In this post I will dismantle the idea that supporting farms that treat animals well (‘ethical omnivorism’) is the way to end factory farming. This is a perfectly understandable idea, but in practice it won’t work. As crazy as it may sound at first, veganism is easily the more effective way to minimise animal suffering in the long term.
There are two important posts closely related to this one:
- Veganism can succeed takes a closer look at the progress veganism is making, to explain how it can manage better than ethical omnivorism.
- How ethical farms make things worse explains why ethical omnivorism isn’t just an inadequate solution, it’s actually harmful.
Introduction
First, let’s clearly define the goal. We want to create a world in the future with as little cruelty as possible towards animals used for food. In this world, most people who have the freedom to do so should mainly eat either plants or products from animals that were well treated.
Most of these people will live in cities. They are not going to raise or hunt their own animals. So, anyone who primarily eats meat from animals they raise or hunt isn’t helping achieve the goal. It doesn’t matter how happy the animals were or how the environment is affected – it’s not a scalable solution.
It’s also not very useful to visit a farm, see happy looking animals, and buy directly from the farmer. It’s often a step in the right direction, but:
- It’s very hard to do this correctly. There’s a long list of things to consider regarding the welfare of farmed animals. The farmer can make conditions and welfare appear better than they are; he/she can control the time of your visit and the parts of the farm you see, pay extra attention to animals and presentation on that day, take advantage of gaps in your knowledge, and so on.
- It’s very inefficient: once you’ve verified a farm is ethical, this is only helpful for you and people who trust you.
- It only works if you want to cook the food from the farm for yourself, as opposed to, say, buying a premade frozen pizza at a supermarket.
There are organisations who carefully design standards for animal welfare on farms, audit farms through independent third parties, and provide labeling on packages. This is the solution*. If we want a future filled with humane animal products, it means making these labels widespread. It means to completely transform the current livestock industry, which is currently filled with cruel practices. It means convincing people to buy from humane farms so that they fill up the market and replace the inhumane ones. Like I’ve said, on the surface, this is a plausible idea. But I have no doubt that it makes more sense to convince people to go vegan, and here’s why:
- Animal agriculture is becoming more industrialised and there’s little reason to expect this trend to reverse now
- Animal products which have good labels indicating that they are humane are very rare
- The ethical omnivore community is very small compared to veganism
- Ethical omnivores are more likely to cheat on their diet
- Economics is not on the side of humane farms
1. Animal agriculture is becoming more industrialised and there’s little reason to expect this trend to reverse now
Farms are growing larger and more efficient. Most animals come from factory farms, and this is becoming more true over time. This is generally terrible for animal welfare. To make farming more ethical requires overcoming the powerful economic forces that got us here in the first place and somehow reversing the trend. And there’s little reason why this would happen now. What’s the relevant difference between now and the past? If we have the means and motivation to change the industry, why hasn’t it happened (or at least started to happen) sooner? Why did we even go wrong in the first place? Are people more compassionate now than in the past?
I’m not saying it can’t happen. Attitudes about many issues have changed over time. But the evidence now is that it currently isn’t happening. And the question is not can it happen, but why would it?
The biggest reason I can think of is that awareness and concern about animal cruelty is on the rise. And the timing makes sense: technology has enabled things like sharing videos of slaughterhouses on social media. But there are two crucial points about this:
- The same factor convinces many people to go vegan or vegetarian.
- The increase in awareness/concern is largely thanks to vegans in the first place.
Another potential reason is that specific cruel practices may disappear when either:
- It was previously thought that the practice wasn’t harmful, and new science shows that it is
- New technology allows farmers to accomplish the same goal as the old practice with less suffering
I don’t know how significant this effect is or may be in the future, but there’s clearly many things it can’t apply to. For example, we know that overcrowding causes stress in animals (see this paper for example). Short of keeping them constantly drugged or bending the fabric of space-time, I don’t think technology will ever provide a cheap, humane alternative to giving animals space.
On the other hand, there are several reasons why veganism is much easier now than in the past.
2. Animal products which have good labels indicating that they are humane are very rare
There are many labels which aren’t particularly meaningful, like ‘free range’. Here is a guide to what different labels really mean and which ones you should support. Let’s take a look at two: Animal Welfare Approved and the Global Animal Partnership.
Animal Welfare Approved (AWA)
The AWA website has a convenient search function which shows where you can buy their approved products. Searching for the product “Cow’s Cheese” yields 92 results:
Note how they’re mostly clustered into a few states, while vast swathes of the US are nowhere near any of the locations.
Global Animal Partnership (GAP)
GAP is pioneered by Whole Foods: it’s the main place you can find GAP products, and all products in Whole Foods for which a GAP standard exists must be GAP certified. That doesn’t mean every animal product in Whole Foods is automatically humane. Firstly, there isn’t a standard for all products; dairy is notably left out. Secondly, products are rated on a scale from Step 1 to Step 5+, with higher steps being more humane. For example, from the standard for pigs: “For market pigs between 56 lb (26 kg) and 112 lb (50 kg): The minimum space allowance is 7 ft² (0.65 m²) per pig” for Step 2. If you’re not sure how to interpret area, picture a square whose side is 2.6 ft or 0.8 m long. Alternatively, here’s a picture of an actual Step 2 pig farm called Sweet Stem which supplies Whole Foods:
According to PETA, “Approximately 79 percent of all the pig farms that supply Whole Foods are Step 2 or lower”.
It’s only at Step 5 that farms are prohibited from making various alterations to the pigs: castration, nose-ringing, and ear-notching. These aren’t trivial issues. The standards document itself says “Castration is known to cause pain and discomfort”, yet pain relief drugs are not required for any of the lower steps. In the UK and Ireland, castration is illegal. Nose-ringing is specifically meant to discourage pigs from their natural behaviours of rooting and foraging by making them painful.
According to Bloomberg: “Of the company’s 2,822 pork, beef, chicken, and turkey suppliers, only 14 are rated “Step 5″ or better.” For some context, according to the USDA, there were 619,172 farms or ranches specializing in cattle in the US in 2012.
3. The community is very small compared to veganism
It’s hard to measure how many people make a serious effort to eat products from humanely raised animals. One article from the Ethical Omnivore Movement website cites an article that says “over one third (35 percent) of consumers stop buying from brands they perceive as unethical” and considers everyone in this category apart from vegetarians and vegans “ethically minded omnivores”. This is an enormous overestimate. Most people have a very poor idea of typical farming conditions and do not perceive the food they buy as unethical. For example:
An estimated 95% of all eggs in the United States are produced in conventional cage systems, sometimes called battery cages. [They] typically provide each laying hen an average of 67 square inches of floor space. In some egg operations, hens have less space.
Source: Table Egg Production and Hen Welfare: Agreement and Legislative Proposals – 2014
So an upper limit on the percentage of Americans buying eggs that might ever be considered ethical by the Ethical Omnivore movement is 5%. And that’s obviously extremely generous, since I’ve only considered one cruel practice for one animal product. More stats of this kind can be found here.
Let’s look at the sizes of online communities. I’m not saying this is particularly accurate or scientific; people don’t participate in every single thing online that relates to their interests or beliefs. But it should give a rough idea of the ratio of ethical omnivores to vegans/vegetarians.
Here are the biggest Facebook pages I could find in 4 categories:
Organisations that certify farms as humane:
- Animal Welfare Approved: 20,912 likes
- Humane Farm Animal Care: 12,723 likes
- Food Alliance: 5,137 likes
- American Humane Farm Program: 2,288 likes
- Humane Choice True Free Range: 1,642 likes
Communities focused on eating animal products ethically:
- EOM – Ethical Omnivore Movement: 10,920 likes
- Ethical Omnivore Consumer/Producer Alliance: 5,568 Members
- Humaneitarian: 1,977 likes
- The Mindful Carnivore: 1,875 likes
- Go Ethical Omnivore: 1,059 likes
Veganism:
- Finding Vegan: 967,590 likes
- Vegan Outreach: 928,935 likes
- So Vegan: 889,549 likes
- Vegan.com: 882,212 likes
- Vegan Recipes: 538,486 likes
Vegetarianism:
- Tasty Vegetarian: 7,913,982 likes
- Vegetarian Times: 2,040,364 likes
- Manjula’s Kitchen – Indian Vegetarian Recipes: 1,727,371 likes
- Vegetarian: 797,434 likes
The subreddit /r/vegan has 167,666 subscribers. I can’t find any ‘ethical omnivore’ subreddit.
When I searched for ‘ethical omnivore’ on YouTube, the only results with more than 1000 views (including one with 32,798 views and one with 11,113) were pro-vegan.
4. Ethical omnivores are more likely to cheat on their diet
From the paper “Can you have your meat and eat it too? Conscientious omnivores, vegetarians, and adherence to diet”:
COs were less likely to perceive their diet as something that they absolutely needed to follow, reported violating their diet more, felt less guilty when doing so, believed less in animal rights, were less disgusted by factory-farmed meat, rated its sensory characteristics more favorably, and were lower in ingroup identification than vegetarians. Mediation analysis demonstrated that differences in the amount of violations and guilt associated with these violations could in part be traced to practical and psychological factors, making it more difficult to follow conscientious omnivorism.
This is a big problem for the spread of ethical omnivorism as a social movement. It’s hard to encourage and inspire people to avoid eating factory farmed meat if you’re doing it yourself. From the book “Eating Animals”:
The decision to eat any meat at all (even if the meat is from producers that are less abusive) will cause others you know to eat factory-farmed meat where they might otherwise not have. What does it say that the leaders of the “ethical meat” charge, like my friends Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan and even the Niman Ranch farmers, regularly pull money out of their pocket and send it off to factory farms? To me, it says that “ethical carnivores” is a failed idea; even the most prominent advocates don’t do it full-time. I have met countless people who were moved by Eric’s and Michael’s arguments, but none of them now eat exclusively Niman-type meat. They are either vegetarians or they continue to eat at least some factory-farmed animals.
It’s also a big problem for the economic side of the movement, which I’ll discuss now.
5. Economics is not on the side of humane farms
The defining difference between a world filled with vegans and one filled with ethical omnivores is the presence of humane farms. This means that an essential component of the ethical omnivore movement is the creation and growth of those farms through financial support. Nothing corresponding can be said for the vegan movement: tasty vegan food doesn’t require specialised substitutes for meat/dairy/eggs. The animal industry is indeed being replaced with vegan alternatives (consider the company Elmhurst which switched from producing dairy to nut milks or this cafe) but even if it didn’t, veganism could manage. But you can’t be an ethical omnivore unless there are ethical farms with available stock that you can afford. And there are major problems with trying to raise the necessary funds. We’ve already discussed the following:
- There are very few ethical farms out there to support.
- There are very few ethical omnivores to support the farms.
- Ethical omnivores often raise their own animals or hunt instead of buying from other farms. (I’m not saying these things are wrong and should stop, but the side effect remains)
- Ethical omnivores often still buy from factory farms instead of humane farms.
Another problem is that ethical omnivores often eat less meat. For example, it’s the first item on this page advising people on how to become an ethical omnivore in practice. There are various reasons for this which I won’t go into – the point is that I agree and I’m not recommending that this changes. But it puts the humane farms at a major disadvantage to the factory farms that they have to compete with in sales.
Then there’s the tendency for humane farms to be small, because at larger scales welfare becomes much more difficult to sustain. This makes it much harder for them to compete with giant factory farms. Most animals already come from large farms even though most farms are small. If small farms are to take over the market, they have to vastly increase in number. That’s the opposite of what’s currently happening.
Moreover, what happens when a farm becomes successful and grows? Consider this passage:
It is not difficult to imagine that as small-scale farmers become larger and more removed from the animals they raise, and, most importantly, better known as a “brand” name, the animals will start to fare worse. This process is exactly what has already happened in the case of the largest, and most well-known, producer of humane meat, Niman Ranch. The original founder, Bill Niman, was forced out by shareholders who wanted to lower standards (while keeping the same name and price for the meat) to increase profitability. The new CEO of Niman Ranch uses an argument identical to the one presented by Salatin to justify these actions: “I think idealism can pay… But it has to be couched with practicality”. Even if someone had visited Niman Ranch in the beginning and been satisfied with the level of animal husbandry used there, they would now be buying a product no longer raised, or even approved, by Bill Niman. In fact, Bill Niman no longer eats Niman Ranch meat, because of his concerns about the care of animals. Therefore, in the best “test case” available, the support of small-scale farms failed, ultimately, to significantly help animals, farmers, or the environment.
Source: Critical Animal Studies: Thinking the Unthinkable
The state of animal welfare on modern farms isn’t an accident. It’s the product of capitalism and basic maths. The farms that make the most profits are simply those where profits are the main priority. They breed the most animals at the lowest cost. Prioritising welfare would get in the way of that. Some will claim that welfare is important for profits because happy animals produce better-tasting meat. Whether or not this is sometimes true, the data clearly shows that inhumane factory farms are having the most success.
* One day we might have more extensive animal welfare laws and enforcement to alleviate the situation, or we might have affordable lab-grown meat. I might talk about my skepticism for these possibilities in the future, but for this post the most important point is that these solutions are affected much less by our choices as consumers. Everyone makes a choice every day to eat either no meat, meat from a factory farm, or meat from somewhere else, and these choices affect the economic and societal landscape. This post is focused on the results of those choices. You can choose to vote for politicians who support animal welfare laws or donate to companies researching lab grown meat independently.
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