[Animals] Now is the best time in human history to be alive (unless you’re a farm animal)

[FazzNoth]

Animal welfare has suffered as humanity has improved, but there’s hope on the horizon.

Pigs on a farm in Cambodia. Over the last 60 years, meat production has exploded in high-income countries and is projected to do the same in low-income countries in coming decades.

 

We can celebrate human progress without becoming complacent after all, there’s never any shortage of bad news to report, and gaping disparities between rich and poor countries will remain far into the future. But McCartney and Lennon were onto something when they sang about things getting better all the time, even if they were talking about love, not life expectancy.

But for just about every animal species besides Homo sapiens, today is probably the worst period in time to be alive especially for the species we’ve domesticated for food: chickens, pigs, cows, and increasingly, fish.

That’s because a not-insignificant amount of human improvement has come at the direct expense of these animals, with rapid human po[CENSORED]tion growth and all those people leading longer, richer lives creating a surge in demand for cheap meat over the last 60 years. 

Human prosperity and animal suffering exist in a kind of twisted symbiosis: Economic growth leads to more food production and consumption, which in turn results in faster po[CENSORED]tion growth and longer life expectancy, which then requires more intensive, factory-farmed meat to satiate growing po[CENSORED]tions. 

 

The cycle has been miraculous for humans. For all the problems of our global food system including a recent rise in world hunger due to the Covid-19 pandemic and price hikes for grain caused by the war in Ukraine far fewer people are undernourished today than they were in the 1970s, and the specter of famine has largely diminished. But the cycle has been disastrous for the environment and animals, as hundreds of billions of them are now raised on factory farms each year, accounting for about 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Growing prosperity and human po[CENSORED]tion have also meant that more and more animals are being used in testing for drug development and consumer products, and that deforestation of massive areas of wildlife habitat is increasing primarily for beef and livestock feed.

 

But it’s not all doom and gloom. An exception to this rule that some of human flourishing has come at the cost of animal welfare is pets; US euthanasia rates at pet shelters have plummeted since the 1970s. And perhaps more consequentially, we’re at the start of what might be a moral revolution in our relationship to other animals. Countries are passing laws to ban the worst factory farming practices; leading philosophers are calling for an expansion of who we include in our moral circle; and scientists are building technologies that could one day eliminate the use of animals for food, medical research, and textiles.

Though currently low levels of meat consumption across Asia, Africa, and Latin America are projected to skyrocket in the coming decades, they’ll likely still be much lower than consumption in the West. But meat eating seems to have more or less peaked, or will at least grow very slowly, in richer parts of the world like the US and Europe.

Some countries, like Germany and Sweden, are actually starting to eat less of it overall, thanks in part to heightened campaigning over the environmental toll of meat production. The European Commission projects a 4 percent decline in per capita meat consumption within the bloc by 2031.

However, declining consumption is relative. Recent figures show Sweden’s per capita meat consumption is almost five times that of Pakistan’s, while the average German eats about as much meat in a month as the average Nigerian does in a year.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/2022/9/12/23339898/global-meat-production-forecast-factory-farming-animal-welfare-human-progress