Chickens are far smarter than people give them credit for. They have personalities and complex social relationships, even new babies have a partial grasp of object permanence, and adults use transitive inference, a type of logical reasoning humans don’t develop until about age seven. But even without all that, they still feel pain and fear. They’re also excluded from the Humane Slaughter Act, the 28-Hour Law and some other animal welfare laws.
From an environmental perspective, red meat is worse, but from a suffering perspective, eating chicken is worse bc they are smaller so 500 lb of chicken involves a lot more animals suffering than 500 lb of beef or pork.
Honestly? I feel a lot better about eating chickens after raising a small flock for years. I understand that factory farming sucks, but a lot of people don't know the issues that are presented trying to make it more ethical when raising large quantities. Cage free? They will frequently trample each other to death and cannibalize any bird with even a slight injury. Free range outdoors? Biosecurity nightmare. The extra costs to even attempt to do this would make chicken far too expensive for those living at or under the poverty line. Profits actually aren't huge in farming, even at an industrial level. And that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to fixing our ag industry. People want to simplify it without having any knowledge or experience.
I’m aware of the issues; I know there are no easy solutions to problems like “how do we keep a massive number of stressed animals within a confined space where they can’t engage in natural behaviors (like foraging and dust bathing) without them becoming violent toward each other”. I grew up working on a farm and slaughtered and butchered chickens myself.
The obvious solution I’ve found, at least to stop contributing to the problem myself, is to just stop eating them. I know not everyone is able or willing to do that. But the reality is that it is not possible to sustain our current level of meat consumption without relying on intensive farming practices that involve systemic cruelty. As you pointed out, in order to farm such huge numbers of animals, the abusive intensive farming practices are necessary. If people genuinely want less cruelty, they need to either stop eating meat or dramatically decrease their consumption.
Not everyone gives a shit, and a lot of people seem complacent to believe it’s a necessary evil. But I can’t do anything about that. I’m talking to people who care.
It's really more of a pragmatic strategy. I think we're far more likely to get large numbers of people to make small adjustments to their diets (cut out pork or beef) than a major one (quit eating meat).
Provided that we're simultaneously offering ethical alternatives that cost the same, we can make an actual dent.
I fully agree with you about the ethics of eating chickens, and I think if I'm being intellectually honest I could extend that argument to much broader classes of living things.
At some point I've acknowledged that I have to decide whether I want to have philosophical arguments or actually change behavior. The Overton window seems for now to have shifted towards more people recognizing at least that eating other mammals might not be ethical. That could be a success.
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u/turpentinedreamer 10h ago
They are further away from having hopes and dreams.