EA - The Common Sense View on Meat Implies Some Pretty Radical Conclusions by Omnizoid

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Common Sense View on Meat Implies Some Pretty Radical Conclusions, published by Omnizoid on June 14, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Crosspost of this from my Substack.Somewhere, right now, a cat is probably being harmed. Some psychopathic child is stomping on it, or beating it, or burying it alive, or dousing it in gasoline before he sets it on fire. This is, sadly, not uncommon. And almost everyone agrees that it’s bad.Almost everyone agrees that, though animals don’t have the same rights as people, we should not hurt them for trivial reasons. Even if this child and a few friends are having a good time hurting a cat, this is still immoral. And it’s wrong not just because of what it does to the character of the boys—it’s partly wrong because of what is being done to the cat. Torturing a cat is worse than torturing a robot that one believes to be a cat, even though they’d have the same effects on one’s character because one causes actual torment to an animal and the other does not.The common sense view around animals seems to be “it’s okay to eat them, but we should try our hardest not to mistreat them.” The philosophical merits of such a position can be debated, but this seems like something that almost everyone agrees with. But if this is true, then common sense condemns our current ghastly mistreatment of animals.People act like the vegan position that our current meat eating is seriously wrong is a radical position—a position that requires believing extreme views. But it’s not—it’s about as moderate as you can get.It’s not radical to be opposed to eating eggs from chickens that were stuffed in a cage, covered in the falling, acidic feces of those above them, that burns their flesh and enters their nose, making it impossible to breathe and making their eyes constantly burn. It’s not radical to not want to buy eggs from chickens stuffed in a tiny wire cage that causes them to develop foot conditions, constantly rubbing against sharp metal, too small for them to ever be able to turn around or lie down comfortably. It’s not radical not to want to buy eggs from suppliers when every second of every day, there are at least 6 million hens being systematically starved, because there’s a way to trick the bodies of the hens into thinking it’s egg-laying season by starving them, resulting in more eggs being laid. When this is the way that 5-10% of hens die, it’s not radical not to want to pay to exacerbate their torment.When the egg industry grinds up billions of bouncy baby male chicks, just because they can’t lay eggs, it isn’t radical to say that we shouldn’t be paying them to grind up more. When the conditions are so bad that the hens go crazy and throw themselves against the sides of the cages, every natural behavior thwarted, everything that might bring them joy snuffed out in the dark, filthy, disgusting juggernauts of death, torment, and despair, it’s not radical to not want to fund that.It’s not radical to think that it’s wrong to buy chickens when they have been artificially engineered to be in constant pain—their entire bodies twisted and warped into maximally efficient machines for generating flesh. When thousands of chickens are stuffed into crates in transport every hour in extreme weather, killing 5-10% of them, it’s not wrong to say that we won’t pay for that until they stop their systematic abuse. Chickens live in windowless sheds, constantly sleep-deprived from artificial lighting. When animals have their beaks, tails, and testicles cut off with a sharp knife, with no anesthetic, when they’re given third-degree burns because it makes it easier to identify them, it isn’t wrong to refuse to pay for that until the people systematically torturing them can get their act together and stop the torture.And yes, it is torture. This is not hyperbole...