Harm Based Veganism Is Unjustified
Why I still Eat Meat
Recently I was reading Extreme Suffering On Farms and I think I realized something in words what I had understood intuitively for a long time. Suffering is not an adequate justification for going vegan. Let me explain my thoughts.
For context, I am a person who is quite concerned with the moral realm. I had spent a large portion of my younger years discussing philosophy with friends, and a weekly activity of mine is attending a local event called Philosophy Club that is exactly what it sounds like. One thing that was somewhat puzzling to me then, is why I felt no particular drive to go vegan, despite the well justified claims by vegans on how consuming animals is obviously a moral wrong. This wasn’t in the sense of wanting to become a vegan but not having the courage, or the strength to do so, but in that I intuitively felt no need to go vegan.
The intelligent argument for veganism based on the principle of suffering goes something like as follows;
Recognition of Animal Suffering: Animals in industrial farming suffer greatly due to overcrowding, painful procedures without anesthesia, and inhumane slaughter methods. Since animals can experience pain, their suffering is morally significant.
Morality of Inflicting Harm for Marginal Pleasure: Causing substantial harm to animals for the relatively minor benefit of taste or convenience is ethically unjustifiable. It is clearly wrong to inflict suffering when the personal gains are minimal compared to the harm caused.
Cost-Effectiveness and Feasibility of Dietary Change: Switching to a vegan diet is a practical and highly effective way to reduce animal suffering with little personal sacrifice. Plant-based options are widely available and can meet all nutritional needs, making dietary change both feasible and impactful.
This is airtight. It doesn’t rely on any specific moral theory, as it’s hard to find a moral system that doesn’t find inflicting harm on others capable of experiencing it as wrong. So long as eating animals inflicts harm on them, and eating meat isn’t a necessary part of our own survival, there isn’t really a strong justification for doing so.
It wasn’t until I read a list of the unfathomable harms that we were inflicting upon chickens that I realized the harm inherent to farming is purely a practical concern, and can mostly be solved by merely eating free-range meat. To be clear I don’t mean it in the current regulatory sense, where if a factory farm adheres to certain standards they get the hollow acknowledgement they are free-range. I mean it in the literal sense of chickens being treated in a way that they seem to enjoy living in, not too crowded, lots of space, protection from the environment and predators, and quick painless slaughter.
Here’s a list of those unfathomable harms:
Bone fractures. The majority of hens experience a bone fracture over the course of their life. On average, they have three. Imagine if you broke the same bone three times. This is, and I can’t emphasize this enough, what most hens deal with—the industry that produces our eggs is so cruel that it breaks the bones of most hens multiple times. In fact, the situation is much worse for hens than it would be for us, because the area around their keel bone, which is the most common kind of fracture, has a huge number of nerves. While such experiences in humans usually produce disabling pain for about a day, for chickens, such pain lasts about a week. Often the bone doesn’t heal properly, leading to constant intense agony.
Injurious pecking. In a hen's natural environment, she’ll spend most of her time pecking the ground looking for food. In a modern farm, hens can’t do that, so they spend a lot of their time pecking other hens, often leading to severe injury (just imagine that you were being bitten all the time by people surrounding you). It’s not terribly uncommon for hens to be pecked to death (seriously imagine what it would be like for that to happen) or for pecking to affect a hen’s body part known as the vent which is particularly sensitive (in this case, for the males reading this, imagine someone biting your balls). Often this becomes infected.
Every one of a hen’s natural behaviors are thoroughly squashed in the farms. Hens cannot make a nest prior to laying an egg, which causes them quite severe distress. Hens are willing to undergo strong electric shocks in order to get a suitable nest—about as strong as the electric shocks they’ll endure in order to get food after being starved for 28 hours (!!!!!). Remember, hens lay an egg roughly daily! This may not seem like a big deal, but only because we don’t appreciate the experience of being a nesting hen; an alien wouldn’t understand why we care about sex so much.
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I don’t know about you, but these harms seem easily fathomable to me. Bone fractures aren’t great, but I don’t see them experiencing these at higher rates when not cooped up in tight factory farms.
Pecking isn’t great either, and some images on google that I won’t share here demonstrate that to me pretty definitively. Again though, that seems like a unique problem of factory farms, where the chickens are packed so tightly that it makes more sense to peck your neighbor than random things on the ground. It seems like free range chickens don’t have this problem.
Third are the psychological concerns, which I can’t say much about because I don’t really understand how we can track these. I’m willing to admit that factory farms are not great for the chickens though, but looking at pictures of free range farms online, I don’t see how this same psychological harm would apply. Now I am not a chicken, so maybe they find being on any sort of farm unfathomably painful, but I seriously doubt it.
Is death painful?
Now in order for a chicken to end up on my plate it obviously has to be killed first, so perhaps the very act of killing chickens is a harm. I haven’t read an argument about this specifically though, so maybe there is some justification as to the way we kill chickens being particularly painful. I’ve killed a chicken before, and the way that it was traditionally done is beheading, or snapping their neck. Either doesn’t seem particularly pleasant, but it doesn’t seem to translate to significant prolonged pain.
Are free range chickens living good lives?
Without the knowledge of the purpose of a farm (or perhaps the capacity to have that knowledge), the chicken grows up in an environment without starvation, protected from predators, the cold and the rain, getting to do what chickens apparently like to do, which is eat and lay eggs. They are certainly in more crowded conditions than their natural environment would suggest, but so are humans in cities, and we generally seem to like living in them. Combine that with all the benefits of being raised on a free range farm when compared to the wild, and it seems to me like there’s no reason to believe farmed chickens experience significant suffering, and as a whole, their lives are net positives.
Now the arguments against factory farming are clear, and anyone with the financial means and the moral care should probably make it a priority never to purchase meat farmed in this way. As far as eating meat in general goes though, I see no justification to stop when the environment of certain farms seems superior to the wild, and the method of actually harvesting the meat inflicts little pain. I think there’s a strong argument to be had that chickens, and other animals on many farms live net-positive lives, despite the ultimate purpose of their existence.
Is any pain unjustifiable?
Now there might be made the claim that to bring a being into existence that experiences any pain is an unjustifiable act, which is certainly a position people hold, however I personally find this absurd. My own experience of the world, one of significant inconvenience, suffering and pain I have found to be justifiable, and the majority of those who have the capacity to answer the question would agree.
There’s certainly enough people on r/antinatalism who feel otherwise, but I consider it a non-starter for an argument to claim that any sort of pain makes existence unjustifiable, regardless of the amount of joy experienced in that life. If this is the fallback for the principle of pain that vegans use, I have to say that it’s even less convincing than the previous claims.
Conclusion
Vegans have done a successful job of convincing me factory farms are bad. The pain animals in these farms suffer is definitely way out of proportion with the benefit gained, and even if the benefit gained was in proportion, inflicting moderate harm on a conscious being so you can have a good sandwich isn’t really justifiable either. There’s certainly other arguments out there to go vegan, but I just don’t see the reason to do so based on the principle of minimizing harm alone. The unfathomable harms listed here seem extremely fathomable, and solvable (or already solved) in completely practical ways.
Happy to hear alternate points of view though.