would require substantial infrastructure and investment.
A future in which alternative proteins dominate is possible, not inevitable.
No reliable timetable exists for cost parity, and technologies that become affordable in wealthier markets may remain inaccessible elsewhere for years.
And even if these technologies succeed, ownership will matter.
A small group of companies could control cell lines, genetic libraries, bioreactors, production software, and the intellectual property required to manufacture food. Countries without advanced biotechnology infrastructure might exchange dependence on imported animal products for dependence on patented food platforms.
The post-meat economy could become less violent toward animals while becoming more concentrated and unequal among humans.
Conventional meat might also survive as a luxury product. Instead of disappearing, slaughtered meat could become rare, expensive, and prestigious. We already see this logic in the appeal of artisan, organic, and “traditional” foods, where older production methods are marketed as more authentic precisely because they are less common. The renewed fascination with raw milk reflects the same romanticisation. In a post-meat society, the wealthy might consume slaughtered meat not from necessity, but as an expression of authenticity, tradition, or power.
Living animals themselves could become status symbols.
In a world where most people encounter animals through digital simulations, museums, or public sanctuaries, owning a living horse, cow, or rare breed could become the ultimate demonstration of wealth. Like the coveted real animals in Dick’s novel, their rarity could increase their social value without necessarily increasing respect for their autonomy.
We might stop treating animals as ordinary commodities only to reinvent them as luxury commodities.
Lacoste’s Save Our Species campaign offers a revealing, if well-intentioned, example of how rarity can acquire symbolic value. The company temporarily replaced its crocodile logo with ten threatened species and limited the number of shirts bearing each design to the estimated number of those animals remaining in the wild. The campaign used exclusivity to make extinction visible and support conservation. Yet the same logic could be inverted. In a post-meat world, living animals might become desirable precisely because they are rare: not beings to coexist with, but scarce objects through which wealth, taste, or moral concern can be displayed. Rarity can inspire protection, but it can also invite possession.
There is also a quieter dystopia: a society that causes far less animal suffering but becomes emotionally disconnected from living beings. Children might know cattle primarily as the historical source of a food now produced in steel tanks. Animals could survive mainly in gene banks, controlled reserves, zoos, private estates, and immersive simulations. If direct encounters with animals help people care about them, a greater distance could weaken the very concern needed to protect those who remain.
The violence would be reduced. But the underlying belief that nature matters only when preserved, consumed, or displayed for humans could remain intact.
A society can end slaughter without ending anthropocentrism.
The phrase “animal agriculture” can conceal radically different realities.
An industrial chicken complex producing hundreds of thousands of birds is not the same institution as a smallholder household keeping goats, chickens, or cattle. A feedlot is not the same as a pastoralist community whose social, economic, and cultural systems are organised around livestock.
This distinction matters especially in Africa and other parts of the Global South.
For many rural households, animals are not simply units of meat production. They provide food, income, manure, transport, and draught power. They may function as savings and insurance where formal banking and social protection are limited. Livestock can also carry ceremonial, familial, and social meaning through bridewealth, inheritance, identity, and relationships between generations.
A technology that replaces meat does not automatically replace these functions. A pastoralist cannot simply exchange cattle for cultivated meat and be left economically whole. A smallholder may still need manure for crops, power for cultivation, an asset that can be sold during an emergency, and a source of household resilience. Removing livestock without replacing these systems could deepen vulnerability.
The transition must therefore be differentiated.
The strongest case for rapid change concerns large industrial systems that breed animals in enormous numbers and organise their lives almost entirely around maximum output. But even there, workers and farmers cannot be treated as collateral damage. Slaughterhouse workers, transporters, feed producers, veterinarians, processors, and rural communities may all depend on the existing system.
A just transition would require more than telling people to retrain. It could include debt relief for farmers with stranded infrastructure, income protection, locally appropriate education, investment in new food industries, and support for land restoration. The costs would be too high for charity alone. Governments could redirect livestock subsidies and other agricultural support, while development banks, climate funds, and philanthropic foundations could help finance infrastructure, social protection, and ecosystem recovery.
Governments could also establish time-limited food-transition funds financed through redirected subsidies, levies on large companies that profited from animal agriculture, and, once the new industry had matured, modest contributions from major alternative-protein producers. Imported and domestically produced alternatives could contribute on equivalent terms, although such charges would need to avoid raising the price of basic food or slowing adoption in lower-income countries. The revenue could be divided between support for displaced workers and communities and the long-term care of animals left behind by the transition. Any such fund would need a clear end date, independent oversight, and public reporting to prevent a temporary measure from becoming a permanent tax or a subsidy for politically connected companies.
NGOs could play a catalytic role by funding pilot conversions, providing technical and legal support, organising cooperatives, connecting producers to new markets, and helping communities design alternatives. Public and development finance would need to carry the highest costs, but NGOs could help turn that funding into transitions that work on the ground. Farmers should have opportunities to become owners and producers within the new food economy, rather than merely consumers of technologies created elsewhere.
In pastoral and smallholder settings, change would need to be co-designed with communities. It might involve gradually replacing particular animal products while expanding financial services, social insurance, alternative fertilizers, transport, energy systems, and other sources of resilience. Some relationships with livestock might persist where practical alternatives do not yet exist, even as communities seek to reduce the suffering and control involved.
The future of food should not become another project in which wealthy societies develop a technology and prescribe a universal pathway for everyone else.
There may be many post-meat transitions, moving at different speeds and reflecting different relationships between humans, animals, land, and livelihoods.
Suppose the technological transition succeeds. Demand for conventional animal products begins to fall rapidly. What would justice require?
The most dangerous period may be the gap between falling demand and a fully scaled alternative food system. Without managed breeding reductions, bridge finance, and guaranteed care, farmers could respond through early slaughter, neglect, or abandonment while consumers face shortages and price shocks.
The first obligation would be to prevent animals from carrying the costs of the transition.
Farmers facing collapsing markets might otherwise abandon animals, reduce veterinary care, or send them to slaughter sooner. Governments and companies that benefited from animal agriculture would need to fund the care of remaining populations and support gradual reductions in breeding.
The most credible model would spread the cost across redirected subsidies, a temporary industry levy, public transition funds, and charitable support rather than leaving individual farmers or sanctuaries to absorb it.
Publicly supported sanctuaries and retirement programmes could care for some of the final generations. Others could remain on transitioned farms under strict welfare protections. Those protections would require independent, risk-based inspection, animal-based welfare measures, traceability, public reporting, and penalties strong enough to make non-compliance more costly than compliance. Decisions about reproduction would need to balance the animals’ social and behavioural lives with the need to avoid recreating large dependent populations without adequate care.
The second obligation would be to the affected people.
Workers should receive income support, retraining, and meaningful opportunities in the emerging food system. Farmers should not be left with debt attached to barns, equipment, and herds whose value has collapsed. Communities should help decide how former agricultural land is used.
The third obligation would be institutional.
Governments might need to prevent conventional meat from becoming an opaque luxury industry with weak welfare protections. This could require regulating not only production, but also the breeding, ownership, sale, and consumption of animals and high-value animal products. Licensing, traceability, welfare standards, or outright restrictions might follow, but these could also create black markets or make animal use an exclusive privilege of the wealthy. Alternative-protein infrastructure should not be controlled entirely by private monopolies. Public research, open standards, and accessible licensing could help ensure that food security is not dependent on a handful of technology firms.
Animals themselves would also need stronger legal recognition. If their market value approaches zero, protections based mainly on ownership and commercial value may become even less adequate. Legal systems would have to recognise that animals have interests independent of whether anyone can profit from them.
A humane transition would not discard animals once they became obsolete. It would treat their dependence on us as a responsibility created by our own history.
A post-meat future would force humanity to confront a question that industrial agriculture has allowed us to avoid.
Did animals matter to us, or did the things we extracted from them matter?
We have often valued animals according to their utility, intelligence, similarity to humans, emotional appeal, or economic contribution. Dogs receive one form of protection, pigs another, and rats another, even when the moral distinctions between their capacities are much less clear than our social rules suggest.
Technology might reveal this hierarchy by stripping away usefulness, even the quieter usefulness of companionship, affection, status, or emotional comfort. If animals are valued only for what humans can extract from them, no category is secure once that value disappears.
Once an animal produces nothing that cannot be obtained more cheaply from a machine, will we still protect it? Will we make space for beings who consume resources but generate no economic return? Will we care for lives that no longer serve us?
These questions extend beyond animals.
There is growing philosophical debate about whether future artificial systems could possess consciousness, agency, interests, or moral status. It remains deeply uncertain whether digital minds will ever exist in a morally relevant sense. We should not casually assume that current AI systems feel, suffer, or possess inner lives.
But advanced digital systems could still become more capable than humans in many economically important domains. They may perform much of the labour, analysis, and coordination on which society depends. They may become embedded in institutions that increasingly evaluate people through efficiency, productivity, risk, and measurable contribution.
The analogy is not that AI will inevitably treat humans as humans have treated animals. History does not function as cosmic punishment, and advanced intelligence does not automatically produce cruelty.
The comparison is a moral mirror.
We are building technologies inside societies that already rank life according to usefulness. We optimise systems for output, speed, and cost, then hope that these systems will somehow preserve values that our own institutions repeatedly fail to honour.
If we teach our most powerful technologies that the inefficient may be discarded, that the dependent have value only through what they produce, and that intelligence determines moral worth, we should not be surprised if those principles are eventually applied to us.
The future of food is therefore not only about what replaces meat. It is about what replaces the relationship that turned living beings into units of production in the first place.
A post-meat society could represent one of humanity’s greatest moral achievements. But only if animals are not discarded once they cease to be profitable, preserved merely as luxury objects, or remembered only through the products technology learned to imitate. The deeper transformation would be learning that a life does not have to be economically necessary to matter.
Perhaps the deepest question is not only what humans will do when animals are no longer useful to us, but what digital minds may do when human beings are no longer useful to them.
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