Are Beef Products More Humane Than Chicken?

My friend Julia is concerned with animal welfare. She seems to have been the first in the world to come up with this obvious-in-hindsight metric for evaluating animal calorie sources: how many food calories does one animal’s life produce?

The differences turn out to be many orders of magnitude. There are vegetarians who eat eggs but avoid beef, but because cows produce many more calories than chickens do, this is just trading twenty chicken lives for one cow life. Maybe a cow’s life is actually worth twenty chicken lives, if cows are more complex or emotional or whatever the morally-relevant quality is. But this isn’t clear, and I doubt most vegetarians are aware of the trade-off.

Author Description

Louie Helm is a Machine Learning Engineer

28 Responses to “Are Beef Products More Humane Than Chicken?”

June 13
Evan Gaensbauer

Your friend Julia might have been the first person to generate this metric, but there are others before her who have figured out that eating beef might be more humane than eating chicken. Within the effective animal activists on Facebook last year, some link made the rounds which featured an interactive graph which visualized how many animals perished per unit of meat consumed, or something. Lucas Zamprogno might still have it.
June 13
Evan Gaensbauer

Mr. Anthis, do you have the link? Obviously it’s super useful. I only saw it once, so I really can’t seem to find it.
June 13
Jacy Anthis

Yes, suffering per kilogram is a common analysis, although suffering per calorie might be a new specific calculations (unsure about this, as someone probably included it in their research). Here’s the most-cited analysis: http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/suffering-per-kg.html
June 13
Jacy Anthis

Although the general conclusion always seems to be “Unless you heavily discount animal suffering (i.e. less than ~1/1000 the value of human suffering) and get extraordinary pleasure from consuming animal vs. plant products, veg*nism is the ethical thing to do.”
June 13
Indiana Bones

Vegans have known this for decades 😛
June 13
Nina Anissimov

You also have to weigh the different animals’ cognitive ability. Pigs are much more advanced than cows are more advanced than chicken. A pig’s suffering is probably “worse” than a chicken’s suffering.

In addition, one should consider the resource investment per calorie. Although that’s more relevant to environmental sustainability ethics, not animal husbandry ethics.

Also, many people rear chickens and cows humanely (arguably offering them a more comfortable life than in the wild) for eggs/dairy, allowing the animal to die of natural causes (and perhaps, at that time, consuming the meat). So the suffering per calorie should be effectively zero.

I was vegan for many years, but have transitioned to vegetarianism, sourcing probably 95% of my non-vegan foods from confirmed humane/suffering-free sources. Although, many people don’t have the luxury of being as familiar with their farms/sources as I do, being that my husband is in the industry. My goal is to maintain good nutrition, while minimize suffering and environmental impact per calorie as much as is possible, within the boundaries of reasonable convenience.

But yeah, like Indiana writes, vegans have been thinking about this stuff for decades, just maybe with different metrics (kg vs kcal)
June 13
Jacy Anthis

Nina, “You also have to weigh the different animals’ cognitive ability. Pigs are much more advanced than cows are more advanced than chicken. A pig’s suffering is probably ‘worse’ than a chicken’s suffering.”

You’re making a jump from intelligence to emotional capacity. I think this assumption is, at best, controversial.
June 13
Buck Shlegeris

I think the important take-home message is that none of the suffering-per-calorie figures are anywhere near low enough to justify not being vegan.
June 13
Florent Berthet

The best article I’ve read on the subject: http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/suffering-per-kg.html
June 13
Nina Anissimov

It is controversial Jacy and not nearly well studied enough, except for some animals, elephants come to mind.

In any case, I don’t eat any animal flesh so fortunately it’s not a leap I have to make.

Buck is correct, unless you consider dairy/eggs obtained with zero suffering (or suffering equal to that which might be endured in the wild, for a net zero).

For those who can’t visit the farms they’re sourcing from to confirm zero/minimal suffering of stock, Buck is correct. None of the suffering per calorie is justifiable over veganism. All meat, except that from naturally downed animals, is a luxury.

Vegan protein substitutes have come a LONG way in 15 years, in terms of flavor, texture and availability, and are attracting the attention and investment funds of big players (looking at you, Beyond Meat & Hampton Creek Foods). Anyone interested in minimizing animal suffering should consider trying these very convincing products to bring their suffering per calorie to as close to zero as possible.
June 13
Buck Shlegeris

I’m not even sure about the ethics of eating humanely produced meat, because it has cross elasticities with unethically produced meat, and I suspect that those elasticities are big enough that eating humanely farmed eggs still isn’t worth it.
June 13
Benjamin Ross Hoffman

I don’t understand, why would they call it moral “weight” if it didn’t scale with the size of the animal?
June 13
Indiana Bones

A creature doesn’t have to be intelligent to suffer excruciating pain. Humans with low cognitive function can still suffer dramatically.

Also milk is nearly never a suffer a free product. The calf whose milk your drinking is separated from her mother and in addition to the emotional trauma induced by removing a baby from her mammalian mother the calf is usually sold for veal production.
June 13
Nina Anissimov

That’s a good point. I can only think of one, very small production sheep milk dairy in the area that doesn’t separate young. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one out there, I just haven’t done the research.
June 13
Buck Shlegeris

(Also, re the OP, section 5 of http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/suffering-per-kg.html has discussed many permutations of this question before, including mentioning the relevance of calories.)
June 13
Jacy Anthis

Nina, “(or suffering equal to that which might be endured in the wild, for a net zero)”

The counterfactual (alternative) to farming a chicken is not a wild chicken.
June 13
Texture Santino D

And none of the animals would have existed if not specifically bred to be eaten. Is it worse to have never been born or to experience life for a short while and then become a delicious steak? Especially given that any wild animal’s life will probably end through predation anyway.

But, we should probably be as nice to our food as possible. Because we can.
June 13
Buck Shlegeris

Texture Santino D: I think it’s probably worse to experience a life so awful than to never be born.
June 13
Texture Santino D

What do you mean by life so awful?
June 13
Buck Shlegeris

Almost every animal produced for food suffers immensely during his or her life, to the extent that I think that the life was a vastly negative experience overall.
June 13
Indiana Bones

Texture, if you’re asking me if I think my partner should be raped, and her offspring to be caged and mutilated and essentially tortured for the rest of eternity, and they get raped to continue the process, id say yeah, don’t do that. I’d rather have them not live at all.
June 13
Texture Santino D

Yeah, I was suggesting we should change that and be nice to them. Then eat them.
June 13
Texture Santino D

Indiana: That’s a weird and ridiculous comparison, unless you date animals, and then it’s just weird.
June 13
Michael Grant Bonner

So much food in America we have the ability to choose whether or not to eat certain types.
June 13
Jackie Lee

Very interesting!!!
June 13
Michael Vassar

Any metric that treats the so-called suffering of all organisms as equal without, you know, bothering to ask what the properties of their nervous systems will produce either obligatory omnicide or some sort of obligatory utility farming (nematodes on cocaine?) as an output, given a very high discount rate. Without discounting, consequentialisms all just focus on x-risk. Rather than claiming a behavior as an output of a pseudo-rational process, better to just look at what you are doing and decide how you feel about killing cows, chicken and fish.
June 13
Daniel Powell

Every mitochondrion deserves equal treatment! Stop destroying living cells!
June 13
Luke Cockerham

So the most ethical meats are Elephant and Blue Whale then?