Humanity is failing one of its greatest moral tests (2024)

If you can stand to think about it long enough, the problem becomes paralyzing. Tens of billions of land animals slaughtered every year; hundreds of millions every day; thousands in the time it takes to read this sentence. The number grows by billions more every year, into multiples that feel as abysmal as they are mind-numbing.

On top of 80 billion, how can we comprehend another 5, 10, 20 billion more? How can it get worse? And while we can count suffering in the aggregate, these animals experience it as individuals, each one containing an infinite depth of conscious experience. Our human world is built atop a parallel universe of their misery, an inferno from which most of us prefer to look away.

But one tiny minority group, so often tuned out by the public, has been imploring us to look.

More than a year ago, my colleagues and I at Vox’s Future Perfect had the idea of launching a project that weighs the state of the movement against factory farming, a movement that has, for the last 50 years or so, fought valiantly to stanch the rise of an unprecedented system of organized violence against our fellow creatures.

What we found is that the fight sits at an uneasy inflection point: Animal rights activism and plant-based eating are more visible than ever; a handful of animal protection groups have managed to win major state and local animal welfare laws and extract concessions from mega-corporations. And yet, by any honest measure, the industrialized exploitation and abuse of animals is rapidly getting worse. Animal advocates are losing the fight.

Meat consumption is rising relentlessly in the US and around the world. If you believe our most reputable pollsters, the share of Americans who call themselves vegetarian or vegan has largely remained static. Whatever gains animal advocates have achieved have not been enough to make a significant dent in the factory farm system or even limit its proliferation. All this is true despite the growing risks of climate change and pandemics, both of which are fueled by the meat and dairy industries. Not even out of self-preservation has humanity yet shown a willingness to eat fewer animals.

These trends reflect a tragic irony of human development: As our numbers and material wealth have swelled, so has the population of domesticated animals that we warehouse in merciless conditions and engineer to their biological limits. Animal advocates who attempt to change these conditions are up against centuries of entrenched cultural norms and identity, combined with ruthless agribusiness interests and captive political actors that tell us today’s unprecedented levels of meat consumption are natural, necessary, and above all else, inevitable. But there is nothing natural about what we have built.

One of the most honest accounts I’ve encountered of humanity’s relationship with nonhuman animals comes from political theorist Dinesh Wadiwel, who describes it as a state of war — not a metaphorical war, but a literal one, in which we are the aggressors. If you were an alien who knew nothing about our species, you might expect a civilization that does what we do to other creatures to be filled with people who hate animals and like to make them suffer.

And yet the vast majority of people care deeply about animals and hate to see them mistreated, so much so that the meat industry in the US and elsewhere has pushed to make it a crime to film conditions inside factory farms. Because we cannot be the morally righteous species we think we are while truly seeing what we have made.

This contradictory truth about our species may be our greatest refuge against despair. We do have profound capacities for compassion and moral courage, and so many of us already do know there’s something broken in our relationship with animals. As living standards rise around the world and American-style factory farming proliferates in regions that have long relied on largely plant-based diets, animal and vegan advocacy are on the rise, too.

Everywhere in the world, across not just the Global North but also Latin America, Asia, and Africa, a growing movement of people is recognizing that our treatment of animals is a stain on the human conscience that must be wiped away. One of the greatest moral tests we’ll face over the next century will be whether we can heed these voices and decouple human prosperity from tyranny over animals.

Several years ago, New York Times journalist and Vox cofounder Ezra Klein coined “taking the green pill”: the experience of waking up to the mass torture of farm animals typically unremarked upon in polite society. And once you awaken, Klein said on a 2018 episode of his podcast, all of a sudden “a world that seems completely normal becomes a horror show.”

Taking the green pill is depressing, socially alienating, and deeply countercultural; those who make the leap often struggle to get their loved ones to see the obvious, all while being told by society that they are actually the weird ones. I’ve been one of these weird people since relatively early in life, and most of my time on Earth has been spent trying to understand why what was scorchingly clear to me remained unthinkable to everyone else.

Still, over the last few decades, as animal welfare advocacy rapidly expanded and the crime of factory farming penetrated the public consciousness, many of these green-pilled people had cause to hope that we were on the cusp of an animal rights revolution. As a teenager in the late aughts, I became convinced factory farming wouldn’t survive another decade. I’d been educated to believe in the steady clip of social progress, and it was the dawn of Obama’s America, when radically new possibilities felt within reach. It seemed inconceivable that something both so wrong and so unnecessary, and so ultimately ruinous to humanity, could keep operating as the curtain was gradually pulled back.

I was far from the only one who thought this way. In college, a prominent animal rights figure told me about a theory that the movement’s ranks would soon grow exponentially, as every vegan in the world influenced a few of their loved ones to stop eating animals, and each one of those then influenced another few, and so on until we reached a critical mass large enough to transform society. If that sounds risible to you, consider how rapidly the world had changed in the half-century before. The very idea that tomorrow could look different from today came from recent experiences of social transformation in the US and around the globe, including decolonization, women’s liberation, gay rights, and the gradual if incomplete lifting of American racial apartheid.

Not only has such a transformation for animals failed to materialize, but we may be even further away from it than we were 10 or 20 years ago. For all the awareness raised, US per capita meat consumption sits at record highs, suggesting that we haven’t managed to convince a meaningful share of the public to decrease their intake, let alone go vegetarian or vegan. Worse, Americans are now eating less red meat and a lot more chickens, the most abused animals on the planet, who make up more than 90 percent of the 10 billion animals slaughtered annually in the US. Because they weigh far less than cows or pigs, it takes many more individuals to produce an equivalent amount of meat.

Although we often use “factory farming” as a convenient shorthand for our systematic cruelty to animals, the true problem is much older, and runs far deeper than modern food production. People today often imagine that before industrialization, we used to raise animals the “right way,” conjuring images of Old MacDonald’s farm, where domesticated animals lived in harmony with humans and nature.

Today’s meat industry profits from such powerful cultural associations, slapping pictures of happy animals onto their product labels and ad copy, but these have always been mythologies. Beyond the marketing is the reality that livestock animals have always been property, brought into the world without rights and for human purposes — bred to maximize productivity, mutilated and branded with hot irons, and slaughtered at the time of our choosing.

Long before we had the ability to pack together thousands of animals in industrial sheds, humans wrestled with the horrors of animal exploitation and slaughter. Leo Tolstoy, in his 1891 essay “The First Step” (“Pervaya Stupen”) advocating for a vegetarian diet, wrote about witnessing the killing of farm animals in czarist Russia. He describes a village pig dragged outside for slaughter, the animal’s “human-looking pink body” screaming in a “dreadful voice, resembling the shriek of a man.” After the screams subside and the animal is dead, even the gruff carriage driver accompanying Tolstoy lets out a heavy sigh. “Do people really not have to answer for such things?” he asks.

It would be unwise to judge our ancestors, who lived under far harsher conditions with extraordinarily high mortality rates even among humans, for their treatment of animals. More important is to understand that the human relationship with livestock has always been one of ownership and exploitation, which trumps their inherent needs and desires as living, autonomous creatures. Even on today’s so-called humane farms, animals often endure terrible physical and psychological suffering, as the Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey found in a sprawling investigation into one of the country’s most celebrated organic dairies.

What is distinct about factory farming is how it’s deployed modern agricultural, biomedical, and financial technologies to push the exploitation of animals to astonishing new extremes. Much like technology has given humans the means to wage war against each other at a terrifying scale, it has also supercharged the human war on animals.

Modern farmed animals’ bodies have been hyperoptimized for productivity without regard for welfare, so long as their productive capacity is unharmed. The livestock industry, with the aid of the US government, is continually testing how far animals can be pushed to yield more meat and more offspring. Chickens farmed for meat grow so large so fast that they live in chronic pain, and their legs often can’t support their weight; egg-laying hens produce 20 times more eggs than their wild-animal counterparts; dairy cows now make about three times more milk than they did 60 years ago; mother pigs have been bred to give birth to ever-more piglets in each litter, resulting in frail, suffering runts. “It appears to be near-impossible in the industry to encounter a conceptual or ethical limit proposed for sows’ biological reproductive capacity,” Tufts anthropologist Alex Blanchette wrote in his 2020 book Porkopolis.

And, of course, there are the numbers. Factory farming’s defining quality is sheer quantity, as my friend and philosopher John Sanbonmatsu put it. It’s reengineered the makeup of life on Earth to such an extent that, Kyle Fish argued in a post on the Effective Altruism forum last year, “the entire good of humanity may be outweighed by the cumulative suffering of farmed animals, with total animal suffering growing faster than human wellbeing is increasing.” It’s a provocative claim, but you don’t have to be a utilitarian to see the insight in it.

The solution is right in front of us — and need not even require any new technology — if we want it.

Today’s animal movement is vibrant, intrepid, and intellectually, politically, and racially diverse. More people than ever from varying backgrounds are working to dismantle animal exploitation — lawyers, veterinarians, climate advocates, conservationists, scientists, philosophers, physicians, chefs, Hollywood stars, athletes, journalists, and old-fashioned, troublemaking activists. The cause is compelling enough to transcend the left-right binary, capacious enough to welcome everyone from leftists and progressives to neoliberals and movement conservatives.

Because animal rights has never been invited into the political mainstream, as other social causes eventually were, it maintains a lively spirit of experimentation, throwing creative ideas at the wall to see what sticks. One of the movement’s most exhilarating triumphs in recent memory took place in October 2022, when two activists with the group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), Wayne Hsiung and Paul Picklesimer, were acquitted of felony charges by a jury in a deep-red county of Utah for entering an enormous Smithfield Foods factory farm and rescuing two sick, suffering baby pigs.

“The jury made the right choice,” Hsiung later wrote in the New York Times. “Our society eventually will, too.” Some jurors later reported being transformed by the experience. It was a stunning David and Goliath outcome, showing that even the most radical advocates of animal liberation, when given a chance to explain themselves, could win over unexpected audiences.

These moments are electrifying, yet getting them to enter public awareness, beyond a narrow sliver of animal rights obsessives, can feel like moving mountains. At the end of the day, the meat industry’s kill count continues to surge.

But there’s another way of looking at it: As my colleague Kenny Torrella points out, for a movement with a relatively tiny budget (by one account, smaller than that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), farm animal advocates have achieved extraordinary things. They’ve managed to pass laws banning cruel factory farm practices in upward of a dozen states and convert a sizable share of the egg market to cage-free, freeing millions of birds from the most extreme forms of confinement. They’ve trounced meat industry giants in courtrooms, from DxE’s criminal acquittals to the Supreme Court’s vindication of Proposition 12 — despite the fierce opposition of the pork industry. A landmark California law, Proposition 12 bans pork produced with gestation crates, tiny cages that trap pigs in spaces barely larger than their bodies. Imagine how much more the movement could do if it had even one percent more resources, or had the buy-in of movements that should be natural allies.

One parallel cause is especially important here: the climate movement, until recently politically marginal like animal rights, but now squarely within mainstream policymaking. Animal and climate advocacy, at least in theory, share an enormous amount of common ground: The scientific consensus calling for meat reduction to stay below warming targets is as unambiguous as the consensus on climate change itself.

Yet dietary change remains a political lightning rod, and US climate advocates tend to shy away from it. Building meaningful partnerships between the animal and environmental camps may be the clearest route to changing that, for the sake of both animals and our future on Earth.

But there’s danger for farmed animals here, too: Because beef is far worse for the climate than other meats, particularly poultry, a focus on reducing emissions from livestock could end up replacing cows with billions more chickens (for this reason, some have argued against climate-based animal advocacy altogether). The US has already been on that path for decades; some global leaders, unconvinced that dietary change is possible, see it as a pragmatic climate solution.

Some climate experts are proving depressingly willing to sacrifice animals to shave off carbon emissions, calling for the “sustainable intensification” of animal agriculture — a disputed concept but one that can often mean, as my colleague Kenny Torrella points out, ramping up factory farmification and optimizing animals’ genes for productivity in an effort to get more meat for fewer emissions, much the same process that gave us today’s Frankenchickens. To prevent these outcomes, animal advocates will have to learn to work with and persuade those who don’t see the welfare of farmed animals as a priority.

For the green-pilled, our society’s collective unwillingness to see that we could simply stop eating animals, or at least so many of them, and all be better off for it can be exasperating. Animal rights poses a fundamental challenge to foundational aspects of human civilization — not just what we eat but also things like our presumed right to breed, cage, and kill animals for scientific experiments. It challenges our very place on the planet. Peter Singer, the philosopher whose work is sometimes credited with helping launch the modern animal rights movement, was absolutely right when he argued that there can be no rational justification for what we do to nonhuman animals; we’re not as special among species as we think we are. Only a tiny movement of iconoclasts has been willing to face up to this.

It would be easy to descend into fatalism, a kind of anthro-pessimism, about the possibility of things getting better as long as humans dominate the planet. Certainly the numbers look that way. But this may stem, paradoxically, from an excess of optimism: We expect change to come fast. We may, instead, need to learn to see the animal liberation movement as part of a very early vanguard — akin to Mary Wollstonecraft, a forebear to modern feminism who was considered a radical thinker in the 18th century for arguing that women were capable of reason and full citizenship, or Benjamin Lay, the militant early 18th-century Quaker abolitionist (and animal rights advocate) who gave hell to his slave-owning co-religionists. Today’s animal activists, too, are laying the foundation for a future that people alive today may never see — a humbling realization but also, perhaps, an empowering one.

Progress is never guaranteed, but the future will always look different from the present, and we as a species have often surprised ourselves with our capacity to change our values, cultures, and economic systems. For example, although we might expect moral change to precede behavioral change, it may work the other way around. Our brains are, famously, self-justification machines, so if climate imperatives can eventually push us to eat less meat, that might start to shift values in favor of animal rights, as people no longer need to search for rationalizations for eating factory farmed animals. We might also yet see a breakthrough in food technology, like slaughter-free meat, that can smooth the path. Giving up, in any case, is not an option.

For the billions upon billions of present and future animals who’ll be forced to suffer in a pointlessly cruel system of our making, that’s a cold comfort. For the rest of us, there is work to do.