How Much Direct Suffering Is Caused by Various Animal Foods?

Abstract. Consuming equal weights of different animal products may produce vastly different expected amounts of direct suffering. Farmed seafood may cause the most, followed by poultry products. Pork, beef, and especially milk produce considerably less suffering in comparison. As an extreme case, creating demand for a kg of farmed catfish meat is expected to cause 20,000 times as much suffering as creating demand for a kg of milk.

Introduction

It is clear that animals living on factory farms endure great amounts of suffering, enough that it is wrong to bring them into existence by creating economic demand for meat. If readers are unconvinced on this point, I recommend the vast collection of literature available online, including FactoryFarming.com, Why Vegan, and Meet Your Meat.

In considering the suffering of farm animals, we presumably ought to care equally about equal amounts of suffering, regardless of which animals experience that suffering. It does not follow, however, that we ought to avoid all animal-based food products with equal amounts of effort. Eating certain types of meat may cause more suffering than eating the same amount of another type of meat under otherwise identical circumstances.

Below, I'll investigate how much direct expected suffering is caused by creating demand for a kilogram of different types of animal products. By "direct" suffering, I refer only to the suffering of the animal whose flesh, milk, or eggs is part of the animal product. I'm ignoring, therefore, the suffering of male chicks in being gassed, suffocated, or ground up as part of the egg-production process, the suffering of calves separated from their mothers in milk production, the contribution of milk production to the veal/beef industry, the large amounts of wild fish that are caught and fed to farmed fish, the (sometimes high) fraction of farm animals that die before reaching slaughter, the environmental destruction that meat production entails, and potential health consequences of eating certain types of meat. Readers should consider these factors, too--perhaps incorporating them into the computations below.

Results

Here is a table of data on various animal foods. Column 4 computes a straightforward value for the expected number of days of life on a factory farm that purchasing a kg of an animal food causes animals of that type to endure. Column 5 represents my best-guess estimates for how bad life is per day for each of those animals. For instance, since I think the suffering of hens in battery cages is perhaps 2.5 times as intense, on average, as the suffering of beef cows, I put a "1" in the beef-cow entry and "2.5" in the egg column. Column 6 is a subjective estimate of the average pain of slaughter for each animal, expressed in terms of an equivalent number of days of regular life for that animal. For instance, I used "5" as an estimate for broiler chickens, which means I assume chickens would, on average, be indifferent between enduring the stress of slaughter and living for five more days in their usual conditions. Finally, I computed "Suffering per kg" in column 7 as follows:

column 7 = (column 4)*(column 5) + (column 5)*(column 6)/(column 3),

where the first summand on the right represents "suffering per kg due to life" and the second summand represents "suffering per kg due to slaughter."

* I think the suffering of farmed fish may actually be greater than this, perhaps about the same as the average suffering of meat chickens. However, while the probability is close to 1 that land farm animals can suffer, the scientific jury is still out on whether fish can as well. I think a 50% probability of fish suffering is reasonable, though perhaps somewhat low.

Notes

Readers should feel free to substitute their own estimates into columns 5 and 6; for instance, if they buy meat from a non-factory farm, the values in column 5 may be considerably smaller. A link at the bottom of the page allows users to download the above table as an Excel worksheet.

It's important to remember that the above figures are per kg demanded, not per kg eaten necessarily. If you get your meat from dumpster diving, you're not causing suffering to other animals. There may be less extreme circumstances, too, in which eating animal products doesn't contribute, or is less likely to contribute, to animal suffering. (See Does Vegetarianism Make a Difference?)

Similarly, per kg doesn't necessarily mean per serving. If your choice is between ordering a two-egg omelet (roughly 0.1 kg of egg) versus a half pound of chicken, then the latter would cause more direct expected suffering (10.4 units = 0.23 kg * 46 units/kg) than the former (7 units = 0.1 kg * 70 units/kg).

In addition, price may also be an important consideration. Suppose, for instance, that you must choose between one of two options:

1. Spend $9 on 0.5 kg of farmed salmon.
2. Spend $11 on 0.5 kg of beef.

Based on the above, the first option causes 121.4 more suffering units than the second. But if you choose the first, you save $2 that you can donate to Vegan Outreach and prevent, say, 20 years of suffering on a factory farm. Assuming, generically, 1.8 suffering units per day for those animals and ignoring the extra suffering of slaughter, this amounts to 13,149 suffering units prevented. Of course, in practice, vegetarian protein sources--beans, tofu, textured vegetable protein, etc.--are far cheaper than meat. For financial reasons alone, then, it makes sense to adopt a plant-based diet.

Finally, I'll emphasize that it's important not to take the above as trivializing the suffering caused by pork, beef, and milk. A half-liter glass of milk still causes an expected 41 minutes or so of pain for a cow, not to mention numerous other consequences. The expected length of suffering caused by a beef burger or slice of ham is, of course, many times higher.

Links

Download this table: suffering-per-kg.xls

See the data sources: Where the Numbers Came From