The Scale of Human and Animal Suffering
I have just finished reading Factulness by Hans Rosling and there was a call to action to fight extreme poverty:
“The suffering it causes is not unknown, and not in the future. It’s a reality. It’s misery, day to day, right now. […] We know that 800 million are suffering right now.”
Extreme poverty seems to be the most widely agreed-upon biggest cause of human suffering in the world. Not having enough food, water, liberty and having a bad health and a shorter life are universally bad. And reducing it is the driving force behind many policies and much of foreign aid spending. Thankfully, these measures have been very succesful in reducing extreme poverty.
What about animal suffering, though? A conservative estimate of the number of animals being slaughtered every year in factory farms all over the world is 34 billion and their lives are filled with suffering. That’s more than 40 times as much as people living in extreme poverty, and it’s all directly caused by human activity. On top of that, the lives of animals on factory farms are demonstrably much worse than the lives of people living in extreme poverty.
Just as we care about the suffering of people living far away from us, in extreme poverty, we should care about the lives of all beings that are capable of suffering. And looking at the scale of the two problems, it’s obvious which one is more neglected.
Even if we equated 1 minute of human suffering as morally equal to 50 minutes of animal suffering, we are still doing a pretty bad job in terms of reducing overall suffering in the world.
The number of animals slaughtered in factory farms in the US has gone from 1.8 billion in 1960 to 9.2 billion in 2015¹. This means that on average, every day, the number of animals suffering in US factory farms has increased by 370,000. Extrapolating this figure to the whole world, the newspaper headline could have read every day during those 55 years: “Today, there are 1.4 million more animals suffering in factory farms than yesterday”.
That is an increase in suffering on a massive scale, at a rapid rate. We need to speak up for animals. They don’t have a voice of their own, which is why they need our help the most.