Chew on this: Approximately 200 billion animals are raised for food each year, often in horrific conditions. The contribution of these animals to climate change is greater than the emissions of all the cars being driven around the world. There is a solution. Listen, as Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer explains both the problem and a simple answer.
Chapter 1: What is the main ethical issue discussed in this episode?
As my guest today says in his book, in 2015, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer asked what present practice universally engaged in and accepted by people of great intelligence and moral sensitivity will be seen by future generations as abominable in the way that we now see slavery as abominable. Mr. Krauthammer's answer was our treatment of animals.
I'm convinced, he wrote, that our great-grandchildren will find it difficult to believe that we actually raised, herded, and slaughtered them on an industrial scale for eating. How should we think about our treatment of animals? Hi, everyone. I'm Lynne Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways.
On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Peter Singer. He's thought a lot about our ethics and our treatment of animals.
He was born in Australia, educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford, and became a professor of bioethics at Princeton University Center for Human Values. His work specializes in practical ethics, and he is known for his work on animals and on global poverty. He's the author of numerous books, including Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, and The Life You Can Save.
His most recent book is Consider the Turkey. Welcome, Peter, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today.
Thanks very much, Lynn. I'm happy to be with you.
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Chapter 2: How many animals are raised for food each year?
It is my pleasure. Peter, let's start with some numbers so everyone understands the scale of what we're talking about, about how many animals, cows, lambs, pigs, chickens, and fish are produced for food each year.
We're talking about an estimated 200 billion animals raised for food each year. And I'm not including in that wild-caught fish, who would make the number go several times that. I'm just talking about the animals we actually raise from birth to death, and the death, of course, we cause.
And the largest proportion of those are chickens and fish, but there are very large numbers of all of those animals you mentioned.
That's an enormous number of animals. As you've pointed out, raising all those animals has a huge impact on the environment. What is the impact on the environment?
Well, there are multiple impacts on the environment. We're all concerned now about climate change, and that is one really important impact. The animal raising industry clearly contributes to climate change. Estimates vary. Something like 15% is a reasonable estimate. Particularly when you take into account the power of methane, which the ruminant animals in particular emit.
And it's especially over a short time period, like a 20-year period, it's perhaps 80 times as powerful as carbon dioxide. And people often don't factor into it that we really need to talk about the next 20 years, because if we don't, we've lost the whole game. And they have put a lower value on methane because it does break down faster than carbon dioxide. but not fast enough.
So that's one difference. Another important impact it has on the environment is that it's a huge waste of food to raise animals in confinement and then have to grow food to feed them. Because the animals just to live and move around, and at least in the case of the birds and mammals, keep their bodies warm, have to use a lot of the food value just to do that.
And of course, also to form bones and other things that we don't even eat. So we're wasting a lot of the good agricultural land. We don't really need as much agricultural cleared land as we have, except for the fact that we're feeding a lot of this grain and soybeans to animals. So we could leave a lot more land to grow trees and absorb more carbon again.
We would also have a lot less manure, of course, concentrated manure, which gets into rivers and pollutes rivers. And if any of your listeners happen to live near these places, they will know that it pollutes the air very badly. Factory farms simply stink.
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Chapter 3: What is the environmental impact of animal agriculture?
Well, it's greater than the emissions of all the cars that are being driven around the world. And of course, most of these cars are still fossil fuel driven. It's very substantial. It's something that is also easier for us to end because we can end it just by switching to a plant-based diet, which is an entirely healthy diet that people can live on.
Or even if they just reduce significantly the amount of animal products they're eating, that's going to make a big help. Whereas some of the other things that we need to cut out require new technologies that we don't necessarily have to guarantee that we have a secure and constant supply of electricity. People are thinking about how best to do that, and I hope they get there.
But this is something that we can do immediately and that will make a big difference to slowing climate change.
For each pound of beef, pork or chicken that we eat, how much grain or food is actually required?
Well, it will vary with each of those species. Chicken is the most efficient converter. And we're talking about something still even there, like three pounds of grain for one pound of chicken. And in fact, if we're talking about protein, we can talk about protein because the grain is actually way dry and the chicken, of course, is not way dry.
So even if you're talking about protein equivalents, it's still roughly a three to one ratio. When you get to pigs, it's more like six or seven to one. The waste of, you know, we only get one back for every six or seven pounds that we're putting in. And when we come to beef cattle in a feedlot, it's one in 10 or even less than one in 10 that we're getting back.
We're wasting at least 90% of the food value of the grains and soy that we feed to cattle in feedlots.
Those numbers are huge. Let's talk about how different types of animals are raised, grow, and live. Can you tell us about pigs?
Pigs nowadays, they're indoors all of their life. They're living either on concrete floors or on metal slatted floors. Both of those are easier to keep the manure off, to hose the manure down. But they're really bad for the hooves of the pigs. They're used to walking on soft floors, or they've evolved to walk on soft floors, I should say, in forests.
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Chapter 4: How do animal emissions compare to cars in contributing to climate change?
Well, if we're talking about cows kept for milk, they are also now increasingly concentrated. We have the image of the cows grazing in the fields, able to walk around in a herd that is natural to their kind. But the intensive dairies are nothing like that. A lot of people realized this a year or so ago when there was a fire that destroyed a Texas dairy and 18,000 cows died in that fire.
Now, these 18,000 cows were not caught in the fields. They were in a building or in several buildings, very concentrated together. Often they're tied up so they can't walk around. And again, that's for the convenience of the workers and puts the manure in the same spot, and then they're just fed there. So they're often just standing or sitting down all day. That's all they can do.
And they can't socialize with other animals in the way that they would if they were part of a herd. The other fact I should mention about dairy cows, of course, is that you have to make them pregnant to keep the milk flying. So, you know, as with other mammals, including humans, the females don't just produce milk without having a baby.
But if you want the milk to sell, then the standard practice is to take the calf away within the first hours of birth, which causes real distress to the cow and, of course, to the calf as well.
How about farmed fish? Is that more humane?
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Chapter 5: What is the food efficiency of different types of livestock?
I think the only thing one can say about farmed fish is that there isn't as much research about what the fish go through. But we do know that fish can feel pain. That's been established beyond doubt by research by a couple of women scientists in the last decade or two, Victoria Braithwaite and Lynn Sneddon. So, you know, especially when we have carnivorous fish like salmon,
They are used to swimming long distances in the ocean, but of course they're confined in nets where they just go round and round in endless circles. To feed them, to keep a salmon and raise a salmon to its market weight, may take as many as 140 fish, one study showed.
There's fish that are often caught in the oceans, cheap fish that don't have high value in themselves, but they're caught and then they're ground up and made into fish pellets and the pellets are fed to the salmon. So it's actually, if you're eating farmed salmon, you're not just responsible for the death of your salmon, you're responsible for the death of maybe 140 other fish too.
How about chickens? What kind of lives do they live?
There are two kinds of chickens that are factory found. One of them are the laying hens who produce eggs. And they are still unfortunately often in standard wire cages that would not allow even a single bird to stretch her wings if she were alone in that cage. But she's not alone. There's probably three or four other hens in with her.
And she's standing on a wire floor, which is not really suitable for her feet. She lays eggs on the floor, which when rolled out of the front of the cage saves labour, but it's an awkward perch for her. And, of course, the weaker birds have no way of getting away from the stronger birds in these small cages.
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Chapter 6: How are pigs raised in modern farming?
These cages, incidentally, are illegal in the European Union, across the entire European Union. They're also now, fortunately, illegal in California and a few other US states, but in the majority of US states, and especially those where most of the eggs are produced, they are not illegal. And when we come to the chickens raised from meat, they're not in cages, but they are incredibly crowded.
You might get 20,000 birds in a single shed. And if you look at a photo of it, it just looks like a white carpet across the floor of the shed. You can't see the floor. There's so many birds there. And they've been bred to grow extremely fast, so they put on weight.
The chickens sold in supermarkets are about six weeks old, but they're as large as birds that in the past might have been twice as old as that or more. So the problem there is that their immature leg bones can hardly bear their weight. And experts who've studied the chickens say that they're in pain as they gain weight.
They start to be in pain just because of the weight of their body pressing down on their legs and feet, which have not matured enough to support that weight.
Is there a lot of demand for chicken breast meat and how does that impact the raising of chickens?
There is demand for breast meat and chickens have been bred to grow fast and to have large breasts. In fact, that's even worse for turkeys because people particularly want the breast of the turkey. And so the standard breed, the dominant breed that's sold in American soup markets is actually called the broad-breasted white.
The bird has such a broad breast that the male actually cannot physically mate, cannot reproduce with a female unaided. So every one of these turkeys, all the turkeys that people are eating at Thanksgiving or other times, is the result of artificial insemination, which particularly the females appear to hate, just they're kind of flipped upside down. They're forced open.
Female turkeys in the wild are very selective about who they'll allow to mate with them. But of course, they're just compelled to have this male turkey semen injected into them. They squawk, they fight against it, but they have no ability to resist in the end.
What you describe as how these animals live is horrifying. What do you see as the main ethical problem with eating animals?
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Chapter 7: What are the conditions for dairy cows in industrial farming?
There are two things that we can do. The first one is we can stop giving our support to these methods of industrial farming. And of course, whenever we buy the products, we are giving our support to them because that's all the incentive they need to continue to produce them and to make profits, which mean that they become a very powerful lobby.
And that's why the United States has no federal legislation at all governing the welfare of animals on farms. So for a lot of these industrial farms, people are basically free to do whatever they like that will be profitable, irrespective of how much suffering it causes the animals.
The other thing you can do, of course, is to support animal advocacy organizations, and particularly those advocating for farmed animals, because that is, as I said, just overwhelmingly where most of the suffering we inflict on animals is.
I know that a lot of people are fond of their dogs and cats and think about the problems of stray animals and want to give to those shelters, but those shelters already get, I think, a
a disproportionate amount of funds compared to the number of animals in need of assistance, the number of dogs and cats in need of assistance, as compared with the number of chickens, pigs, cows, and also fish in need of assistance.
Should we treat different species of animals differently? For example, should we treat dogs differently from turkeys?
I don't believe we should treat, I mean, I should say, of course, obviously they have different needs, but I think in terms of the amount of weight we give their interests and the extent to which we ignore or discount their interests, as we're clearly doing with turkeys to a vastly greater extent than we're doing with dogs, that just seems to me to be wrong.
And in Consider the Turkey, I actually describe the life of one turkey, Cornelius, who was lucky enough to be taken to a sanctuary for animals, where Cornelius marched into the house and the people running the sanctuary and said, you know, most of the animals were outside in various enclosures, and said, I'm going to live here.
There was a pig already living in the house, a pig called Esther, and Cornelius and Esther became firm friends. They would spend a lot of time cuddling up on the sofa together, and that was tolerated by the people running the sanctuary. When Esther had to go to the vet and stay overnight for a couple of days because of medical needs,
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Chapter 8: Is fish farming humane?
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I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways. Thanks for listening.