Question
Where would all the cows go?
Alternatives
What about all the farmers? What about the open landscapes of the countryside? Isn't soy destroying the Amazon?
Summary
Farm animals are not left to breed among themselves. It should come as no surprise that nothing is left to chance in the big business that is intensive animal farming. Breeding is strictly controlled and responds to the laws of supply and demand rather than the needs of animals or their welfare. If people eat fewer animals, livestock corporations will artificially breed fewer. It may be interesting to think about “what if we all suddenly stopped eating animals?” But, back in reality, the transition will probably continue to be gradual, and our economies will have plenty of time to adjust.
Discussion
When people try to justify why they eat animals, the main thing the conversation generally reveals is how divorced people are from the reality of modern industrial farming.
Animal agriculture today bears little resemblance to the way animals were kept on farms for most of human history. General knowledge appears to have advanced little beyond the children's book images of a cow called Daisy wearing a straw hat, the rooster on the fence greeting the sun, and the anthropomorphised pig, smiling while enjoying a grassy field. Certainly, these are the sort of images the livestock industry adorns its products with, but it is strange that adults would believe an industrial system with billions of animals in it is still anything like Old MacDonald’s farm.
Modern animal farms have thousands or even millions of a single gender and breed of animal, crowded into conditions where the only limit on cruelty is anything that might interfere with profits. Cruel ways of slaughtering animals are sometimes changed, not because they are cruel, but rather because they flood an animal's body with so many stress hormones that they are detectable in the final product. Chopping off tails, horns, beaks, and genitals is all routine and done without anaesthetic. Animals are taken from their families, fed alive into grinders, and experience regular horrors that are considered just part of the business. Except for vegans who don't contribute to the system, only a tiny minority of the public seems to care about any of this. The profits of animal agriculture corporations are heavily increased by the near-total apathy of many animal product consumers towards the lives of animals. Animal exploitation is big business, run by vast corporations to maximise profits for owners and investors. This is a part of society where slaughtering even more animals is something only to be celebrated. In this chain based on the oppression of other forms of life, extending from corporate executives to end consumers, only a vanishing few people involved will ever spend a moment to bear witness to, or even think about, the lives and deaths of the animals in the system they pay for and profit from.
Genetics, like everything else in an industrial factory farm, is highly controlled. The search for profits is evident in the manipulated bodies of livestock animals. Turkeys, for instance, have had their natural form so warped by selective breeding that not only are they unable to fly, but they are also incapable of breeding naturally and must be inseminated by humans. Many farm animals, after generations of selective breeding, live with bodies that outgrow the ability of their skeleton and internal organs to support them. No animal on these farms gets to live anything like a natural lifespan, but it is perhaps a mercy for many to be slaughtered at such a young age, rather than live with the painful bodily mutations we have bred into them. Animals on factory farms do not breed naturally at their own inclination; they are only brought into existence when we breed them. If breeding these animals were no longer profitable, the majority of them would disappear in less than a generation.
Ethical transitions
From the point of view of social change, it’s also not a well-thought-out question to ask what happens if industrial animal farming ends overnight, just because that’s rarely how improvements in the ethics of society happen. Some of the horrors of the past took decades and centuries of thought and movement building to change. Ideas often spread slowly in society, usually championed by small groups of committed individuals. Often, there comes a sudden change, a moment when a tipping point occurs. Legislation banning unethical practices is finally passed, and the social license of common consent for them is withdrawn. There may be many more vegans today than decades ago, but we are still a small minority. We are far from any position enabling us to widely legislate more humane farming, much less abolish animal farming.
Our animal product-consuming friends needn't worry. Sadly for animals, animal agriculture is not going to end tomorrow. They can give up animal products without the nightmare of factory farms empty of tortured animals, or of the killing floors of the slaughterhouses ceasing to be covered with the blood of innocents. They don't need to worry about the rewilding of nature, or of native animals and plants reclaiming the pastures that for millions of years prior to animal agriculture were their homes. Instead, we should be glad that the real nightmare will end, the horrific system that the eating of animals on an industrial scale has created in our world. We can say a long overdue goodbye to the hooks, cages, brands, barbed wire, whips, electric prods, slaughterhouses and countless other tools of animal oppression. It is not only nothing to fear, but the reduction of much fear caused by humanity in the world.
Crisis or progress?
As for what will happen to the jobs of the animal farmers, butchers, slaughterhouse workers and others in the livestock industry, that change will also happen gradually. People will transition to other work and products, just like so many changes in industries and technologies have happened in the past. New opportunities will be created because people will still need food and will still need to eat the same number of calories and nutrients. Those farmers and businesses that succeed will be those best able to adapt to more animal-friendly foods. This change will also be better in the long run for the people involved in the cruelty of animal farming. If fewer poor people are living psychologically traumatising lives, spending their days stabbing, slaughtering and dissecting animals in sheds hidden away from the rest of society, then that's a win for animals and humans. People working in animal agriculture, especially in slaughterhouses, cannot do so without damaging some part of their psyche. We see this in higher rates of violence, trauma, intense shock, paranoia, anxiety, guilt and shame. These poor, often immigrant, workers, who are paid to do animal agriculture's dirty work, work that few of us would want to witness, much less do, will only be helped by transitioning to less violent work.
In the past, when society has legislated an end to cruel or outdated practices, transition plans have been put in place, including paying compensation. Nobles and owners were often compensated when serfs or slaves were freed. Although we think it strange and unjust for the state to pay out to people involved in what should always have been a criminal enterprise, it was deemed necessary for society to adapt and move forward at the time. Upton Sinclair once said it was hard to get a person to understand something if their salary depended on them not understanding it. We might expect the same about what they think their food depends on. Most people know on some level that factory farming is cruel, but as with other atrocities of the past, it might take some distance from it for people to comprehend the full horror of what they once tolerated.
As for all the open fields in the countryside, people may have grown accustomed to their current state, but it is cleared land that is more sterile and hostile to species than it has been for millions of years. If we watched the trees being felled in making these cleared spaces, and saw the native animals being killed or dispersed, we might think differently. It was once said about the Roman Empire that it created a desolation and called it peace. Something similar could be said about clearing complex forest ecosystems to create livestock pastures. We should think more deeply about what we are looking at when we pass a deforested pasture populated only by animals enclosed in barbed wire. We rarely think about the story of who and what lived on a land in both city and country before it was cleared for human development, and who the beings were who lived there before being killed, removed or dispossessed. The fields that have now been turned into monocultures of introduced species were once complex ecosystems, bustling with life in forms endless and beautiful. Ecosystems integrate millions of years of evolutionary wisdom in their subtle balance. In beginning the process of restoring them, we must hope that not all that deep wisdom has been irrevocably lost. At least some of the workers freed from animal production industries could find more meaningful and healing work rewilding the places we have so denuded, allowing the native flora and fauna to reclaim their ancient homes.
Rewilding
The benefits of rewilding the pastureland of our world would be many. Livestock farming and the crops grown to feed livestock cover a huge percentage of our globe. Environmental reports from the United Nations and other authorities have long said that livestock farming is one of the primary causes of environmental degradation. It is a leading cause of species extinction, deforestation, water pollution, air pollution and most other environmental problems. The monopolisation of land by the livestock industry is not just a cruelty done to non-humans. Much of the land of dispossessed poor and indigenous people over recent centuries has been usurped to farm high-profit livestock by privileged elites and colonisers. The already large carbon footprint of livestock farming, quoted by bodies like the UN, usually does not include the carbon reduction we would all share by rewilding millions of acres of pasture and cropland currently dedicated to livestock and their feed. Other than our reliance on fossil fuels, there is no other consumption we engage in that competes with animal agriculture in terms of negative environmental and political impacts.
Amazonian myths
While we touch on the environment, we must deal with something that has been said to vegans as long as I have been vegan: "Soy is destroying the Amazon; therefore, vegans are destroying the Amazon". I first heard it two decades ago when I already knew it was false. A friend just told me someone said it to them recently. Firstly, vegans are a small (but beautiful) percentage of the human population. So while they may eat more soy than average, vegans would have to be eating 50 times more soy than the rest of the population for the problems surrounding soy production to be laid solely at their feet. This, of course, isn't true, and tofu, tempeh, soy sauce, miso, and edamame are popular foods widely eaten around the world. Looking at soy milk as an example, the industry itself says that vegans only consume about 10-15% of their product, with the rest going to people who prefer it, are lactose intolerant, or are trying to improve their environmental or ethical footprint. Soybean oil is used widely in cooking and foods, and is the most widely used oil in the US. Soy in the form of flour, lecithin or textured vegetable protein is also present in about two-thirds of US prepackaged and processed foods. So, vegans and even vegetarians are eating a tiny percentage of the soy that humans collectively eat. Still, before we lay blame for the destruction of the Amazon on the soy humans eat directly, we must pull our view out a little more.
To begin with, 16% of soy globally is used in industrial processes, such as ethanol production, plastics, glues and so on. This is more than double what humans eat directly. The main consumer of Amazonian soy, though, simply dwarfs even that amount. 75 - 80% of soy grown globally, including in the Amazon, is used in livestock feed. People may see the soy milk and tofu in the supermarket and think that is where most soy goes, but it is a minor amount in the scheme of things. Soy for livestock feed is a major problem in the Amazon, but it is still only related to the primary culprit. The motivation behind the heartbreaking destruction and deforestation of one of the world's most complex and species-rich ecosystems is cattle pasture. 80% of land clearing in the Amazon basin is done for the purpose of raising animals for slaughter.
So the very opposite of the point people are trying to make about soy and the Amazon is true. It is not vegans, vegetarians, or soy food, but meat eaters and livestock that are the drivers of deforestation and species extinction. If people spent a few minutes having a basic look into the issue, rather than repeating what they heard some ill-informed person say, they would better understand this globally relevant issue. The first time someone said "vegans are destroying the Amazon" to me, I thought this was going to be an easy enough thing to disabuse them of, and perhaps naively thought they might appreciate the update. I regaled them with some facts, quoted World Bank figures, talked about my experiences working with Greenpeace, protesting Amazonian soy being imported to feed chickens in Australia, but alas, nothing I said seemed to change anything. They certainly didn't say "Oh, I didn't know those facts, maybe I should reconsider eating animals". Instead, they became more and more hostile and finally left in a huff. It's almost as if they weren't that interested in what was destroying the Amazon, but were just trying to argue against veganism. The fact that people are still bringing up soy and the Amazon decades after I first heard it, a point which is not only invalid, but the opposite of the truth, shows how people will unquestioningly accept any justification for their consumption of animal products.
The anthropocene
What do barbed wire, cages, chains and other tools of confinement and oppression say about the lives of the animals who live there? What do they say about humanity? Some people have said we should call our current ecological age the Anthropocene, to acknowledge the overwhelming effect humans now have on the living systems of the world. This age began with our land clearing, burning, and the commercial exploitation of wild animals, but has gained pace since the Industrial Revolution. Humanity has selfishly used its ever-growing power to diminish the home we share with all other species. Livestock farming is one of the more obvious and exaggerated examples of this selfishness. Factory-farmed chickens, one of the most abused animals on Earth, are now over two-thirds of the mass of all birds. Humans and our livestock comprise over nine-tenths of the combined mass of all terrestrial species. Wild species are crowded into the remaining small portion, with most of them in the process of diminishing or disappearing. We often focus on human-caused extinction, but the massive loss of members of wild species has been even more catastrophic in terms of suffering. Since I was born, it is estimated that we have lost three-quarters of wildlife populations, with the number for large fish in the oceans being over nine-tenths.
There is no doubt humans are intelligent and have advanced organisational abilities, but on an evolutionary time scale, what have we used these traits for? To create a tyranny for all other life seems a petty, wasteful and terrible thing to do with our potential.
Transcending anthropocentrism
We have created ideas to justify our oppression. The religions and philosophies of societies invested in animal agriculture tend to centre around human supremacy, with only the gods of our imagination being higher than humans. In an example of how self-serving human thought can be, we imagined those gods to be obsessed with the lives of humans above all other things. The gods are incredibly concerned about the trivial details of human lives, but have little to say about all other life, except in how it relates to us. Our anthropocentrism flows from our philosophies into the way we live, the things we consume and the technology we create. Our concrete and asphalt-dominated cities are deserts for wild animals, especially the animals that evolved in the places our cities have overrun.
Finding a path beyond anthropocentrism, a way to reintegrate human civilisation into the natural world, seems to be the only path forward for humanity that is not built on the oppression of everything else that lives. The positive emotions most people who spend time in nature feel tell us that if we allow nature to restore itself, we will be rewarded with happier and more beautiful lives as well. A new, more harmonious self and world awaits once we can shake off the habits and ideas of the past to find a more equitable relationship between humanity and the other life that co-evolved with us. The planet does not belong to us, we belong to it. All life has its own evolutionary paths that should not be subservient to human needs and desires. Indeed, we will, in the end, find out we flourish best together. Having the power to dominate other animals does not give us the moral right to do so. Rather, our treatment of other animals makes it evident that we need to spend more time on our collective philosophies. We must summon the collective maturity to responsibly wield our ever-increasing power.
What we do to animals, we in some way do to ourselves. Oppression not only damages the oppressed but also limits the flourishing of the oppressor. The livestock industry is oppression run rampant; it is a symptom of our myopia. The gradual replacement of these cruel, unnecessary industries will reflect a wider ethical and intellectual progression for us all. In the future, animal liberation will be something only to celebrate.