Veterinary Medical Ethics

Ethical question of the month — March 2011

Animal welfare considerations play an increasingly prominent role in the societal ethic. Animal care and use committees at research institutions are composed of laypeople, animal scientists, veterinarians, and ethicists, who are charged with judging the value of various animal use protocols. These committees are expected to balance the welfare of animals against the benefits that may result to animals or society as a result of animal use. Such committees are seldom held in high regard by the individuals submitting the protocols, and their decisions are often severely criticized. Is it even reasonable to expect that a committee can objectively compare the stress or suffering experienced by the animals in question against any potential benefits resulting from such animal use?

Responses to the case presented are welcome. Please limit your reply to approximately 50 words and forward along with your name and address to: Ethical Choices, c/o Dr. Tim Blackwell, Veterinary Science, Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, 6484 Wellington Road 7, Unit 10, Elora, Ontario N0B 1S0; telephone: (519) 846-3413; fax: (519) 846-8178; e-mail: tim.blackwell@ontario.ca

Suggested ethical questions of the month are also welcome! All ethical questions or scenarios in the ethics column are based on actual events, which are changed, including names, locations, species, etc., to protect the confidentiality of the parties involved.

Ethical question of the month — December 2010

A common rebuttal against improving the welfare of intensively raised livestock is that even the simplest welfare improvements such as decreasing stocking density will decrease farm efficiency and productivity. With malnutrition predicted to worsen in the decades to come, it is argued that agriculture cannot in good conscience improve animal welfare if it leads to a decrease in food production. With so many in the world at risk of starvation, agriculture’s first priority must be to maximize productivity. How does one balance the rights of animals with the rights of the desperately poor?

Comments

With so many in the world at risk for starvation, a culture’s first priority must be to maximize productivity: How does one balance the rights of animals with the rights of the desperately poor?

This is such a poorly worded question. Its phrasing suggests that the production of meat at cheaper costs far outweighs the ethical considerations of raising meat.

However, if one were taking the cost for producing proteins for the world’s poor, it would make more sense to raise plants rather than animals. It’s cheaper (economically, environmentally, and financially) to raise vegetable protein per pound rather than animal proteins.

The cheap cost of meat is an artificially created entity. To calculate its true cost, government subsidies for cheap corn and/or wheat need to be taken out of the equation, and the environmental costs for disposal of waste products need to be included, as well as input costs for intensive antibiotic use. Once a more accurate accounting is in place, raising meat in a more environmentally and ethically sustainable manner may actually be cheaper.

Niran Sabanathan, DVM

Animal welfare and feeding the poor are not conflicting goals. To the contrary, it is well-established that producing animals for food requires significantly more resources to provide the same energy and nutritional value as the plant-based alternative. Furthermore, plant-based diets are recognized by the American Dietetic Association as healthful and nutritionally adequate.

The most efficient and economical way of feeding the world’s population is to use non-animal food sources.

The question is incorrectly posed — one does not need to “balance” animal welfare and the right of the desperately poor to food, as they are both on the same side of the scale. If “maximizing productivity” is “agriculture’s first priority,” then we should reorient our priorities to non-animal based agriculture.

Elyse Hauer, OVC 2012, Guelph, Ontario

The question implies that intensively raised livestock (essentially, corporate “factory farms”) exist to serve the “rights of the desperately poor.” This shill has been used to justify the atrocity that is corporate agriculture since the cage layer was invented. Their goal is not to feed the hungry people of the world but to solely maximize corporate profits.

Implicit in this question is the notion that animal factories are “efficient.” They are efficient only in a few narrow parameters, like feed conversion. Factor in real environmental costs like not recycling their waste and the environmentally undervalued fossil fuels and government largesse required for their existence, and I suggest they are not “efficient” at all. They are as unsustainable as the notion that human population growth can continue forever on this planet.

The rights of animals and the rights of the desperately poor are the same thing. Corporate agriculture ignores them both.

Kenn Wood, DVM, Ebenezer, Saskatchewan

An ethicist’s commentary on promoting farm animal welfare at the expense of productivity

“Feeding the world” is one of those reassuring, mom and apple pie clichés that are often adduced to nullify concerns about farm animal welfare, or for that matter any other criticisms directed against modern intensive agriculture. For example, when I served on the World Health Organization task force setting guidelines for the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture in 2000, I was asked to give the keynote speech discussing the ethical issues occasioned by current unrestricted antibiotic use. When I finished, a well-polished, expensively dressed member of the audience who, in fact, represented the drug industry association challenged me as follows: “You obviously don’t care about the Third World. Because if you did you would realize that we cannot feed the Third World without unrestricted antibiotic use.” In response, I asked him if we currently enjoy unrestricted antibiotic use. He replied in the affirmative. “Well,” I said, “are you currently feeding the Third World?”

Juxtaposing the interests of humans against the interests of animals is a classic technique designed to marginalize animal welfare concerns. When I drafted and successfully defended US research animal welfare laws in front of Congress, one research community ploy against such legislation was the claim that providing analgesia to research animals (a major component of the law) would make it impossible for medical researchers to cure children, even though, in hindsight, the research community acknowledges that mandatory control of pain and stress and distress in these animals has generated better research results. Nonetheless, some knee-jerk defenders of the status quo in agriculture still use “feeding the world” as a way of deflecting demands for agricultural animal welfare improvement.

Any reflective person realizes that the problem of “feeding the world” is not a matter of lack of food. None of the people who invoke that argument are prepared to give food away to the poor, despite the fact that we have large surpluses in some foodstuffs. The real problem with food deprivation is lack of resources for purchasing the available food, as well as massive distribution problems resulting from debilitating political corruption in many underdeveloped countries. In fact, the much-vaunted “cheap food” we enjoy, as the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production demonstrated (www.pcifap.org), “cheap” only means “cheap at the cash register,” with a great deal of the true cost of food production externalized to society in general. For example, the costs of cleaning up the massive environmental despoliation created by concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) is not borne by the CAFOs, but by the public.

Since I was a college student, the price of a candy bar has risen 2000%. In stark contrast, the price of a whole chicken has not even doubled. That is because the true costs of chicken production (including the cost of employing first-line antibiotics to make intensive production possible) are borne by the public — as well as by the chickens in sacrificing quality of life, be it bruises and fractures resulting from accelerated growth, or inability to fulfill basic interests. Whereas costs externalized to people can be economically accounted, the costs to the animals are not so easily quantified. That, however, does not mean they are any less real. Hurting animals for human economic benefit is a moral issue that society has begun to recognize. Demands for relieving the extent of animal suffering cannot be dismissed simply by referring to cheap food, anymore than demands for an end to slavery could be trumped by appeal to cheap cotton.

In addition, it is by no means clear or documented that increasing the well-being of food animals necessarily entails increasing the cost of production. For example, it is clear that substituting open housing systems for sows for gestation crates substantially reduces the cost of capitalizing new sow buildings.