There are several major issues when it comes to the state of the meat industry. A huge number of lives are spent in agony, only to meet a gruesome and tortuous end in some slaughterhouse. The lives of these beings are treated as if their experience doesn’t matter, as if their sole purpose on this earth is to feed humans.
The debate as to wether this is true or not seems to ultimately depend on who is having the experience. If humans are the only sentient beings on earth, and were created from some all knowing god to live and consume whatever we so please, then it appears that animals are indeed here specifically to feed us.
This of course doesn’t appear to be the case, and we have a deep enough understanding about how the brain works to see that most animals, if not all animals, are in fact sentient, and can experience life and all the pains and joys that come along with it.
Despite this fact, we continue to breed, castrate, confine, and brutally slaughter incredibly large swaths of these animals on a daily basis in order to deep fry and devour their insides in overabundance.
Enter lab grown meat…
Yes, we have successfully grown a small amount of meat in a lab, and the process is very reproducible. Although likely to be years away from large scale production, the process has been proven possible.
This is a strange concept, and many of you may be making a distasteful scrunchy face as you read this, but I assure you, if you truly understood the horrors involved with the modern meat industry you would be as ecstatic as I am for this incredible discovery.
Lets imagine for a moment what it means to be sentient. The ability to have an “experience”, that is to exist and be aware of this existence. This of course is a great debate but I’m not going to annoy you with the unending sophism that weighs down nearly all philosophical arguments.
When you consider the brain structure of an animal such as a cow, or a sheep, the probability of sentient existence is overwhelming and hard to argue logically without being annoying and unproductive.
These sentient beings, who have had the incredible misfortune of being born on a livestock farm destined for the slaughterhouse, are just as sentient as an animal born in the wild. These animals are subject to an inordinate amount of fear and pain, just so they can end up on our plates. By all frames of the imagination this is without a doubt, morally unethical.
Many would argue, that we can avoid these problems by simply using more ethical farming methods. This might include allowing these animals to graze happily with enough space to breath, avoiding the barbaric practices of castration, branding, dehorning, and ruthless pain endured euthanasia.
Is this really more ethical though?
To give something a happy, fulfilling life (which we are to assume it enjoys and would like to continue to live for the years to come), only to suddenly take it away and deprive it of future existence is also not such a morally intelligable suggestion
The other argument is that the vast majority of these animals are only alive because of human intervention in the first place. If we did not continually breed these animals on such a massive scale the majority of individual livestock would not have even existed in the first place. If we were to cease farming and grow non-sentient meat tissue instead, it is unimaginable the amount of lives that would not be given the chance to exist at all…
So this begs the question, is it more ethical to allow this animal a happy life for a time, before then snatching it away at a later date? Or would it be more ethical to deny it of any existence at all? (Aka growing non-sentient lab meat instead.) That way there is no life for there to be taken away.
This is the type of question where each side can argue their point endlessly without conclusion. Or shall we say “until the cows come home”.
Nevertheless, I am fairly certain that both sides can ultimately agree that current farming practices are blatantly unethical, and need to stop.
The trouble with this argument is that there is not really a clear line with these sort of ethical problems. We as humans need to consume life in order to survive. That does not necessarily mean meat, but meat is an incredibly rich source of the nutrients we need to survive and has been consumed by us and our hairier ancestors since the dawn of time.
Many people will angrily point out that we do not need meat to live, and that we should instead consume only plants and insects in order to be ethical about our food.
Plants and insects do not have higher thinking (as far as we can tell), yet still partake in some experience of life. By eating them we are ultimately ending some kind of experience… are we not? Again I believe it comes down to what actually defines a sentient experience. Colonies of insects for example and networks of trees and mycorrhizae are thought to have some form of sentience on the macro level.
I point this out mainly because there have been a lot of great philosophies surrounding this idea that all life has an experience, and more reading into practices like Jainism and Buddhism will come up with some pretty good reading if this concept interests you, but I digress.
Rhys Southan lays this problem out in an article he wrote for Aeon, which outlines this exact line of ethical questioning (much more effectively than me I might add!). He uses the clever example of Zombie cows, to play this problem out in a way that makes it easy to grasp.
I highly suggest you give it a read if you want further reading on this concept.
Now…
If that wasn’t enough, consider the other impacts lab-grown meat can have on the environment… and therefore poses more ethical questions
The environmental issues associated with the meat industry are well known.
Factory farms have a hard time hiding the large toxic waste pools, filled to the brim with feces and blood outside their facilities. These areas can be seen with the drone footage below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayGJ1YSfDXs
On top of that, factory farming requires an incredible amount of water, energy, and land, and contributes to greenhouse gas production.
These are big issues in our world today, up there with our insatiable thirst for fossil fuels, the spread of deadly superbugs, and the even more unethical religious extremism that has been testing our theological tolerance. These, of course, will need to be talked about in another article, but what I aim to suggest, is that on a list of the modern world’s biggest threats, environmental damage ranks amongst the top 3.
Therefore by allowing these issues to persist when there are ways to fix it, we are only furthering this ethical dilemma. Now lets connect this back to lab grown meat.
How lab-grown meat can help with the environmental side of the ethical debate.
Physically, lab-grown meat seems strange and unnatural but is likely the most significant invention since the discovery of antibiotics in the 1940's.
The effect it's likely to have on the environment is not to be underestimated either. In an article by Conservation Magazine, it was suggested that if everybody on earth suddenly stopped eating meat, emissions would drop by 44 percent! The thing is, if everybody switched to low-emission lab-grown meat, these figures would stay vastly intact.
In an article by BBC news, Pallab Ghosh reports that lab-grown meat uses 45% less energy, releases 96% less greenhouse gas emissions, and requires 99% less space to do it.
The importance of this last point is also significant since currently, the leading cause of deforestation worldwide is make room for cattle farms.
Tropical forests provide the biggest potential for carbon sequestration and with the rate at which we are chopping these forests down, there is little chance they will recover before it is too late.
Without these forests, carbon levels will only continue to rise at exponential rates, which is one of the driving forces for global warming.
With solutions like the development of lab-grown meat in a time facing a looming global environmental disaster, wouldn’t it be unethical NOT to use this technology as a way to help save our planet?
The other option, of course, is to stop eating meat altogether.
Finishing up…
We have explored both the existential, and the environmental ethical arguments of this issue. I admit that the existential argument is likely never going to reach agreement amongst the inhabitants of planet earth, but I would love to encourage this conversation to continue.
Comment your thoughts below, or give me a mention on Twitter @JuzzieCooke.
Lets keep this conversation going!
