A new report is pure nightmare fuel for animal advocates. According to the research, humanity is on track to farm and kill nearly 6 trillion animals annually by 2033, a near-quadrupling from 2023. Almost all of the growth will come from farming tiny animals: shrimp, fish, and most of all, insects. New research has shown that fish and insects, such as fruit flies, have the capacity to feel pain and are in need of protection. Some in the animal advocacy movement might consider the expansion of moral concern, especially for insects, a major strategic error. One that will make an already fringe movement seem even more strange. But the general public might be more open to having some ethical consideration for these animals than we might think. Last month, the common and disturbing practice of tearing out female shrimp’s eyes to make them breed faster made it to the front page of Reddit, whose users were overwhelmingly horrified by it.
KENNY TORRELLA: Should you care about the suffering of bugs? For most people, it’s a laughable question. But for those who really, really care about animal welfare, there’s a certain intellectual journey that might lead them to take it seriously… For the animal advocates who take this journey and wind up at the bottom of this animal suffering rabbit hole, a new report from the research organization Rethink Priorities will be pure nightmare fuel. According to the group, humanity is on track to farm and kill nearly 6 trillion animals annually by 2033, a near-quadrupling from 2023…
And almost all of the growth in animal farming will come from tiny animals: shrimp, fish, and most of all, two insect species (mealworms and black soldier fly larvae). While humans farm and slaughter an astonishing 3 billion pigs, sheep, goats, and cattle each year, these animals are so dwarfed in numbers by farmed chicken, fish, and bugs that Rethink Priorities didn’t even include them in its calculation, nor did it include the 1 to 2 trillion wild fish scooped out of the ocean every year.
The forecast starkly illustrates how a transformation in global agriculture patterns have ratcheted up animal suffering to mind-boggling proportions.
The reason is that we’re increasingly eating really small animals. In the 1990s, chicken overtook beef as America’s meat of choice, and US chicken consumption continues to climb every year. And it takes about 127 chickens to produce the same amount of meat as one cow, because cows are enormous, while chickens weigh only about 6 pounds at slaughter. So, as Americans shifted toward eating animal species that are smaller in size, the total number of animals raised on US factory farms shot up.
The same logic applies to an even greater extent to fish and shrimp — you’d have to kill about 28,500 shrimps to get the same amount of meat as you would from one cow. These animals are being farmed and eaten in increasingly massive numbers around the world, with both fish and shrimp typically confined in crowded, disease-ridden ponds or tanks that animal advocates liken to underwater factory farms. The world now eats more fish from these farms than from the ocean.
Even worse, small animals, like chickens, fish, insects, and shrimp, tend to be treated worse and have fewer protections than larger animals like pigs and cattle.
Concern for the welfare of insects — and even fish and shrimp — might bemuse or even offend many people. Humans already kill untold numbers of bugs annually by simply going about our daily business — driving, walking, exterminating ant infestations from our homes, and spraying pesticides on our crops. Americans eat tens of billions of individual shrimps each year with virtually no worry that they might feel pain. While farmed chickens and pigs have received the sympathetic Hollywood treatment, like the Chicken Run movies, Charlotte’s Web, and Okja, similar films about shrimp or mealworms don’t seem to be in the offing.
But Rethink Priorities, along with a growing chorus of scientists and philosophers, believe that invertebrates like shrimp and insects could be sentient, meaning they possess the capacity for pain, pleasure, and other sensations. They’re not arguing that these animals are equivalent to a chicken, cow, or human, but that they may be worth some moral consideration given emerging research on their potential for sentience and the massive scale on which they’re farmed.
History has long shown us that today’s laughable moral concern could be tomorrow’s tragedy. That could be the case for these tiny, unfamiliar, uncharismatic animals the more we come to understand who they are and what they might be capable of feeling.
There had long been relatively little research into whether invertebrates like shrimp and insects are sentient, but that’s begun to change in recent years.
“Evidence is building that there’s a form of sentience there in insects,” Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics who leads the Foundations of Animal Sentience project at the university, told me.
Historically, this line of inquiry has focused on bees, he said, who have demonstrated signs of sentience by engaging in wound-tending behavior, complex decision-making in weighing pain versus pleasure, and even play. Some research has shown that fruit flies may have the capacity to feel pain and enjoy play…
Most people who advocate for factory-farmed animals focus on pigs, cows, chickens, and turkeys. Only the most quantitatively minded number-crunchers, like Birch and the folks at Rethink Priorities, look at the data and focus on fish, shrimp, and insects.
Some in the animal advocacy movement might consider this expansion of moral concern — especially for insects — a major strategic error, one that will make an already fringe movement seem even more strange and scolding… But the general public might be more open to having some ethical consideration for these animals than we might think…
Last month, a post about eyestalk ablation — the common, disturbing practice of tearing out female shrimp’s eyes to make them breed faster — made it to the front page of Reddit, whose users were overwhelmingly horrified by it. SOURCE…
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