A few weeks ago I wrote about cultured meat, and the potential for a dramatically reduced livestock sector in the future. As usual with this topic, it garnered a few disapproving comments. Some people don’t like the fakeness of it all. Some can’t get past the idea that it would be easier just to eat less meat. And then there’s this one: what about the poor farm animals?
To paraphrase one comment on Twxtter, how can cultured meat be considered ethical when it would cause farm animals to die out?
Let’s have a think about this. To begin with, this is something of a reversal of the ethics. By definition, every animal farmed for meat will be killed. If it’s a cow, it will usually die by a bolt to the head. Pigs are often gassed, as are most chickens. Some sheep and pigs are electrocuted. Stunned in one of these ways, they will then have their throats slit.
Chickens are frequently hung upside down by their feet from a conveyor, which then dips their heads into a electrified water bath. Then their necks are slit. These are the slaughter methods that are considered humane and approved by the RSPCA, by the way. There are others.
This is the fate of over 300 million cows every year, 1.5 billion pigs and an extraordinary 75 billion chickens – without question the most abused animal on the planet.
If we’re interested in creating a more humane, less violent meat industry, then the bar is very very very low. So what is it that people are worried about if the world were to turn against the meat industry?
I’ve heard two broad categories of concern. One is an end to the kind of farming that people feel positive about. Maybe they enjoyed a visit to a farm at some point, or a family member runs a farm where the animals are well treated. Who are we to say this shouldn’t exist? Or as one commenter told me, they like driving past hillsides and seeing cows and sheep. They’d miss them if they weren’t there.
This massively underestimates the scale of industrial farming. You could slash animal farming to a fraction of its size and not lose a single picture-book family farm. Children would still be able to go on walks and want to hug the sheep. We will still be able to lean on a fence and look into the gentle eyes of a cow. That’s because the vast majority of animals bred for food are in factory farms. Exact figures depend on the animal and the country, but for chickens the global figure is over 99% factory farmed. For pigs it’s 98%. Nobody drives past industrial farms and slaughterhouses and gets sentimental.
I’ve referred in the title of this post to ‘the end of animal farming’ because that’s what a lot of people seem to imagine. But cultured meat isn’t going to replace animal farming. It’s going to take an initially tiny market share of it. That will grow, giving people an alternative to the violence of the current meat industry without taking away the meat itself. There will be a market for ‘real’ meat for the foreseeable future. Rearing livestock will continue, in large numbers, probably for as long as there are people.
Cultured meat isn’t ‘the end’ of livestock farming. It’s the beginning of a reduction, hopefully of factory farming first. If and when cultured meat proves itself, then we can talk about banning the worst practices of industrial meat production, the battery chickens and pig skyscrapers. Nobody will miss this, because that’s not what people value about farming, and we will save billions of animals from a life of misery.
The second concern is that a lot of people imagine a sudden and complete end to the industry. I’ve never imagined it that way or heard a credible advocate of veganism express this, but I’ve heard it from worried meat-eaters a couple of times. How could it be ethical to ban meat and let all the existing animals die? We couldn’t afford to keep them all alive unproductively, so billions of animals would be left to starve.
This too is a misunderstanding. There is simply no mechanism in politics that can end animal farming with immediate effect. That would require a radical vegan global government. Any change that comes about through cultured meat will be gradual. It will be a transition, a winding down of the industrialised slaughter of animals for meat.
What does that mean for the animals themselves? It means that animals will be slaughtered and not replaced on the farms.
There are shouty vegans on the internet who demand the immediate ceasing of all animal slaughter. Those people are nowhere near power. If we want to formulate a considered opinion on cultured meat, we need to focus on likely scenarios and reckon with the world as it is. And as it is, the meat industry is horrific. For all the questions around cultured meat, it would be genuinely quite difficult to make things worse.
In short, worrying that cultured meat will mean the end of animal farming is unnecessary. What should worry us is the state of things as they are.
The Earthbound Report 