Factory Farming – NHSEB 2020-2021 National Case 1

Case 1 this NHSEB season comes out pretty hard against factory farming. This is uncharacteristic of ethics bowl cases, which usually offer a decent balance of reasons for and against. The lopsided presentation may be appropriate due to just how difficult factory farming is to morally defend. However, one angle to consider is how beef production and consumption doesn’t seem quite as morally problematic as other forms of meat.

Industrial vs. Mom and Pop

First, it’s important to distinguish factory farming from family and hobby farming. Our romanticized image of agrarian animal husbandry still exists. I bottle fed calves as a teenager in the 90s. My wife’s family once raised a pig. Thousands of preparedness-minded suburbanites built luxury chicken coups at the outset of COVID. These examples aren’t what case 1 is targeting.

Factory farmed pigs are kept in industrial buildings on concrete floors, separated from their mother shortly after birth, and given little opportunity for interaction or mental stimulation. Despite what the entitled dogs in Babe may say, pigs are famously smart, as smart as or smarter than canines. Imagine thousands of bright Australian Shepherds, eager to herd and frolic and fetch, instead confined to concrete cells. Now imagine equally intelligent pigs in the same predicament, no warm mud to wallow in, no landscape to explore.

As Napoleon Dynamite discovered, factory farmed chickens are crammed into cages so small they can’t even spread their wings. Imagine having a powerful instinctual drive to do something as simple as flapping, yet being smothered between a wire cage that cuts into your feet and fellow prisoners pecking at your face. For your entire life. Whether bred for poultry or eggs, factory farmed chickens lead pretty miserable lives.

This just scratches the surface. If you’re up for the full gory truth, PETA and similar organizations routinely send spies undercover to record how factory farms are run. So do some research – ensure your position on factory farms is based on a fair and accurate assessment of actual, current conditions. But just as we shouldn’t accept the myth that all farms are happy farms, we shouldn’t conclude all meat sources are equally tortured.

Bacon vs. Beef

While some factory farmed animals have it really bad, it would be a sweeping generalization to conclude all meat sources are severely mistreated.

Beef cattle, for example, often live a decent life up until the point of slaughter. They’re usually free to roam and graze, breed and birth, and are left largely to behave as they might in the wild. This isn’t because beef farmers are necessarily concerned with cows’ happiness. Giving them room to roam is simply efficient and convenient. Cattle need grass (and hay during the winter), a water source (any pond or creek will do), and a good enough fence. Fenced fields are cheap. Pond water falls freely from the sky. So long as you don’t have too many cows per acre, or you rotate the herd at regular intervals, grass grows on its own. I know because I live in cattle country and thanks to kind neighbors enjoy ATV rides along and through cow pastures regularly (watch for those patties!). Beef cattle aren’t pampered. But their lives usually aren’t as bad as factory farmed pigs and chickens.

Of course, veal’s another story. Veal comes from calves who have weights tied around their necks to prevent them from moving. This ensures their meat is tender and white, which is what makes veal veal.

Cows are also sometimes artificially inseminated rather than naturally bred. Having a farmer impregnate you with a long straw feels invasive, cow or not. Young bulls often have their testicles removed via a thick rubber band that cuts off the blood supply and causes the scrotum to rot and fall off (this turns bulls into steers, preferred because steers are less aggressive and easier to handle). The de-horning process is painful and traumatic. Horns are either prevented from growing with an acidic cream, or cut off with shears (horns look cool, but being gored isn’t).

So it’s not all green grass and loafing. But hey, cattle are largely left alone, receive water, food and medical attention, I’m assuming even at the largest operations. Simply being able to roam outdoors is worth a great deal, and so beef cattle in particular would seem to have a less miserable life than non-free range poultry chickens and laying hens, as well as factory farmed pigs.

We should also note that dairy (milk-producing) cows have it worse off than beef cattle. I know because I’ve visited local dairies – watched a high school buddy dip a cow’s udders in an iodine solution before attaching the suction mechanism that drained its milk. One hardship is that dairy cows are kept perpetually pregnant – that’s why they’re able to continually produce milk. Male offspring aren’t especially useful on a dairy farm, and are sold to be raised for beef. That’s how I obtained my own calves as a kid, by buying 3-day-old Holsteins from a local dairy which I’d then raise to 6 months or so and sell to farmers at auction.

I concede this so you know the extent and limits of my experience with farm animals. Full factory farms I know only through YouTube. But medium-sized beef cattle and dairy farms and hobby egg operations, I’ve seen up close. I actually raised chickens as a kid – my favorite’s name was Cluck. My first calf’s name was Buttercup. If your only encounters with farm animals have been at the zoo, do some research so your view isn’t based on an overly rosy or an overly ugly myth. The truth is somewhere in between.

Size Matters

Ethicist and philosophy grad school buddy Joel MacClellan once made a convincing argument that it’s less morally problematic to eat meat from large as opposed to small animals. Why? One cow can supplement a small family’s diet for an entire year. However, one chicken won’t last a week. In fact, if KFC’s family-sized buckets are any indication, sometimes it takes more than one chicken to feed a single family a single meal.

Assuming cows’ and chicken’ ‘lives and suffering matter equally, if killing and eating one rather than the other would decrease suffering and death, all else equal, that’s the one people should eat. In fact, if whale meat were healthy and sustainable, according to this line of argument, we should all switch to whale. Or bear or hippopotamus or whatever.

MacClellan’s insistence that we eat meat in ways that minimizes overall pain and maximizes overall pleasure is consistent with the argument Australian philosopher Peter Singer offers in Animal Liberation. A Utilitarian, Singer contrasts the pleasure humans get from the taste of animal flesh with the great suffering animals must endure to provide it, concluding that our pleasure is far outweighed by their pain. His logic is hard to deny.

Given that factory farms are especially miserable, Singer’s argument is most powerful for animals stuck in them, living under the worst conditions. And combined with MacClellan’s argument, it would seem that eating smaller animals, which presumably endure greater suffering to produce similar nutrition and taste satisfaction, is more morally problematic than eating larger animals.

Thus, a reasonable person interested in developing a nuanced position on factory farming might conclude that it’s less wrong to eat non-veal beef as opposed to chicken, bacon and other meats. Why? Because non-veal beef cattle’s lives aren’t as terrible, and each can provide many times more satisfaction and nutrition to those who consume them.

Of course, an even more reasonable person might insist that carnivores eat wild deer or salmon, or synthetic meats grown in a lab (wait, wasn’t that an ethics bowl case from last season?). And an even more reasonable person might insist we satisfy our taste buds with yummy fruits and vegetables, and get our nutrition from pain-free plant-based proteins. But if your team isn’t ready for all that, try pitching this approach. And whatever the case, base your views on a realistic assessment of what factory farming is all about.

P.S. Australian Ethics Olympiad coach Andre Costantino wrote this excellent post on the ethics of meat consumption only two months ago. It’s on a different ethics bowl case, and not specific to factory farming. But it does address common misconceptions and bad rationalizations likely to come up during prep and/or competition.

P.P.S. Notice how the analysis above steers the conversation away from traditional factory farming, and also how it doesn’t directly address the enumerated list of harms found in the case’s final paragraph. To thoroughly prepare your team, be sure they’re ready to answer the question asked (oh man, practice question 3 with this one is tough!) , and also have some thoughts on the issues raised in the case which include environmental harms, labor-related issues, the fact that meat-eating is often unhealthy, and how large factory farms run smaller operations out of business.