I like beef. I also eat chicken, fried or grilled: when it happens, I also eat a hamburger, or a sausage. I am ashamed, I have reduced my consumption a lot but I still eat it. It's the truth, I can't hide it.
Another truth? Animal farming is a barbaric and morally horrible practice. Pigs are confined to tiny stalls for life. They are forced to stand in their own feces, malnourished and force-fed with hormones and tortured. Live chickens are sucked into giant machines or chopped alive when young (if male). Dairy cows regularly abused, castrated cattle without painkillers. And all this waiting to be slaughtered, massacred.
The agricultural industry is the kind of industrialized, mass nightmare of torture and cruelty that, when done to human beings, acquires the status of totemic evil. However, since we do this to animals instead of humans, we don't think twice about it.
We tell ourselves that animals are not human.
Although (fortunately) there are a substantial number of people convinced that “animals should have the same rights as people“, in practice only a still marginal number of more committed activists would reorder society so as to put the happiness of a pig on par with that of a human being. I'm honest about this too: I wouldn't do it. But I'm not the only one. This is what happens to all carnivores by choice. To support and justify the nightmare of our farms it is necessary for our brain to completely "forget" the weight of the happiness of pigs, cows and other animals. Because it is clear that attributing even the slightest moral importance to the life experience of a pig, it is necessary to admit that our society is based on a monstrous and systematized horror.
After cats and dogs, the flood
If you look at the direction of the advanced nations, however, it is clear that the concern for the animal welfare Is increasing. Governments and associations are fighting hard to reduce abuse and protect animals as much as possible. How much do we do it, though? And apart from cats and dogs, who do we do it for?
It seems a bit like a guilt complex: to morally support the practice of intensive farming, we are "forced" to tell ourselves that the well-being of a pig matters infinitely less than that of a dog or a cat. We draw bright lines between the animals we care for and protect and turn into members of our family and the other animals we brutalize and systematically torture to devour their flesh.
Intensive farming: out of sight, out of mind
Of course, making that kind of arbitrary, absolute distinction is very difficult, so we make it easier on ourselves by simply not thinking about it. We keep the animals we torture far from ourselves, cared for by a special class of dedicated workers. In this way, only very occasionally, when faced with reality are we forced to bring out our inconsistent rationalizations ("These animals wouldn't even be alive if we didn't raise them to eat them", "Even if I stopped eating meat, the question for agriculture would not decrease much”, and so on).
We do this because it is psychologically necessary for us to do it. Most human beings, the vast majority, do not give up meat. There is a lack of official global data, but here and there there are very clear statistics. In Italy, approximately 8% of the population is vegetarian, in second place in Europe with Germany (8%) and below Austria (9%). In China 4,5%. This is an increase compared to previous decades.
Added to the moral monstrosity of intensive animal farming is the ecological monstrosity. Intensively raising animals is also a gigantic source of carbon emissions. Cattle farming, in particular, gives rise to enormous amounts of greenhouse gases, many of which are due to the clearing of forests for grazing.
Yet we will not quit that easily.
Yet I am optimistic for the future
Why am I optimistic about the possibility of abolishing intensive animal farming? Because, as with climate change and many other issues, technological progress is changing the tradeoffs we face. In my lifetime, it may be possible for humanity to relegate animal farming to the history books, without changing our selfish lifestyles. And I'm not the only one who thinks so.
The key word? Artificial meat. And when I say “artificial meat,” I don't mean plant-based substitutes likeImpossible Burger (I don't expect these to impact meat consumption much). I mean meat that is grown directly using chemical processes, rather than growing an entire animal and cutting out the muscles. I mean what they call “lab-grown meat,” even if it ultimately won't be grown in a lab. Tissue-cultured meat, grown in a factory instead of intensive farming.
Differences matter
Unlike cultured meat, tissue culture meat can be obtained in just a few weeks (or in the future even less). Tissue cultured meat is much less likely to be infected with bacteria, parasites, etc., and is much better for the environment. And in theory, the cost of producing muscle tissue directly, without also having to produce bones and skin and brains and everything else (not to mention the savings in land use) could be less than that of animal farming.
Best of all, tissue culture meat is real meat. They are animal muscle cells, without the animal. Of course, reproducing the position of the fat like that in a steak is a challenge, but not an insurmountable one.
This was also the case for solar energy. Before it was prohibitive, today it is competitive with fossil fuels.
Goodbye to intensive farming? Funds are needed
Clearly, both private and public investments are needed. Governments must also take the field and finance the sector to make it emerge. One of the reasons, of course, is climate change: but there is also the moral aspect of the question. only once acceptable substitutes become price competitive will humanity abandon the barbaric practice of animal farming.
Let's think cynically: this was also the case with forced labor. As long as we needed it and where there is a need for it, we pretend that it doesn't exist, we look elsewhere. When it is possible to mechanize a process, society can finally afford to "anathematize" forced labor. Bad to say, but if humans can maintain their lifestyle without eating animals, then and only then will they do so en masse and no longer need to exploit and slaughter them.
Humans (or at least, most humans) are monstrous, but not infinitely so.
I eat meat, and I can't wait to switch to the "cultured" variety. When artificial meat becomes cheaper than farmed meat, there will certainly also be resistance. I don't know, like those that today push people to pollute the environment again with diesel, or to deny climate change. But these resistances will be increasingly ostracized and over time their numbers will decrease. Eventually there will also be a change in our moral standards. A return to intensive farming will be considered impossible.
Morality is a coordination game: once a critical number of people accept that animal farming is barbaric and wrong, animal rights activists will have won. There will be a cascading effect where in a short space of time, animal farming will go from being widely accepted to fought over and marginalized. In the resulting equilibrium, only iconoclasts and eternal naysayers will insist on eating meat cut from the bones of real animals. And eventually animal farming will be banned in most areas of the world. End.
This future must be our goal.
There is nothing dystopian or unnatural about this prediction: it's just another step in the age-old process of a monstrous species using its intelligence and ingenuity to allow itself to be a little less monstrous. Since we are too horrible to do the right thing and abandon animal agriculture today, we need to do the next best thing: work to replace it with something cheaper and more delicious.
As soon as possible.