Matthew

Welcome to Feed a food systems podcast presented by TABLE, I’m Matthew Kessler.

“We use the word ‘animal’ in deeply contradictory ways. On the one hand, humans are animals. We share many physical traits with other animals, often assume that they are like us, and easily fall into relating to them as if they were humans. On the other hand, we most commonly use the word ‘animal’ to distinguish what isn’t human from what is.”

This is the first few lines from TABLE’s latest explainer on animal ethics in food and agriculture written by researcher and writer Tamsin Blaxter. Go read the piece. It’s a brilliantly researched history of the debates surrounding animal welfare and animal ethics and what that means for food systems. So go read it. But of course, listen to this conversation too. 

Tamsin

In some ways that's the whole story. Like why can you have radically different intuitions from person to person about what animals are. Part of the answer to that might be the radical differences in the kinds of amounts of contact and the types of contact we all have with non-human animals, which is kind of historically unique.

Matthew

The explainer shows that philosophers, animal welfare scientists and farmers each have different worldviews and as a result, argue for different food futures. For philosophers who focus on animal ethics, these are moral questions that should be answered by directly examining our values. For animal welfare scientists, they believe we should improve our understanding of animals’ lives through scientific research. Meanwhile, farmers, fisherfolks, and others involved in raising animals feel that their direct experience with animals is undervalued in these conversations. For them, it’s more intuitive to know what’s a good or bad way to raise animals.

This is what we breakdown in our conversation, and what I find most interesting here – is that you can be arguing from a principled and ethical position, and come up with completely different view of a what is “good” way to eat or to abstain from eating animals. We’re about to dive deep into what we think we know about what animals think and feel, and why it matters for arguments over different futures for food.

Tamsin 

It's simultaneously true that you can be arguing from principle positions and come up with very different answers. But also there's some really big disagreements I think about that point. I really struggled talking talking to kind of particularly the philosophers who thought about this very deeply, to come up with kind of satisfying descriptions of what the principles were behind some of the deeply felt moral positions held by some people in this debate.

Matthew 

Right. So there's even a debate around what is objective and what is subjective in this conversation.

Tamsin 

Exactly and the debate about what counts as a principled position and yeah.

Matthew 

So I was thinking about starting us in that territory. Because I thought a lot about where do we start this conversation? But I thought since people often hold pretty strong and confident views on this topic, I want to see if we can either soften or at least expose people to different positions. 

Tamsin

Sure.

Matthew

So do that - I asked Tamsin about a table she made in the explainer - for those who are following along in the document at home - we’re talking about Table 4. Contrasting perspectives on actions. Here Tamsin offers three different examples about specific actions connected to the debates around eating more or less meat or eating certain types of animals. 

The first one is intensifying poultry production to reduce the cost of food. What do you mean by that and what are the positions for or against that?

Tamsin

Intensifying is a word with a lot bound up in it, but we're basically thinking here about increasing the number of animals we keep in the amount of space we have, increasing the efficiency of the system. If we understand efficiency as something to do with amount of resources we put in relative to the amount of food we get out. So the resources we're putting in are: land, but also feed, labour, and so on.

And these kind of very efficient, intensive poultry systems were invented in the mid -20th century. This is the kind of beginning of rhetoric around factory farming. That period is when that term comes from. And these are the kind of systems it was referring to.

So yeah, in that period we're talking about this kind of sharp distinction between your kind of backyard or farmyard free -range poultry and hundreds and then very rapidly thousands and tens of thousands of chickens kept in very small cages unable to move for their entire lives. 

Matthew 

So I mean, right away you describe that system and I think people have quite strong emotional views about that. And then at the same time, they would also like to go through a drive-through in a fast food place and eat something immediately off the dollar menu. So I think, right, there's already maybe a difference that's forming in between how someone thinks about the system and how someone kind of experiences it.

Tamsin

Right, totally. And it's worth saying that like, what I just described, the kind of intensive system, in some ways that's like a slight caricature because that isn't exactly what these systems look like today, at least in the UK. Though it is in some parts of the world still what they look like. But I think it's useful to understand that kind of the sharpest version of this contrast, because the achievements of that factory farm system brought in in the 1950s, early 60s in the UK, at least, was that the cost of chicken fell really fast. 

It went from being a luxury food that was only eaten typically once a year to something that people were having pretty regularly and then increasingly became like not even just like a regular slight luxury but an actual staple that as you say you could buy at the drive -through on the dollar menu kind of thing and that has potentially enormous benefits, enormous moral goods come with that, which is to say this is a high calorie. This is a food with pretty little to object to it from a nutritional standpoint. And if that is available to everyone really cheaply, that's an incredible tool for tackling food poverty, for tackling malnutrition, any kind of problems associated with people not getting enough of the right foods. 

That argument maybe feels a bit hollow in somewhere like the UK right now. in the sense that although we clearly have a huge problem of food poverty, maybe meat is not the thing that people, like maybe chicken specifically, is not the thing that people think about as being inaccessible. Maybe it's more like fresh fruit and veg that people think about as being inaccessible. But that itself is a product of these incredibly successful systems that have brought the cost down so much. And there are lots of parts of the world where that argument rings much more straightforwardly simply true. So from that perspective, this is like a huge moral positive.

Matthew 

You've called that the anthropocentric perspective. Now on the other hand, there's a biocentric perspective. So what's the difference there between anthropo- and bio- and what is that view?

Tamsin

If we're going to talk about ethics, we're really talking about who matters and what matters. 

These centricities, these anthropocentric, biocentric, eco -centric, but we'd also talk about sentientist is another one in this list which awkwardly doesn't have the same form. These are answers to that question of what matters, what are we meant to take into account when we decide what's a good action and what's a bad action. So in an anthropocentric view, the only thing that matters are human beings. In a truly anthropocentric view. 

Obviously, like, probably most people operate with like weird mixtures. So I'm talking like a philosopher here, where we kind of come up with neat absolutes that we can put down on paper and then have a conversation about. So in that kind of sense, an anthropocentric view is a view of ethics where the only thing that matters are human beings. So if the only thing that matters are human beings, then great, we've increased our access to cheap, nutrient -dense food. That is a really straightforward, powerful, moral positive.

On the other hand, we might say that all ‘feeling beings’ matter and should be taken into account in some way in our moral calculus. And that would be a sentientist perspective. Or that all living things of any sort should be taken into account and that might be a biocentric perspective. Or we might even say from an eco -centric perspective that all ecosystems, all whole collections of living beings in systems together have moral status. 

And if we take any one of those perspectives, but let's kind of stick with the simple kind of biocentric or sentientist perspective, then we're missing a huge part of the story if we just talk about the nutritional benefits for humans, because there are also the lives of the chickens in that system, which are lives of potentially very great suffering. 

They're also in a kind of efficient intensive system just very short lives compared to what they could be. And it's very hard to come up with a really kind of principle straightforward reason why other living things should matter or other feeling things should matter but shouldn't matter as much as humans. 

I think kind of the story of a lot of thinking around animal ethics for the last half century maybe has been one of people struggling with that question. Our intuitions for most people are that humans matter, animals matter as well, but animals matter less. And it's really hard to come up with a justification for that that isn't just, well, this is our arbitrary decision.

Matthew

And similarly that some animals might matter more than others, if we think about the total lives of animals that are suffering and with this particular poultry example, here we have in one of the last few years, the statistic that 73 or 74 billion chickens a year have been slaughtered for meat consumption.

Matthew

Yeah, okay, so that's a nice detailed dive into one example. I want to go to another example, another kind of food system example that you hear about maybe a lot more lately, which is switching from extensively farmed beef to fish caught from sustainable fisheries. So here we're transitioning from one animal, which most people are aware has a high environmental footprint on land, on water, a high carbon footprint to a sustainable fishery. So now we're tackling kind of different animals, different arguments. Can you share what, again, what is sort of the positive case for this and then what's the case against it?

Tamsin 

So the positive case here has to do with beef is this food is incredibly carbon emissions. And there's lots of debate around that, but let's stick with that point for now. And it uses a lot of land per amount of food produced. So from the point of view of the climate crisis, and the point of view of the kind of occupation of land that could potentially be occupied instead by wild species. 

This is an incredibly harmful way to produce the amount of food it produces. So if what we're really worried about is this kind of age of extinction that we're living in. We're worried about the potential damage to ecosystems, to kind of whole living systems of beings. Then shifting from eating beef to eating fish caught in sustainably caught fisheries is a really great move. I've, you know, I've stipulated their sustainable fisheries. 

From a sentientist perspective or from from a biocentric perspective if what we're worried about is the experiences of individual animals well then beef cattle have pretty good lives on the scale of animals in the food system, they have very short lives but they live lives with much less suffering than many other animals we eat and each individual animal feeds a lot of people. There’s  a lot of there's a lot of calories in one beef cow on the other hand those fish - i mean it depends exactly the exact numbers that depend on the exact fish we're talking about but they're definitely much smaller than a cow. And they are going to be so we're talking about far more deaths to feed the same number of people, and instead of deaths happening in kind of highly regulated slaughterhouses where there's stunning before so that the animal is feeling less pain than might be involved in some kinds of death. 

We're instead talking about pretty haphazard deaths en masse, mostly suffocating to death after being taken out of the water, some of them dying of kind of incidental injuries. These are, you know, pretty high on the scale of cruel deaths. So from that perspective, that is straightforwardly a kind of real moral disaster as a shift.

The thing I want to add though is that like this stuff is difficult because you could then also add a kind of deeper time step and you could say, well, if we keep on harming these ecosystems in the way we are doing with our high carbon, high land use beef, in the long run, that is going to mean more suffering of individual animals as these ecosystems collapse because we failed to mitigate climate change and we failed to kind of halt habitat loss. That's a lot harder to calculate and then we also get into the problems of like, what are you meant to do when you're dealing with ever greater uncertainty as we look further into the future?

Matthew 

And then the last action example that I want to point out, and I've intentionally put them in this order: of intensifying poultry production, into switching from beef to fish, and then this one, because I think that's actually represents sort of the majority of diets and the majority of views. And so this one is on open rescue tactics.

So these are ones pursued by animal rights groups like direct action everywhere where they, they would say saving these animals from these confined systems and setting them free either in wild lands or in nature reserves. So can you talk about what is the positive case here?

Tamsin

So the positive case here, again taking a kind of biocentric or sentientist perspective, is that if you come across another being who is suffering, who is morally important, has some kind of moral status, and you are in a position where you have the resources to save that being from their suffering, you have a responsibility to do so.

I'm framing this in quite kind of deontological terms. One could also frame it in different, in the language of a different ethical system, but that's the broad idea. And the kind of suffering involved in living in some of the worst kind of industrial intensive systems is really quite high. This is, you know, this is the suffering of being held captive all of your life in a very small space, suffering diseases associated with being unable to move properly, often being harmed by conspecifics, by other animals in the system alongside of you. If we imagine a human in these positions we would be very comfortable saying this is very great suffering and that our, that kind of is really is kind of morally incumbent on us to save someone from that situation if we find them in it. 

On the other hand, if you are coming from a kind of anthropocentric perspective where humans are the relevant, the only kind of morally relevant actors, then some other harms come into view, which is like you are harming the owners of those animals by stealing from them. You're possibly, you're probably damaging their property on the way out. You have obligations to other humans. Those obligations are the kind of things that are encoded in laws. People have a right to be protected from theft, be protected from trespass, assaults on their on their property and their livelihoods and so on.

Matthew 

I think that's really nice coverage of it. Yeah, I wonder if there's just a, before we move on to the next kind of topic, which I'll introduce and surprise you with shortly, if there's any kind of broader reflections that you take from these different examples outside of this is a very contested space.

Tamsin 

I suppose something to say is that I don't think very many people live their lives as though any of these neat philosophical positions like, these are not good reflections of exactly how people describe their own ethics. Most people describe their own ethics in much more mixed messy terms than any of these. 

Matthew

In the next section we explore how we know what we know about what animals think and feel and what constitutes good animal welfare. Tamsin breaks down the scientific experiments used to make these assertions, and whether they’re helpful or just proving what some people presume is pretty obvious.

I do want to get a little more in depth on “how do we know what we know about this topic”? What do we know about the state of animal sentience or pain or reasoning? So could you maybe talk a little bit about what does a research experiment look like to prove that animals have capacities that are similar to humans, like reasoning or feeling pain?

Tamsin 

Yeah, I mean those are two very different things. So very different kinds of questions that require different kinds of experiments. And I should start out from a kind of really, really, I don't know if you ever did like, if you ever do like philosophy 101 in the first year of your undergraduate degree, you'll get introduced to kind of like scepticism about other minds. Like we can never truly know whether other human beings are there.

They could all just be automata and that's totally impossible to disprove. Yeah, that's true. And that's true for other animals as well. So to a degree, this is like... This is stuff that is beyond experiments to prove. That is my position it's not necessarily everyone's position but I’m convinced by that perspective so in some ways i don't think we're like really using experiments to prove that animals are there are conscious are sentient are feeling any more than we can do for other human beings. But what we can do is show that they respond to stimuli in the way, that we would, respond to similar stimuli kind of analogous ways. And that they have some kind of analogous brain structures that could explain those responses and then it sort of Occam's razor to assume well in us those that relationship between response and stimulus is mediated by conscious experience So it's probably mediated by conscious experience in them as well. 

So for example, this is things like trying to avoid pain moving away from pain and that could just be a kind of unconscious reflex but then you can show that if you introduce a painkiller into their system if you give them an opioid or you know some other kind of analogous drug they stop having that reflex, that pain response, which implies that it's it's not a reflex and it is modulated by some kind of experience which can be blocked with drugs. So that's a kind of really simple example of how you might try and demonstrate that there seems to be something analogous to human consciousness here.

Matthew 

And to what extent do animals demonstrate that? For example, do fish demonstrate that? Can fish feel pain?

Tamsin 

Yeah, fish can definitely feel pain. At least that is the current position of the science. This kind of gradually extending circle of what other animals we recognise as having conscious experience, having being sentient, feeling things and specifically feeling pain. Pain tends to be the thing that we find easiest to investigate and do most work on investigating.

That expanding circle has now pretty confidently included fish and we're on to thinking about decapods. insects, crustaceans and so on. The way this tends to be done, youcan have like a list of criteria and if a creature meets all of those criteria then we say yeah we're pretty sure that this is a ‘feeling being’ that can experience pain.

And if it didn't meet all of them, we'd be confident it wasn't. And if it met only some of them, we'd have some uncertainty. And so with that kind of description of how the creature responds to damage and then how that is related to responses when painkillers have been used. That's the kind of item that would appear on these lists. And basically with fish, with most fish we've investigated, I think with all fish we've investigated that I've ever read about, but I just don't want to over confidently state too many “alls and everys”, but yeah, as far as I'm aware. Fish always pass all the tests that we put them through in this, on these kind of lists. 

Which is not to say that we've tested that many fish for that many items on these lists, but all of the evidence points towards yes they are sentient beings that feel pain. And of course, like that's also just intuitive if you've ever interacted with a fish.

Matthew

And then there's the other experiments towards reasoning or towards memory or towards relationships with family. One question here is, what was the most interesting or surprising or coolest thing you found in your research about animals, whether it's domesticated farm animals or wild animals that kind really blew your mind? 

Tamsin

The bumblebee's playing with things I thought was totally fantastic.

Matthew

I’m going to play a short clip from the insects episode in the Meat the four futures series we produced, where environmental and animal ethicist Bernice Bovenkerk at Wageningnen University described the experiment that showed that bumblebees are capable of play.

From Meat the four Futures, Episode 9:  Will you join the insect revolution?

Matthew 

You might be thinking, how do they test if a humming bee, or bumble bees, intelligent and able to communicate?

Bernice 18:33

There's this researcher, Lars Chittka, who shows that they play even if they don't get a reward. If you give them a tiny little ball, they will play with it and seem to just do that out of fun. But also, he made some really interesting test facilities where he had a little plate of nectar with a glass plate above it and a little string attached to the nectar. And the humming bees could figure out pretty quickly that if they pulled that string, they could get to the nectar, but also having bees that were watching. So that hadn't actually tried it themselves, they straightaway knew how to do it. But then it turned out to be that also other having bees in the colony later on, when they hadn't watched it, they knew straightaway how to do it. So it seems like they're telling each other. 

Matthew 

Okay. So they’re clever, but just how clever?  

Bernice 

And then an interesting other observation that he made was he cut the string at some point. So it wouldn't make sense to start pulling that string to get to the nectar and humming bees when they flew over that glass plate. And they saw that the string had been cut, they didn't even try to pull them out anymore. So that does point to some form of reasoning. And it's something that we never thought was possible in humming bees.

Tamsin

Our increasing understanding of the sophistication of insects, I think is fascinating. So playing, social behaviors, memory, some reasoning. 

I will give one more example. This is not an experiment. This is me watching an Instagram channel. fantastic Instagram channel which are publishing at the moment where they have trained this little rat to drive a remote control car. They've glued the controls the remote control to a car,  so the rat can sit in the car and drive his own little car around and they've set up a game where there's a seed that he wants he wants to get the seed and he has to get to the seed to be given it and he can only only gets given it if he gets there in the car.

And the reason I think that is amazing and it's you know like is that this is tool use. This is quite sophisticated tool use ability to understand the relationship between a set of like totally abstract little levers on the dashboard and a larger environment. It's goal setting. Yeah, this is stuff that we really only imagine humans are able to do. And yeah, given exactly the right circumstances and animals that are much smaller than us, much less clever than us can actually also do a lot of these things. Animals have a lot going on that we're not very good at noticing.

Matthew 

And I want to use that to pivot to farm animals. So livestock farmers are very different from each other in different parts of the world. There are different cultural relationships with animals. but one thing is fairly consistent, which is that they care a lot about their animals. whether that's strictly their livelihoods that they represent or whether they feel really personally or in spiritual relationship with their animals.

And to relate this to your piece, you talk about the kind of different debates around animal welfare. So we just talked about how do you measure or estimate how much an animal can think or feel. How about welfare? How do you physically measure or understand what is good animal welfare?

Tamsin 

Yeah, this is also fascinating. And there's a kind of philosophical component, which is arguing about what do we mean by the word welfare? Do we just mean health? Do we just mean internal experiences, sort of suffering and happiness? Do we mean ability to live a natural life? And all of those are kind of proposed as definitions of welfare. 

I think that, as I understand it, the kind of welfare science community has settled more or less at this point on combinations of the first two. Either animal welfare is more or less an animal's internal experiences, suffering, pleasure, and so on. Or it's that and health. So taking that as our kind of definition of welfare.

Basically, we start from the assumption that there are some things that we're very clear cause bad welfare or indicate bad welfare. 

Matthew

So what are those? What are indicators of bad welfare?

Tamsin 

Well, this is obviously dependent on the particular species. So we might be, you know, if it's a species that we know vocalizes in pain, then that vocalization in pain is a clear indication of an experience of suffering. If we're including physical health things, then, animal that's lame, that's a clear indication of poor welfare. And if we had something new, which we either, if we have something new which we think, might be a good way of measuring welfare.

So for example, say we think that. presence of some neurotransmitter at higher levels than normal as an indicator of bad welfare or some hormone or whatever. Then we can do experiments and see whether there's a correlation between these existing established indicators of welfare and this new proposed one and if there is we can add it to the list of this as a kind of established marker of welfare. 

And the most interesting one of those that I would add I think people should be aware of and is really an important part of this conversation has to do with optimism and pessimism. So there's, we know in humans, if humans are suffering, we become more pessimistic, and if humans are happy, we become more optimistic. And you can show in many kind of fun animal species that the same seems to apply, that if you train an animal, say we're gonna do this with cows. 

We can train them that when they see a certain stimulus say hear a certain noise see a certain light see a certain image printed on a piece of paper, whatever it is, they're going to get a reward. And you train them until that's really really reliable they definitely always respond to great i'm going to get a award i'm going to come over here and do the thing that gets me the reward.

And then you put them in an ambiguous situation, some situation where the stimulus isn't clear, and you see how they respond to it. And we could think that they're acting optimistically if they interpret the ambiguous stimulus as being a sign that they are going to get the good thing and they go over and try and get the reward. And they can, you could think of them as acting pessimistically if they respond to the ambiguous stimulus by ignoring it, by moving away from it and so on.

And then you see whether that optimism, pessimism is correlated with other things you know correspond with good and bad welfare. So are they experiencing pain? And it turns out that if they're experiencing pain, they will be more pessimistic. So there are all these kinds of, that's a nice example of how you can extend our skill at measuring welfare. You take some new thing and you test whether it's correlated with existing things we know affect welfare or indicate welfare.

Matthew 

And I guess this, this understanding of welfare, the practical implications is most likely applied in the regulations or creating standards in the law around what is good welfare?

Tamsin 

Yes. With the caveat that there is, that it's a pretty, it's a very tenuous connection, there's a huge delay, it's not like, you know, a new study comes out and lawmakers are like, “oh goodness, it turns out this practice, that this husbandry practice that we generally accept has just been demonstrated causes bad, like, negative welfare consequences, we'd better ban it immediately.” That is not how it works, but it does feed into a conversation which eventually - In the UK, a parliamentary committee is considering redrafting some bit of law and animal welfare legislation, they will speak to panels of scientific experts who will bring these data.

Matthew

That's helpful to articulate the relationship between the creation of regulations and the scientific experts, as well as showing that these things take time. 

Could you share a few examples of different countries and different animal welfare regulations that have been passed? Because I think people who care about this topic, they can actually connect it in their purchasing choices by saying, I'm going to eat meat from this particular country because they, in fact, have a set of regulations that creates a higher standard of animal welfare.

Tamsin

For example, we could think about farrowing crates. So this is the practice of constraining sows in very small confined areas in order to to furrow, to give birth, and for the first, the kind of beginning of piglets' lives. 

At one point, in highly intensive pig farming, most of the lives of pigs looked like that. But as it has been demonstrated both that there are not major improvements on sow mortality by keeping them in these highly confined spaces and also demonstrated that it really does have negative effects on welfare, there have been movements to ban farrowing crates or to limit them in different polities. The current status is that Sweden, also some other countries, Switzerland, New Zealand, Germany, Austria have banned farrowing crates. And then in other countries there are kind of different restrictions on how long a sow can be confined to a farrowing crate. And then there are countries where there are no explicit bans or restrictions on these at all. 

And the interesting thing there of course is that like, these different laws do result from more or less the same evidence going in. It's not like that list of countries I just gave reflects when they made the law and the countries who made the law most recently, with access therefore to the most evidence, banned the practice and countries whose laws are older hadn't yet responded to the evidence because it wasn't there yet. It really is more different lawmakers and different policies will weigh the evidence differently and will also weigh their other political considerations differently.

Other interesting ones would be like, the UK officially recognizes decapods as sentient. So theoretically, laws about like humane killing should apply to them. But that relates to a really recent specific, like the government asked for evidence on this, funded a committee to go write a report, the report reviewed the evidence and you say yeah, turns out decapods are sentient and the UK was changed.

Matthew

So that's a clear example where there is relatively new evidence that is being acted upon in a shorter time span that is changing the patterns of what people find acceptable and therefore what they choose to eat or farm or make illegal the practice of producing certain types of food.

Tamsin

Yeah, yeah, with some caveats there about the connections between legal and acceptable, but yes.

Matthew

So we just covered a bit about the relationship between the science, the regulation and public perception, and also a little bit about the gaps between them. Is there anything else that you want to say that you haven't already on this?

Tamsin

One thing I think has been kind of missing from this conversation is we haven't talked a lot, we talked a little bit about consumption but we haven't talked a lot about it and the deeper historical context of the society we live in, how different our consumption patterns are to historical societies and how much more alienated we are from the lives of the animals whose bodies we eat is kind of an invisible, huge shaping. You know, like in some ways that's the whole story. Like why can you have radically different intuitions from person to person about what animals are and what kinds of relationships we should have with them? Well, I think part of the answer to that might be the radical differences in the kinds of amounts of contact and the types of contact we all have with non -human animals, which is kind of historically unique. That's a really important part of this, I think.

Matthew

So I know everything in the explainer that you wrote is deeply nuanced, and everyone should go and read it, but I want to just send I want to just do a few rapid -fire questions at you if that's okay?

Tamsin

Yeah, I'll see if I can answer briefly.

Matthew 

So first, if I have a pet, does that make me less likely to eat meat?

Tamsin 

Yes. Particularly if you have a pet as a child. Yeah, so there's some studies which look at what kinds of experiences with animals in your life change your views about animals, just statistically in surveys, and make you more or less likely to agree with certain statements? And yeah, having a caring relationship with an animal, particularly earlier in your life and kind of more formative period, does make you more sympathetic to animals' interests and less accepting of practices which harm them, and it does make you statistically more likely to be vegetarian or vegan.

Matthew

So I'm going to ask you questions here, both for eating animals and against eating animals. So first, I know it depends on the person, but on the whole, does the research say it's more effective to make ethical arguments against eating meat or environmental arguments?

Tamsin

I think this probably varies by country. So there are cultural context things here. There is research, for example, in Germany, which points to the idea that we can more easily influence consumers to eat less meat by talking about animal ethics arguments than environmental arguments. I have talked to lots of people who find that hard to believe in their cultural contexts. 

I think the point here is that there's a synergy between those two sets of arguments, the environmental arguments and the animal ethics arguments, and so used intelligently, sensitively in your political context, there might be usefulness in using one or the other to achieve both goals.

Matthew

And I know you don't eat meat, but I'm going to ask you personally, which maybe this is just a dead end, but what do you think is the best argument to eat animals?

Tamsin

To start with the kind of easy bit, I'm perfectly sympathetic to: if you're in a situation where your life depends on it or your healthy, happy, thriving life depends on it. That's not really for me to judge and that's fine. I think that's an easy argument. 

In a way, that's like a bit of a straw man because I don't think very many people are seriously arguing that people in extreme poverty in the global South whose only option is to eat animals shouldn't eat animals.

Matthew

And again, it completely depends on the person, but for you personally, what's the best argument against eating animals?

Tamsin 

This sounds a bit glib, but you wouldn't want to be eaten if you were them.

Matthew

Yeah, I think it's great. This one, I don't know if there's a clear answer, but I'm just going to ask you. Does where you grow up, either by country or whether you're raised in a city versus a rural area, is that the best predictor of attitudes towards adoption of different diets?

Tamsin

I mean, like zooming out, yeah, absolutely. Where you grow up, the cultural context in which you grow up is by far the best predictor of, I mean, all of your ethical positions and culinary habits. Specifically thinking about countries like the country I live in, the UK, and also the US, Western Europe, and so on, where veganism, vegetarianism are part of the cultural discourse, have a kind of history. So there is this tension between are you -  These are kind of dietary identities. Those are definitely associated with rural versus urban communities. It is not clear to what extent we should think of that as if you live in a rural community then your experience with animals is quite likely to be one of exploitation for food, things like hunting or livestock farming, and broadly speaking if you've experienced it as part of your community, normal cultural practices, you're much less likely to have a moral problem with it and you're likely to kind of look for reasons why it's acceptable. If you've grown up in a cultural context where that stuff is all pretty alien, it's much easier to come to the conclusion that it's morally objectionable.

Matthew

And my last one in the series of rapid fires.  How malleable are people's views on this topic?

Tamsin 

Not very.  Which is not to say that people cannot be persuaded one direction or the other by argument. And it's not to say that people can't change their practices in relation to animals due to experiences or argument. But these are quite deep beliefs about the world. And when it comes to food practices, these are, we all know, all food practices are pretty difficult to change. And going from like eating meat to not eating meat is a pretty huge transformative change for many people. So this stuff is quite hard to shift and slow to shift.

I could give my journey of eating animals and then not, well, not eating animals and then eating animals and then not eating animals.

Okay, so yeah, just to put that kind of not very in context. But clearly like some people do change their views on this. So I grew up mostly in a rural context with parents who are vets surrounded by lots of animals and who are vegetarian. Surrounded by the way by livestock as well. So I had a kind of weird mixture of experiences. I then started eating meat as a kind of early teenager as an act of defiance against my family's cultural context. 

I gradually, as I got into an older teenager, engaged with the moral arguments more seriously and shifted to only eating “happy meat” and then only roadkill and then I shifted to being vegetarian and then many years later I shifted to being vegan. And for me all of those shifts like happened by engaging thoughtfully, except the first one, that one was totally lacking.

Matthew

That was just strict early teenage rebellion.

Tamsin

Exactly, yeah. But all of the other shifts have been from like, come from a place of thinking about this stuff a lot. And then none of them are easy. None of them are quick and like snap decision of okay, no problem, I've changed my view now. But they also all are deeply to do with experiences with animals. 

How about you?

Matthew 

Yeah, I think I have a very different story, but also shaped by my experience with animals. So I grew up without thinking twice about any of this. I grew up in the suburbs, very disconnected from where food comes from.

I really hated anything green on my plate for a very long time, which is funny because a few years later I was working on vegetable farms and that was a much bigger part of my diet. I think I was totally guided by like, what is the cheapest thing that I can get in my body to give me fuel for my day. That was pretty much how I thought about food. And I included animals, not as a separate category in food, which I think is how a lot of people conceptualize food.

Then I went and I spent about seven years working in farms in different rural areas. I worked on a number of livestock farms. That experience actually probably brought me more to respecting animals, respecting farmers and eating less meat all at the same time.

So it was the end of a very long day of slaughter in preparation for Thanksgiving in the US tradition that, that was probably in retrospect, a real turning point into greatly decreasing how much meat that I ate.

And then I married a vegan. And of course that is another experience that's going to kind of inform the family diet. But I still eat meat today, very sparingly, probably a few times a year.  And honestly, I think more probably around like the cultural circumstances of where I'm eating that meat, even more than how that animal is raised.

To wrap up here, we've talked about quite extreme views or positions in these debates. And as we said, there's a messy reality that doesn't always reflect this. And there's also perhaps quite a lot that we agree on, maybe outside of some very fringe positions. Maybe we could just name a few things that a lot of people do agree on and what we can do with that knowledge or what's getting in the way of acting on large areas of agreement?

Tamsin

There are a couple of things we could say about how we can move forward and where there's agreement. One of them is about identifying where there are like areas of synergy, places where we might agree for different reasons on the same course of action. And so there, we've already mentioned that there's this kind of synergy between environmental arguments and animal ethics arguments, both pushing in the direction of we should eat less meat.

Which is not to say that those two sets of arguments always push in the same direction. You can clearly come up with systems or specific context, specific changes you could make, which would create disagreement between those two sets of priorities, but broadly speaking, they push in the same direction. And that can be quite helpful for like moving past some of the deadlock. Another one is, if we zoom out particularly and don't think about the specific stakeholders in the systems and instead think about kind of general public attitudes.

There are some systems that most people seem to agree on when asked the question directly. So this kind of term, factory farming, which has been very much criticized term as being a bit too non -specific and empty. I often see now kind of industrialized or industrial animal farming as doing the same rhetorical work. These very intensive systems with relatively little resources put to welfare questions relative to the kind of considerations for efficiency. Most people find something to object to ethically in those and so maybe there are kind of points where we can move forward and some legal systems, some societies are moving forward on reducing the role of those in our food system. Once you bring in stakeholders with specific interests in these systems, the picture gets much more complicated.

Matthew

Yeah, and just to bring back where we started the anthropocentric argument that creating systems despite the numbers of animal suffering, and we think about in terms of affordable, nutritious food for a population that is currently demanding meat, and producing that in the most quote environmentally efficient way possible. There's all sorts of caveats on the externalities of those systems that are very much worth bringing in. 

Tamsin

Totally.

Matthew

It still can be seen as a compelling argument compared to some other alternatives.

Tamsin

I think you can understand some of these arguments as being conflicts about tension around who has the right to speak, who gets to be an expert on what kinds of topics. 

From the point of view of people who are direct stakeholders, who are involved in animal agriculture. They have really important expertise. They are the people with these animals every day. They are the people who are really in a position to judge what is good for their welfare and what isn't. And zooming out, they are the people really qualified to judge whether those conditions should be accepted as ethical overall or not. 

From the perspective of perhaps the kind of people who have ethical objections for that system and are outside it, a kind of activist group, they would see things almost exactly reversed, that people who are within these systems, because they have a vested interest in the existence of these systems, because they have been acclimatised to the suffering that happens in these systems, and also their perspectives on what the nature of these animals are. Has been set by how animals are able to be in these systems that they are singularly ill -suited to speak for the ethical status of these systems to speak for whether this is okay or not. They're kind of both they they have a vested interest and they have a skewed set of evidence.

And I think like it's really useful thinking about our kind of project as table to try and drill into those positions to give, to listen seriously, take them both seriously, to find the value and the expertise and the kind of the truth for want of a better word within both of those positions and then see where we can go forward in a dialogue which holds them both.

Matthew 

And I think you set out a really excellent frame to explore these debates around animal welfare and animal ethics in your explainer. Tamsin Blaxter, thanks so much for speaking with us. 

Tamsin

Thanks very much.

Matthew

Thanks for listening, and if you’d like to learn more, we’ve linked to the TABLE explainer: Animal ethics and welfare in food and agriculture, in the podcast show notes and on our website. 

Can’t enough of this topic? We’re also hosting an online event called Rethinking Animals in Agriculture September 10th. So you can still register depending on when you listen. You can also watch a recording of the event on our website.

Plus, there’s a very cool diagram that shows different Pathways to animal futures: values, strategies and perspectives, created by Tamsin Blaxter, TABLE intern Tatiana Dickens and Jackie Turner.  And of course, there’s the Instagram rat video that is 100% worth checking out.

TABLE is a collaboration between the University of Oxford, Wageningen University in the Netherlands, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, University of the Andes in Colombia, National Autonomous of Mexico and Cornell University in the US. 

This episode was edited by Matthew Kessler, with assistance from TABLE intern Tatiana Dickens and Tara Garnett. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Talk to you soon.