Paper Review: Animal Harms and Food Production
How do our food choices affect all animals, both domestic and wild?
The paper Animal Harms and Food Production: Informing Ethical Choices is an interesting paper listing off every kind of harm to animals associated with food production that the authors can think of.
There are, broadly speaking, four kinds of harm that humans can inflict on animals:
Harm related to keeping animals for companionship, food, research, entertainment, etc
Direct, intended harm (e.g. slaughter, pest control, hunting, fishing)
Direct, unintended harm (e.g. vehicle collisions, land clearing)
Indirect harm (e.g. climate change, pollution)
These types of harm are, unimaginatively, called Types 1 through 4.
Traditionally, animal welfare science has focused on Type 1 and Type 2 harms. But that’s a very limited perspective which is particularly inadequate for thinking about wild animal welfare. For example, recent preliminary research suggests that wild birds are most likely to be killed due to predation from pet cats (type 4 harm) and collision with windows (type 3 harm), while type 2 harms like hunting and pest control have a smaller effect. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first analysis of harms related to food production which discusses all four kinds of harm. I will summarize their findings. (Specific items on the list should be considered to be illustrative examples and not a complete list of harms associated with a particular category.)
Type 1 Harms
On-farm husbandry
Confinement (e.g. pigs in sow stalls)
Not allowing the animal to perform its normal behaviors (e.g. prevention of foraging or dustbathing behavior, calf-cow separation)
Painful procedures (e.g. castration, dehorning, debeaking)
Neglect (e.g. failure to offer food or medical treatment)
Livestock transport
Heat
Overcrowding
Vehicle motion
The ordinary stresses of transport
Non-livestock working animals
Livestock guardian animals (e.g. working dogs)
Animals used to plow or till or to transport agricultural products
Working animals used in hunting (e.g. hunting dogs)
Exhaustion, heat stress, attacks from wild animals, accidentally being shot, vehicular trauma, getting lost, contracting diseases from hunted animals
Obscurer working animals (e.g. falcons used to deter wild birds)
Type 2 Harms
Livestock slaughter
Stress due to confinement
Slaughter methods that don’t successfully induce immediate insensibility
Wildlife harvesting (e.g. fishing, hunting)
Suffering during death
Animals which escape wounded
Orphaning of young animals
Wild herbivore and omnivore control
Lethal control (culling)
Nonlethal control (e.g. auditory and chemical deterrents)
Reasons:
To keep them from eating crops
To keep them from competing with livestock for grass
To keep them from damaging agricultural infrastructure (e.g. fences)
Wild predators
Lethal control
Nonlethal control (e.g. deterrents, fencing, fladry)
Reasons:
To keep them from eating livestock
To keep them from eating fish that humans would otherwise be able to eat
Rodent control
Lethal control (e.g. poisoning)
Reasons:
To prevent grain loss
To protect personal food stores in e.g. homes
Parasite and infectious disease control
Lethal control of animals to keep them from spreading diseases to livestock
Lethal control of sentient parasites (e.g. vampire bats)
Laboratory animals used in safety testing
Of food
Of crop protection products such as herbicides and pesticides
Type 3 harms
Land clearing for agriculture
Death of wild animals
Displacement of wild animals
Local resource depletion
Tilling, ploughing, and harvesting of agricultural land
Deaths of small animals living on agricultural land (e.g. voles, rats, mice)
Injuries due to mechanical harvesting equipment (e.g. severe lacerations of deer fawns caught in combine harvesters)
Fencing
Wild animals caught or entangled in fences
Wild animals electrocuted by fences
Disruption of wild animals’ movement patterns (e.g. migration, foraging)
Exclusion of wild animals from important resources (e.g. water)
Netting
Entanglement of wild animals in netting, resulting in death immediately or by predators because they can’t move
Marine debris and plastic waste related to food packaging or commercial and recreational fishing
Ingestion of plastic waste or marine debris
Entanglement in plastic waste or marine debris
Damming of water bodies for irrigation
Inhibition of fish migration
Lack of access to water for wild animals
Harms associated with transport of food
Vehicular collisions
Animals may be attracted to vehicles carrying food products
Habitat fragmentation because of roads
Loud noises
Type IV harms
Eutrophication (a body of water is overly enriched with nutrients because of fertilizer runoff)
Fish kills
Hypoxia (“dead zones”)
Changes in fish growth and energy conversion efficiency
Insecticides and pesticides
Poisoning of animals which accidentally consume these items
Secondary poisoning
Poisoning of animals who eat animals which were deliberately poisoned
Veterinatry pharmaceutical compound pollution (e.g. antibiotics)
Effects on wild animals unknown
Noise pollution
Changes behavior and physiology of wild animals in ways suggestive of lower welfare
Light pollution
Changes behavior of wild animals sensitive to natural light cycles in ways suggestive of lower welfare
Toxic lead exposure from scavengers eating lead-based bullets
Climate change (agriculture produces about a third of world greenhouse gas emissions)
Deaths during disasters (e.g. wildfires, heat waves, flooding)
Habitat loss
Assorted other poorly understood effects (e.g. changes in which plants are available for animals to eat)
Invasive species introduction
Competition from invasive animals
Environmental modification due to invasive plants (e.g. increase in wildfires)
Predation of domestic animals by wild animals
Infectious disease exposure due to importation of infected livestock
Salinization and desertification caused by land clearing and poor agricultural practices
Causes various changes in behavior and physiology suggestive of poor welfare; effects generally uncertain
Soil erosion caused by poor agricultural practices
Reduced water quality
Altered vegetation communities
Eutrophication
Disposal of food waste in such a way that wild animals can eat it
Increased interspecies and intraspecies aggression
Infectious disease exposure
Starvation if the food waste is later disposed of in some different way where they can’t eat it
Depletion of natural resources (e.g. plants, fungi, animals) due to overharvesting
Inadequate food supply
The authors present the following table of harms associated with various food production systems:
There are three primary limitations of this paper. First, while it does try to explore as many harms as the authors can think of, it is almost certain that they missed something. Second, it doesn’t discuss the intensity of the harms—while the table indicates which harms are frequent and which harms are infrequent, it doesn’t address how many animals are harmed or how strongly they are harmed. Third, it focuses exclusively on harms and doesn’t discuss the ways that various food systems might potentially help domestic and wild animals.
Still, I think it’s an interesting paper, and I hope their framework sparks ideas for future research on the effects of agriculture on animals.
Has anyone estimated the _benefits_ that animals receive from humans?
If we decreased Type 3 and Type 4 harms, e.g. among birds, but that resulted in, say, the same number of birds dying of starvation, is that still a net improvement?
I'd like to see some further improvements to Types 1 and 2! I'd actually appreciate my grocery store labeling animal products with a 'harm score' – if I didn't think that the producers would just game it. I'd be happy to trade money/alternatives to reduce harm.
I find it a little horrifying that we've bred domesticated animals. I'm not sure I'd endorse doing that originally. Maybe that's a good argument for not benefiting them now.
What's your own 'moral goal' in this area? Would we, ideally, completely vacate Earth and leave it to the rest of life and never interfere again?
I'm not sure myself. I'm not sure what's the most (or least) that we can 'morally' claim of Earth.
I'm not actually _entirely_ sure that it's okay for us to live in space and, e.g. mine asteroids or build bases on planets/moons. Are we 'defacing' the universe by exploiting it? Are any 'ways of making a living' for us even possibly moral?
For now, I'm definitely open to trades that reduce the harm to or suffering of other living things.