In this excellent piece, I was most struck by the following passage:
But pigs and chickens, which convert grain to meat far more efficiently
than beef, are increasingly the meats of choice for producers,
accounting for 70 percent of total meat production, with industrialized
systems producing half that pork and three-quarters of the chicken.
Let’s say you want to protect the environment, and you are going to eat some meat, should you eat cows or pigs? Pigs. Let’s say you care about animal cruelty. Pigs are smarter and more social than cows. A pig (or chicken) also seems to yield less meat per unit of animal suffering. That would imply it is better for animal welfare to eat cows rather than pigs. The conflict between environmental goals and animal welfare goals is one of the most significant underreported stories in this area.
Well, chickens are more efficient than either pigs or cows, and a lot stupider.
There is also the issue of grass fed versus grain fed. So, animals fed on grass
grown on areas where grain cannot be grown are much more ecologically efficient.
So let us eat thos locally grown, free range chickens.
Chickens and pigs are omnivores with very inefficient digestive systems. Like people. Bittman has his thumb on the scales in that his numbers depend on grain. For all of these animals that’s a twinky diet that is bad for them and us, but worst of all for ruminants.
If you want to eat foods that are the least harmful to the environment then eat meat and dairy products from ruminants that are raised on their natural diet of leaves and twigs. Nature makes lots of leaves but not much grain. Eating such meats is even less harmful to the environment than eating grain.
You might look into imported NZ lamb. They’re mostly raised on non-irrigated high country pasture land that is not particularly well suited for anything else. Lambs are pretty stupid, and seem pretty happy out in their pastures. I have no doubt that any randomly chosen NZ lamb prefers having been born, and they’re dumb enough that the scare of being herded into trucks for slaughter can’t be that much worse than being startled by the sun coming up in the morning or by a passing UFO. Ignore the food miles folks: pasture-raised lamb frozen and shipped is still more carbon friendly than ones raised locally on heavily fertilized and irrigated pastures or on grain supplement. Of course, US tariffs on NZ lamb to protect a tiny number of US lamb farmers might make it a bit pricey. Here, decent lamb chops sell for the equivalent of about $4.50/lb.
I’d lean to pasture-raised beef over chicken if I were an environmentalist. Chickens tend to be fed on grain/soy based pellets. On the Canadian beef farm where I grew up, the cattle would be on pasture for as long as decent pasture existed, then were in feedlot where they’d eat a mix of grain and baled hay/alfalfa. A lot of land that would be pretty marginal if broken for grain farming is put to good use either in pasture or in hay production. Kebko might want to wait for the cow that’s able to tell him that her liver ought to be particularly tender as she’s been force-feeding herself for months.
Ok, enough Douglas Adams…
I suggest veal. Here, where there is a good bit of dairy farming, I know of a small slaughterhouse that recently obtained a couple of dozen head of perfectly good veal for free after an auction. The veal calves are a byproduct of the dairy industry, and there is so little demand for them that there were no bidders at auction.
Thus, as long as there is minimal demand for veal, you are consuming a resource with essentially no marginal cost (in dollars or to the environment).
Bentham wrote: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
Pigs being smarter and more social has got nothing to do with it.
Kerim Can: As far as I am concerned, the capacity to suffer requires some ability to reason. Merely feeling pain is insufficient, you need to be in some sense self-aware to truly suffer. Of course to my standards, pretty much no animal is worthy of rights, so YMMV.
Since the animals we “process” are bred specifically for human consumption, its fair to say that the only reason they are alive to begin with is to serve as food? So is wallowing around in your own feces for a couple years before death better than not living at all? I would say yes.
Further, using this reasoning, hunting for wild animals is cruel in that we are taking away a life that we didn’t first create.
EAT MOR CHIKIN
http://www.tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com/chicken/
As a practical matter I think virtually all that matters is already incorporated into the retail price.
In a world where there was a Pigouvian Greenhouse Gas (GHG) tax, they’d all be more expensive simply because of methane, and pound for pound they all have the same “food miles”. However the added price in any case would be a lot more marginal than envirosocialists (i.e. putative environmentalists who are really capitalism haters rather than intergenerational welfare maximizers) would like.
As far as the cruelty issue is concerned, I’d say the imputed extra price is either zero (for those who could care less, or claim to care or think they care but go on eating the critters anyway) or infinite (i.e. vegans), depending on your point of view, and thus a nonissue as well.
So, buy what works for you on a price/quality basis, as usual.
as noted, eating domesticated animals can be justified on repugnant conclusion grounds. and intelligence/whether social seems to tie into possible suffering (unless you’re going to say you don’t distinguish between killing a chimp and rabbit, which seems a little silly). you can assert that one shouldn’t eat any animals (question is whether they suffer), but this discussion is about how to rank the various animals in terms of minimum damage done for output (question is who suffers least).
I have heard that rabbits are even more efficient at turning plants into meat than chickens are.
Doctorpat, vegetarians reduce animal suffering because they are not eating animals for meat, regardless of the animals that might die from farming. Plain and simple logic.
Last time I was in Austrialia I saw a graffito that said,
“What do vegetarians have against plants?” I would remind
that some religious perspectives assign souls to plants,
including Jains, whose diet forbids the killing of anything,
thus no roots from vegetables.
Nonsense. Feeding animals doesn’t kill plants. Leaves grazed or browsed off plants regrow . . . repeatedly. Annual grasses and legumes – maize, soya – die after setting seed, but that’s their survival strategy. Rather than toughing out the seasons like perennials they produce copious seed and launch their genomes into the future. It’s cheaper from a thermodynamic perspective.
What kills plants and animals is cultivation – plowing and such. It even kills bugs in the soil. It slices dices and desiccates. Some American indians characterized cultivation by European settlers as ripping the breasts of mother earth with steel fingers.
Plants do respond to predation. They alter their own chemistry to produce toxins, and emit volatiles that other plants can detect, which induce them to produce toxins too. They are not indifferent to their fates. They aren’t animals, and so don’t react in an animal way, but it seems ungenerous to deny them consideration just because they are, well, alien.
More interesting is that plants require predation to survive long term. An interesting example is the acacia tree which has a mutualistic relationship with a species of ant in which tree sap is swapped for the protection services of the ants. However, if the tree has no predators (leaf-eating elephants and giraffes), it stops paying the ants the protection money. Then beetles and such kill the tree. The specifics vary from plant to plant but the prey-predator relationship appears repeatedly. Scientists are becoming ever more aware of how dim they have been in the past not to understand these relationships.
I have a resolution to the paradox. Don’t eat meat at all and this “conflict” dissolves. But if someone does choose to eat meat, the argument is still weak. “If you care about the environment eat pigs.” Why? What’s the proof that this is the environmental choice? Hog waste lagoons are horrible things, but the rainforests are being deforested for cattle. Cows also produce enormous amounts of methane, greatly contributing to greenhouse gases. So who is going to decree which is more “environmentally friendly?” Al Gore? Maybe…Mark Bittman? Keep it to yourself.
And, frankly, if you’re deeply concerned about animal welfare you’re not going to eat any animal at all. Animal welfarists believe that it’s not our place to make our food choices based on the sort of values-based judgment as which animal is “more social or more intelligent”. “Let’s eat cows ’cause they’re dumber,” is about as callous an argument I’ve heard in some time.
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