The Horrors of Pre-Industrial Farming
The realities of preindustrial farming are at odds with the popular imagination.
Many people assume that livestock lived in peace and happiness before factory farming—with pristine, spacious surroundings, fresh grass to eat, and kind treatment from good-natured family farmers.
Sadly, real conditions on preindustrial farms were often far removed from that image.
While animals still suffer on modern farms, the industrialization of livestock production has massively improved human diets.
As meat prices have plummeted and the global population has grown wealthier, increasing numbers of people have gained access to tasty and nutritious animal products.
The claim that it was illegal to sell unbaited beef strikes me as implausible. It seems more likely that it would have been illegal to sell unbaited beef advertised as baited considering the author say there were only 40 cases in 26 years. They only list one eccentric source for this claim.
I'm generally a fan of Human Progress and Cato, but this post really pissed me off. The effect is to cheapen and downplay the moral horror of our time, in part by daring to recast it as a positive.
It does not really matter whether farmed animals today suffer less than the goriest examples of animal abuse in olden times. What does matter to progress is the scale: how many animals are being tortured over time? (I eat meat, value growth, and used to be very skeptical about that kind of rhetoric - but if you don't think today's animal farms are torture, you're simply uninformed.)
Right now, every moment, 23 *billion* animals are suffering through an existence constant pain and stress on factory farms around the world. This works out to roughly 100 billion per year and 94% of the animals on the planet. In 1961, this number was under 8 billion. That is not progress: it is a damning indictment of our species' capacity for moral depravity, so long as we keep it out of sight and mind. Future generations will look back on this atrocity with comparable rage and incredulity to how we see slavery today.
And they will not be impressed by the argument that this mind-boggling amount of suffering was actually happy progress because hey, at least it boosted human nutrition or economic growth for a few decades. Anymore than economic growth or increased food production justifies slavery our minds today. If you want to make a moral defense of factory farming on the merits, have the courage to address the crux of that argument - how much suffering it causes - instead of glossing over it with irrelevant anecdotes about whether a few thousand cows in 1660 had it worse.