4 ms·

This discussion really depends on how animals experience the world, if we can assign them consciousness and value to their experience, etc. But if we give them

This discussion really depends on how animals experience the world, if we can assign them consciousness and value to their experience, etc. But if we give them some degree of conscious experience, it seems the jungle is far preferable to factory farming. Would you rather live in a tiny cage stuffed with other people, doing nothing during your short life except eating, or living with a tribe in a jungle/savannah (more or less our natural habitat) ? Remeber you'd not be teached anything, learn no language and wouldn't experience much about the world (its richness) -- the cage is your entire reality. I'd very much prefer the jungle. For the free animal the gruesome death is just an episode to a rich life of hunting, fleeing, nurturing, seeing nature, communcating with others; for the caged one the painless death is just an end to a joyless existence. That said, I think there are kinds of acceptable compromises... not extremely intensive farming seems reasonable to me. Again, dependent on their ability to experience the world. Chicken seem to have less cognitive experience then cows, for example, so it should be acceptable to not spend as much per individual in controlling their environemnt. And this line of reasoning suggests a (ethically delicate, but interesting) solution: Should we select (breed) animals for lower cognition, thus making factoring farming acceptable? (or equivalently making acceptable farming practices more efficient) It seems logical. If the animal ultimately has no brain (as weird as that sounds), in principle there doesn't seem to be much difference from lab-growing meat.

avar 7y ago
The video we're discussing talks about how it's an "achievement" for chickens that there's 23 billion of them at any given time, making them by far the most populous bird species. For comparison the red-billed quelea is the most populous wild bird species, with around 1.5 billion individuals. So the question if you're going to pose an ethical conundrum isn't to suppose that all 23 billion would otherwise be living happily in the wild, but rather the antinatalists argument that chickens would be happier as a species if they were all dead instead (well, except maybe some low number of millions who'd make it in the wild). Of course it's rather hard to have that conversation with a chicken. Assigning human motivations to animals of that intelligence doesn't make any sense. Would you rather spend your life as a bird eating trash from a landfill, or take your chances in the open skies? We know what most humans would pick in that scenario, but we can also see that there's wild seagulls that voluntarily choose to live their whole lives doing not much of anything except eating trash in the same small place, and they're pretty intelligent compared to chickens. As ethical trolley problems go comparing the intelligence of a single chicken v.s. a single cow doesn't make sense either, as you need a lot more chickens to produce the same amount of meat. If we're going to suppose some linear no-threshold model of cognition for farm animals we'd thus be better off if we killed 100 human-level intelligence animals if they were so large as to give us the same amount of food as those 23 billion chickens. After all we're killing a lot more humans than that yearly just from exposure to a chicken population that large, nevermind the ethical calculus. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-billed_quelea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-billed_quelea

avar 7y ago

The video we're discussing talks about how it's an "achievement" for chickens that there's 23 billion of them at any given time, making them by far the most populous bird species. For comparison the red-billed quelea is the most populous wild bird species, with around 1.5 billion individuals. So the question if you're going to pose an ethical conundrum isn't to suppose that all 23 billion would otherwise be living happily in the wild, but rather the antinatalists argument that chickens would be happier as a species if they were all dead instead (well, except maybe some low number of millions who'd make it in the wild). Of course it's rather hard to have that conversation with a chicken. Assigning human motivations to animals of that intelligence doesn't make any sense. Would you rather spend your life as a bird eating trash from a landfill, or take your chances in the open skies? We know what most humans would pick in that scenario, but we can also see that there's wild seagulls that voluntarily choose to live their whole lives doing not much of anything except eating trash in the same small place, and they're pretty intelligent compared to chickens. As ethical trolley problems go comparing the intelligence of a single chicken v.s. a single cow doesn't make sense either, as you need a lot more chickens to produce the same amount of meat. If we're going to suppose some linear no-threshold model of cognition for farm animals we'd thus be better off if we killed 100 human-level intelligence animals if they were so large as to give us the same amount of food as those 23 billion chickens. After all we're killing a lot more humans than that yearly just from exposure to a chicken population that large, nevermind the ethical calculus. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-billed_quelea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-billed_quelea