HELL ON EARTH: Human progress has come at the expense of animals
The number of land animals alone killed for food, every year, is 10 times the global human population. Worst of all, with each passing year, more and more animals live short lives of suffering only to be mercilessly killed. Although human population growth is declining and shrinking, the population of farmed animals shows little sign of slowing down. The result is that humanity may have set in motion a welfare system on a steep downward trajectory. That’s not progress. That’s hell on Earth.
BRYAN WALSH: The human present is better than the past, and barring catastrophe, we can likely expect the future to be better than the present. The statistics are so clear as to be indisputable. Nearly two centuries ago, almost half of all children died before their 15th birthday — now it’s below 5 percent globally. Starvation was high, life expectancy was low, violence was more common, and literacy was reserved for the elite…
And while far too many people in far too many countries today still live in poor conditions,… the trends have long been pointing in the right direction, with extreme poverty, hunger, and death from preventable diseases all declining sharply, especially over the past few decades… Climate change, which is measurably making the world worse in some ways with each passing year, is on track to be less bad than we thought five or 10 years ago… So zoom out far enough, and things really are getting better all the time. Except for one exception that is so large and significant that, depending on your values, it might be enough to turn the entire story of progress on its head: animals…
That’s the argument made… by Kyle Fish.Using data that goes back to 1961, Fish estimated the changing levels of total welfare of both humans and animals to make the striking case that even with humans doing better and better, the sheer misery and rising numbers of farmed animals like pigs, chickens, and cows mean that on net, global welfare is declining and trending negative. As he puts it: “The entire good of humanity may be outweighed by the cumulative suffering of farmed animals, with total animal suffering growing faster than human wellbeing is increasing, especially in recent decades.”
The kind of moral math that went into these calculations can be hard to parse for those outside the utilitarian mindset that characterizes effective altruism, but the foundation is relatively simple. Estimate the overall welfare of a species — roughly, how much suffering they’re experiencing, weighted more heavily to species we believe can suffer more — and multiply it by the total population. Put it all together, and you get a (very rough) estimate of net global welfare for humans and farmed animals… But the calculations go beyond the sheer misery of the median farmed animal. What really changes the picture on global welfare is the question of numbers.
Over the past 60 years, the human population has more than tripled, from 3 billion to 8 billion… But human population growth has been absolutely dwarfed by the growth in the number of farmed animals. In 1961 there were more humans on the planet than all farmed animals except for chickens, and they outnumbered us by less than a billion. Today, there are four times more chickens than humans, and more than an order of magnitude more farmed fish and shrimp. Put it this way: the number of land animals alone killed for food, every year, is 10 times the global human population — and even that figure is dwarfed by the number of slaughtered fish and shrimp. Perhaps worst of all — and very much unlike human beings — this is rapidly worsening. With each passing year, more and more animals live short lives of suffering only to be mercilessly killed…
Given that human population growth is declining, and our numbers are even projected to start shrinking within this century, the human proportion of overall global welfare will likely fall as well. But the population of farmed animals shows little sign of slowing down. The result, as Fish puts it, is that “humanity may have set systems in motion that put the total welfare of the world on a steep downward trajectory.” That’s not progress. That’s net hell on Earth…
So have we indeed locked ourselves into a future that is more and more miserable for living creatures on net?… Just as whether we accelerate the reduction in extreme poverty — or not — is a choice, so is whether we will continue to permit the extreme suffering of billions of animals. Technology can help, through better plant-based meat alternatives, and perhaps eventually, even lab-grown cultured meat that can eliminate the need for farmed animals altogether…
But the real change would need to come in our moral values. If you don’t believe that the moral value of a farmed animal has any weight next to a human being, these calculations mean little to you. And in practice most of us do not, whatever we might say or feel, given that close to 90 percent of the human population eats meat, while global per capita meat consumption has nearly doubled between 1961 and now.
To attempt to fix this is to engage in perhaps the most radical social change in the history of humanity, to upset an established order most of us never stop to question. The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey put it well in a recent profile of the animal rights activist group Direct Action Everywhere, a movement “burdened with advocating for billions of suffering creatures and being able to help only a few. They are burdened with the futile, enraging task of trying to get people to live by their own articulated values”…
The history of humanity shows that we have a capacity to change and improve, through better technology, better politics, and above all, better morals. We’ve brought that change, imperfect but real, to the human story. The question is whether we will extend it to the living beings with whom we share this planet. SOURCE…
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