[content warning: moralizing about food]
A lot of people I know argue that the ideal diet for animal rights supporters is veganism– not consuming any animal products. Most of them do consume honey, because of the minimal harm honey causes to bees. I would like, in this post, to argue that we should instead be aiming for lacto bivalvegetarianism.
Bivalveganism– eating bivalves like oysters, clams, mussels, and scallops– has already become quite popular among effective altruist vegans. Because they are sedentary, the bivalve nervous system is extraordinarily simple, much simpler than an insect’s; unlike most animals, they do not have a central nervous system. As far as we know, bivalves do not have any form of nociception. While it is controversial whether creatures capable of nociception feel pain (and thus whether we need to worry about the suffering of insects), as far as I know there is not serious debate about the fact that creatures that do not have nociception do not. Bivalves are considered animals because they don’t photosynthesize or have rigid cell walls; however, these are clearly not morally relevant traits. On everything morally relevant, bivalves are essentially a form of plant.
My support of dairy consumption is more controversial.
According to Brian Tomasik’s How Much Direct Suffering Is Caused By Various Animal Foods?, a kilogram of milk produces the equivalent amount of suffering to 1.68 hours of a beef cow’s life. A kilogram of milk is equivalent to about a quart of milk, three cups of ice cream, or a fifth of a pound of cheese.
Tomasick’s essay did not weight his assessments based on how morally relevant the animal is, presumably because those are sufficiently complicated that everyone who reads his article would disagree. Nevertheless, I think it is possible that I, a human being, get enough pleasure out of a fifth of a pound of cheese to outweigh less than two hours of a suffering cow, and thus it is the correct decision from a utilitarian perspective for me to eat cheese. Depending on how much you value cows and, of course, how much you enjoy cheese, similar calculations may be true for you.
This is particularly true when you consider health benefits. All vegans need to supplement with vitamin B12; most should also supplement with vitamin D and iodine, and some should supplement calcium and iron. With the exception of iron, Vitamin-D-fortified milk is a good source of all those nutrients. (In comparison, bivalves provide only B12.) For this reason, the mostly vegan person can gain significantly more benefits from milk than an omnivore would, which makes the case for consuming dairy considerably stronger for people who are otherwise vegan.
I’ve heard some people object that veganism is much easier to explain than lacto bivalvegetarianism, so being vegan is better for PR. However, I actually think consuming some animal products might be better PR, because lacto bivalvegetarianism isn’t a very common choice. When someone asks “why do you drink milk but not eat eggs?”, that’s an opportunity to bring up the fact that different animal products cause wildly different amounts of suffering, and that by eliminating chicken they can prevent a lot of animal suffering. When someone asks “I thought you were a vegetarian, why are you eating clams?”, that’s an opportunity to talk about the evidence that various animals feel pain.
In conclusion: I think the case for eating bivalves is very strong, and the case for consuming dairy products is strong enough that I currently eat as much cheese as I want, although reasonable people can disagree about how much to weight cows.
rash92 said:
Are you alsp for eating insects (e.g. locusts/ grasshoppers as I know are eaten In some places). You have convinced me bivalves. This does mean thoigh I think, that it may be possible eating ice cream is ok but milk is not (for rxample) if th3 pleasure to dairy used ratio is significantly different.
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The Smoke said:
I am really fascinated by the idea to establish an institution for moral-offsetting veganism. It works like this: A high amount of animal suffering is constantly produced, but for every piece of animal products consumed worldwide, the suffering is reduced by an amount wich clearly outweighs the production of the meat. (I believe there is some less-wrong terminology for this kind of thing, but I can’t remember)
Thus meat consuming becomes net-positive morally. Of course, the existence of the institution can’t depend on the behavior from animal-rights-supporters, since it would a high priority of them to deconstruct it, but since it should relatively cost-efficient, it should be possible to maintain it in a non-vegetarian bubble (say, china).
This is also beneficient to my utopian goal of everyone eating meat, which is produced in a moral way.
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ResearchToBeDone said:
The bivalves thing makes sense with respect to suffering, but I’m curious what the numbers are factoring in throwing-important-ecosystems-out-of-balance numbers? Generally speaking, my impression has been that’s a pretty big reason some people avoid seafood?
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Dendritic Trees said:
I’ve actually read that the bivalves are some of the easiest seafood to farm and harvest sustainably, although I’ve only researched the topic very superficially.
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megaemolga said:
On the moral relevance of nociception. Anyone who has ever been to a dentist and had anesthetic that, worked, injected into to them has experienced nocipetion without pain. Nocicepters send signals to the brain and the brain needs to evaluate those signals as bad in order to create pain sensation. Pain can exist without nociception, but nocipetion by itself is not enough to cause pain. So the question should be. Do insects have brains capable of pain experience? I don’t have any obvious answers to that question but what I do know is that. Roaches without a head behave strikingly similar to to roaches that do
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-cockroach-can-live-without-head/#comments
And I think that says something about how important a brain is to a roaches experience of life.
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Erin said:
Whenever I see calculations like this, I rarely see discussed “ethically-raised” animals. I am pretty sold on the negative impacts of factory farming, but the solution to me was not “cut out all animal products” but “cut out animal products that are not from farms where they are raised in a humane manner.” There’s obviously a lot of debate about what that entails, but I’m familiar with a number of companies that I can buy milk products from locally that have very strict standards, and where the cows seem to have rather nice lives. Is there any research suggesting that there are negative impacts from even this (besides the global warming impacts – I mean animal suffering impacts).
Simply put, it seems like a bad approach to calculate the suffering from the worst possible example and not to look at other alternatives as well. If these are morally equivalent, then that suggests that work to reform farming practices and promote humane standards is ethically pointless, whih doesn’t seem true.
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davidmikesimon said:
Erin, I agree but have had a hard time finding reliable information about the ethical standards of various farms. I was initially turned off the whole process when I learned that “free-range” chickens are not actually very well treated at all.
Is there a ethical standard or review organization that you suggest, or do I just have to do the legwork and visit the farm myself?
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The Smoke said:
As an American I would be really annoyed by the lack of a green party one can vote for.
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Emma said:
Something that strikes me as important in relation to this is the pressure on farmers. Lots of people wanting to eat more ethical animal products = a strong incentive to improve animal welfare. Lots of people not eating animal products at all = no incentive to improve animal welfare.
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Hedonic Treader said:
It’s a trust issue. People can lie about production standards.
It’s also an expertise issue. Which standards correlate with how much suffering requires expert knowledge.
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Gaudior said:
I raise my own sheep and chickens and eat them. From that perspective I have a few things to say.
One: everything dies. If a grazing animal is not killed by a predator or an accident, it eventually dies a slow death of starvation once it outlives its teeth. Allowing that to happen is not kind. And once it starts to happen, having the animal put down and taken away by the knackerman to be incinerated seems a lot more disrespectful and wasteful than killing it a bit earlier and treating it as valuable food does.
Two: captive bolt slaughter done right is instant. When I take my sheep to the abbatoir the part that is rough on them is being taken somewhere unfamiliar, and being able to smell blood in the brief time between arrival at the abbatoir and slaughter. The number one thing that would improve welfare for my sheep would be if it were legal for a licensed professional to come slaughter them right on my farm, so they would really never be stressed at all, but unfortunately that is not legal where I am.
Three: similar to two, I raise truly free range chickens who spend much of their time wandering through the pastures annoying the sheep, but it is not legal for me to sell them for meat if I kill them myself, and no slaughter facility wants to handle such small batches of non-commercial traditional breed chicken. Chicken meat breeds are kind of horrifying in themselves, as they are specially crossbred to gain weight so fast that if you don’t slaughter them at a few months old they die anyway of heart failure. So again, best thing for welfare would be changes in the law to support small providers with traditional breeds and really good welfare practices. A lot of people would like to buy chicken meat from me knowing my chickens have a great life, but I can’t legally sell it to them, unless they’re willing to buy the live chicken and have me show them how to kill and butcher it themselves.
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ozymandias said:
To be clear, I don’t think any animal rights people in our community would object to slaughter if it didn’t happen, in most cases, after a lifetime of pain and suffering.
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loonybrain said:
Yeah, I worked on a farm for a short time, and did a little research on slaughter methods. I myself am ethically okay with the idea of consuming something… but I want the animal to be as comfortable as possible. Unfortunately, combined with poverty, that’s very difficult to insure.
(And no, can’t go vegeterian. Get sick every time, even with careful protein monitoring. A shame, too, I wouldn’t mind actually going, since I’m not THAT into meat.)
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kevinbrowne said:
Just to add to the conversation about nociception and pain, it turns out there’s a surgical procedure that can be used in cases of really intractable chronic pain called an anterior cingulotomy. As mentioned by another commenter, the experience of pain in humans involves two parts: first is nociception (i.e. firing of pain fibers in your body) and then there’s the negative emotional experience of pain once that signal reaches the brain. People who receive an anterior cingulotomy can still feel pain, but they no longer have the negative emotional response that it sucks to feel pain. Weird.
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Hedonic Treader said:
Hi Ozy, it’s Tomasik without a c. Just nitpicking. You don’t have to publish this comment. 🙂
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loonybrain said:
The pain argument doesn’t actually work for me because, well, for various reasons, I’m a little uncomfortable with the idea that it’s okay to kill something as long as they don’t feel pain. I’d rather the whatever-it-is to still be treated as humanely as possible.
Which means I’m okay with eating a cow or a pig, I would just rather their lives be good and their slaughter as quick and un-upsetting as possible. (I actually read a little about slaughterhouse design; it was really fascinating!) I know I don’t have the stomach to do that slaughtering myself, but going vegetarian makes me sick, so I’m kinda stuck eating meat (though not much of it) for the time being. And seafood, alas, is rather expensive.
A shame, really. I don’t even really LIKE meat that much; my love is dairy. But I apparently need to eat a little bit of it every once in a while, or I’ll get sick. No clue why.
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
According to Brian Tomasik’s How Much Direct Suffering Is Caused By Various Animal Foods?, a kilogram of milk produces the equivalent amount of suffering to 1.68 hours of a beef cow’s life.
The trouble with such arguments is that round here, people will look around, see the likes of this, and go “Oh yeah. I can see they are really suffering. Such agony!” and then ignore the earnest vegetarians and vegans who may actually have a point but deliver it in godawful ways.
As to eating shellfish – well. I’ve eaten limpets and winkles once (picked fresh off the rocks on the seashore when my father decided we should all eat what he ate as a kid), and I’d have to be very damn dedicated to quasi-vegetarianism to make them a primary source of replacement animal protein, but at least such a doctrine is open to allowing people to make gradual changes instead of telling us omnivores we are all animal torturers and rapists (I have an evangelically vegan brother, the links he posts on Facebook really do make those kinds of arguments: since dairy cows have to be in calf to give milk, then putting them in calf either via the old-fashioned way of turning the bull into the field or modern methods such as artificial insemination is rape).
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Gaudior said:
If you want to only eat animals that had a good life and a quick humane death, and are not in a position to raise any yourself, then I would suggest seeking out whatever small farmers are nearest to you. Farmers markets are a good place to find them, and they can also often be found online these days, especially if you look for local smallholders facebook groups and similar. Look for ones that are raising traditional breeds rather than commercial breeds, as commercial breeds are often so genetically distorted that it’s hard for them to live a normal life even if given the chance.
If you get to know a few small farmers you may find there are possibilities for trading labour for meat or eggs or whatever you are looking for, if you have time to spend rather than money. Even if you are not able for physical labour there is always a wide variety of things that need doing. For example I would be delighted if someone wanted to help sort and clean fleeces for spinning, in exchange for meat or eggs, and that only needs someone to be sighted and able to work with their hands.
Also, it would be fantastic if more people put pressure on regulators and lawmakers to make sensible accomodation for small producers who keep less than say 50 animals, and who keep traditional breeds and give them a natural life. The huge industrial producers lobby for health and welfare regulations that are convenient for their scale but are often counterproductive for small producers. For example, under EU regulation animals can only be slaughtered for food under the supervision of a veterinarian. Sounds good, right? But only large centralised slaughterhouses can afford this, so the small local family abbatoirs shut down, meaning that animals now have to be transported much longer distances, which is rough on them, and industrial scale processing is never going to be as humane as a good small local place will be.
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davidmikesimon said:
Why does small scale necessarily mean more humane slaughtering conditions? I’d naively expect it to be the other way around, since bigger scale generally means better specialized treatment and more experienced, specialized workers.
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Gaudior said:
In my experience small scale means more personal and more care. I think a place that does 25 animals in a day is going to be better at seeing them as individuals that matter compared to a place that does 2000 animals in a day, even with the best of intentions. And the small places, like the one I use, are generally run by a family over several generations. They are going to be way more experienced than the employees at a big industrial place, who are more likely to have turnover and to be people who just needed a job and may not have come from a livestock background to begin with.
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Gaudior said:
Oh here’s a good illustrative example. When an animal goes to the abbatoir it’s supposed to have food withheld for 12 hours beforehand, so its guts will be empty. To ensure this, big industrial abbatoirs require that the animals be brought to them the day before, so they can keep them in pens overnight and control the food withhold. By contrast, my abbatoir trusts me to take care of that so I can bring the animals in the morning to be done immediately. That is much much better for their welfare as being kept in a pen overnight in a strange scary place is very stressful for them.
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davidmikesimon said:
(Whoops, I meant to type “better specialized equipment” instead of “better specialized treatment” in my comment above.)
Gaudior, thanks for the specific reply! It’s good to actually talk with somebody about this who actually has direct experience.
One concept I keep coming back to is the idea of “full lifetime”. I wouldn’t put down a dog earlier than was necessary, i.e. before its qualify of life irreversibly dropped below a certain threshold. That’s the same policy I’d have for a human (including myself) being euthanized, and also for any other conscious animal.
However, when it comes to animals raised for meat, milk, or eggs, I would imagine that the quality or even safety of the product would be affected badly by age, which makes it impractical to wait as long as I would for my dog. I know this is particularly true for many highly-altered breeds of livestock today, but would it even be a problem if we were to somehow start over from wild stock and do the selective breeding again? I suspect so, but don’t have any expertise to say for sure.
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Gaudior said:
You have good questions, happy to discuss with someone who wants information from direct experience.
Generally speaking it’s not that quality or safety are issues with an older animal, it’s that people’s tastes have now been trained toward what is convenient for industrial production and fast turnaround. So people expect a carcass to have a large amount of relatively bland and tender meat. An older animal will be tougher and more flavourful and require a bit more attention to cooking. It is true that the longer an animal lives the more chance it has to get sick or die by accident or non-human predator and thus not wind up as food for humans, but that’s a minor issue at most.
With regard to full lifetime and what that means, at least for a traditional breed like mine which is not too far removed from wild stock, the main issue is the boys. For both chickens and sheep, in nature what happens is 50% boys are born and when they get to sexual maturity they fight until the majority of them are injured and/or driven off and get taken by predators. If I just let my flocks increase naturally, that’s what would happen, except that there aren’t any non-human predators here that take sheep so the losers would just die a lingering death. So in my approximation of that, I separate the ram lambs at about 4 months and keep them away from females in a different field, so they are social with each other instead and don’t fight too much. I keep them like that until they are about 16 months old, so they get their full growth and get to enjoy two summers, and then take them to slaughter in early fall. Which isn’t a terribly long life but stacks up pretty well compared to the odds they’d have in nature. Similar for the cockerels but shorter timescale.
For the girls, and the boys that I keep for breeding, the sheep get closer to 7-8 years, depending on teeth and other health considerations, and the chickens generally get a few years until a fox or hawk gets them, which is the price of free ranging.
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