Meatonomics (23 page)

René Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher and mathematician, was one of the first scientists to theorize that animals don't suffer. The father of analytical geometry argued that among animals, humans were uniquely endowed with minds and souls. This belief led to his famous remark, “
Cogito ergo sum
” (“I think, therefore I am”). As a corollary, he argued that animals were mere machines whose responses to stimuli were simply mechanical. Because he and his followers considered nonhumans incapable of thought, emotion, or the capacity to feel pain, they treated live animals as pieces of equipment and mocked those who objected.
⁵

However, today we know that if an animal changes her behavior in response to harmful stimuli, then she likely experiences those stimuli as pain.
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Because the ability to feel pain helps animals remember to avoid harmful situations, this capacity has played a role in evolution and in the success of species who experience pain.
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Conversely, if harmful stimuli did not produce a painful reaction, animals would not learn from encounters with such stimuli and would repeat dangerous interactions at the risk of injury or death. That's why it turns out, for example, that virtually all sentient beings have evolved the same ability that a human child has to avoid a hot radiator after touching it once or twice.

While the Cartesian view remains popular with some people in the scientific community, modern research has turned the traditional wisdom about the suffering of animals—including fish—on its old-timey
wigged, powdered head. Scientists have confirmed in the past decade that fish not only feel pain, but they also experience emotions. In one study, researchers assessed how fish responded to having acid or bee venom injected into their lips. With eighteen pain receptors on a trout's head and face, some more sensitive than those in the human eye, it turns out they don't like having their face injected with stinging chemicals any more than we would. The injected fish engaged in stress-associated rocking behavior and, compared to control groups, reduced their swimming activity, waited three times longer to eat, and had significantly elevated breathing rates. The researchers concluded that “both the behavior and physiology of the rainbow trout are adversely affected by stimuli known to be painful to humans. This fulfills the criteria for animal pain.”
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How do we know the trout exhibiting these responsive behaviors weren't just engaging in the reflexive behavior of Cartesian machines? Because in a similar, later study, trout dosed with morphine again had their lips injected with harmful toxins. The medicated fish engaged in significantly less rocking, lip-rubbing, and elevated breathing than those who did not receive morphine.
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Researchers concluded that because the responsive behaviors were directly related to the level of pain as managed by the morphine, the trout's responsive behaviors could not be merely reflexive and that “pain perception in fish” is a reality.
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Although these trout studies don't seem particularly humane in themselves, their results may suggest a need to reconsider how we treat marine animals.

Another study involving goldfish shows fish experience emotions like fear and anxiety.
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Researchers studied two groups of goldfish—one dosed with morphine and one undosed—who were subjected to painful levels of heat. Both groups responded reflexively in an attempt to escape the heat. However, after being returned to their tanks, the morphine-dosed group soon returned to normal behaviors, while the undosed group showed stress-related behavioral changes. The undosed fish acted defensively, exhibiting what researcher Joseph
Garner called “fear and anxiety.” According to Garner, “The goldfish that did not get morphine experienced this painful, stressful event. Then two hours later, they turned that pain into fear like we do. To me, it sounds an awful lot like how we experience pain.”
¹²

The recent research into fish and pain leads some to conclude that fish farming, the fastest-growing segment of animal agriculture, is one of the least humane of all processes to produce animal food. Farmed fish suffer routinely both during their lives
and
when slaughtered. As one would expect from any profit-minded fish farmer, tight stocking densities are used in typical farms to help keep costs down. But it's a hard-knock life for the fish since tight densities cause them chronic stress and make it impossible to engage in natural behaviors like defending territory or escaping from bullies. One group of researchers found that “the aquaculture environment is inherently unsuitable for fish that are territorial or solitary animals in their natural environment, such as some salmonid fish [salmon and trout]. In these cases, agonistic interactions can be particularly stressful to the fish.”
¹³

Packed stocking densities also cause fish a variety of physical problems. Injuries to tails and fins are common because of aggression-induced cannibalism and frequent friction with cages and other fish. Tightly packed fish are highly susceptible to eye diseases leading to cataracts and blindness, a problem pervasive enough to merit the formation of a group called Friends of Blind Fishes.
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One research team even worried that the prevalence of blindness among farmed fish might give consumers “doubts on the ethical standards of industrial fish farming.”
¹⁵

These overcrowded containers can also give rise to parasitic infestations. In the case of salmon, there are various techniques for dealing with sea lice—none of which is completely effective and all of which have their own welfare implications. One is to douse infested salmon with a chemical like hydrogen peroxide. Because such chemicals are harsh skin irritants, they cause the fish to exhibit stress behaviors for days after treatment.
¹⁶
Another technique is to introduce helper fish
called wrasse as cleaners to pluck the parasites from their hosts. However, in such close confinement, the wrasse are often bullied or killed by the salmon, and in any event, they're killed by farm workers at the end of the season to prevent the spread of disease to the next batch of salmon.

Slowly consuming their hosts, sea lice cause lesions, bleeding, and sometimes death. As one would expect, salmon don't enjoy being eaten alive; research shows those infected with sea lice suffer from chronic stress and compromised immune systems.
¹⁷
Sometimes the parasites eat all the way down to bone. When this happens on a fish's head, farm workers call the grisly result a “death crown.”

When ready for slaughter, farmed fish are killed in profit-focused ways that many commentators deem inhumane. For starters, farmed fish are often starved for a week or more before slaughter to eliminate fecal matter from their intestines and make it easier to butcher them. While any sentient being presumably dislikes being starved, for fish conditioned to being fed at the same time every day, research finds this sudden disruption in their feeding schedule is particularly stressful.
¹⁸

One common method of killing fish is to throw them in water rich in carbon dioxide. Placed into this acidic, low-oxygen environment, fish thrash around for half a minute or more, and even after calming down, continue to show signs of distress, such as vigorous head and tail shaking, for up to nine minutes.
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Fish killed in this manner routinely bleed from the gills because of the intensity of their reaction.
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Another popular slaughter technique at fish farms is to bleed the animals while they're fully conscious. This might involve cutting open their gills, opening their bellies with a knife, or some other method developed for a particular species. It's unclear whether we need research to determine that it hurts animals to have their bodies cut open while fully conscious, but regardless, the research has been done. Here's what the scientists found: if not stunned first, fish feel pain when bled to death.
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In fact, those eviscerated or degilled while conscious struggle “intensely” for four to seven minutes and respond to stimuli for up to fifteen minutes.
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For greater freshness and salability, many farmers like their fish to freeze while dying. Gradually slowing a dying animal's metabolism helps to minimize tissue decomposition and preserve its taste. Because fish asphyxiate at a slower rate when ambient temperatures are lower, chilling can lengthen the suffocation process by seven minutes or more.
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Not surprisingly, being frozen to death is distressful to the animals. Research measuring levels of the stress hormone cortisol in fish found that these levels increase markedly when the animals' ambient water is chilled.
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In the world of animal foods, fish are an anomaly—an outlier. For one thing, fish differ from land animals in their inability to cry out when hurt or suffering. This powerlessness to vocalize leads many to confuse a dying fish's silence with a lack of suffering—although the research shows otherwise. And then there is the conventional wisdom that says fish are particularly nutritious. But a flotilla of scientific papers shows that fish are routinely high in mercury, PCBs, and cholesterol, making them a distinctly unhealthy alternative to plant foods (
see
Appendix A
).

Nutritional issues aside, this chapter centers on the humane issues facing fish because marine animals frequently take a backseat to land animals—and because the recent research in this area is particularly compelling. Of course, cattle, pigs, and poultry have their own set of humane problems, like gestation crates for pigs, battery cages for laying hens, zero-grazing systems for dairy cows, and rapid growth and hyper-confinement for broiler chickens (as mentioned, more on that in
Appendix D
).

Given the chance, what—if anything—would you pay to change animal food production practices that are particularly inhumane? Economists Norwood and Lusk have sought to answer this question through studies involving real people and real money, and the answers are enlightening. In auctions where participants used their
own cash to bid on animal welfare improvements, people paid an average of $57 per person to actually move one thousand laying hens from caged to free-range systems.
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Bidders also spent an average of $23 per person to actually move one thousand sows and their offspring to shelter-pasture systems from confinement crates. Even more interesting for our purposes, Norwood and Lusk extrapolated from their auction results to estimate that people
would
spend a one-time average of $342 and $345 per person, respectively, to implement these two welfare changes throughout the United States.
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Now I propose to extrapolate further. Let's add three more hypothetical changes in animal farming to the two above: ending zero grazing for dairy cows, eliminating rapid growth and hyper-confinement for broiler chickens, and banning overstocking and inhumane slaughter of farmed fish. In terms of the number of animals affected, these five items likely represent the most prevalent industry practices in need of reform. Take $343.31, the midpoint of the range between the two amounts Norwood and Lusk estimated people would pay to improve hen's and pig's lives, and apply it to all the hypothetical changes. The total that this exercise suggests each American would be willing to pay, on average, to make these five changes is $1,717.
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Adjusting this figure for inflation, multiplying by the number of US adults, then amortizing the total over twenty years (the standard IRS depreciation period for farm buildings) yields a total of roughly $20.7 billion yearly that farm animal cruelty imposes on Americans in externalized costs.
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Some will argue this figure is too high because not everyone would pay nearly $2,000 to improve the lives of fish and farm animals. That's true, but this figure is proposed as an average that puts us in the right vicinity. Some would spend nothing, while at the other extreme, some would spend $50,000 or $100,000. How much might billionaire casino owner and vegan Steve Wynn pay? Five million dollars? Fifty million?

In fact, if anything, I believe this cruelty number is too low. For starters, it excludes the amounts the animals themselves would be willing to pay—if this could be measured and conventional economics ascribed any value to it. Measuring animals' economic preferences is
not all that far-fetched. One study actually measured pigs' willingness to pay for certain items. The animals were taught to repeatedly press a nose-plate to receive either food or increased social contact. By a ratio of 2:1, the pigs demonstrated they were more willing to spend time and effort on food than on friendship.
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Of course, if we could assign a value to animals' willingness to pay for better conditions, it would nevertheless go unrecognized by economic standards that measure only the
human
value of goods and services. Some believe this omission represents a deficiency in conventional economics. As methods improve for measuring animals' willingness to pay, and humans become more comfortable with the idea of using such figures, better metrics may emerge for making these calculations. Is it possible to measure the economic effects of producing animal foods without accounting for a single penny of economic cost associated with the individual animals' personal suffering? Because many of the 60 billion land and marine animals killed to feed Americans each year suffer throughout their lives, and some suffer further at the time of slaughter—in each case in measurable ways—perhaps assessments based on conventional economics omit a material component.

Furthermore, the estimate of $20.7 billion yearly covers only five inhumane practices. It doesn't include numerous others, like raising veal calves in crates, force-feeding ducks to produce foie gras, castrating pigs and cattle without anesthetic, and killing male chicks by starvation, suffocation, or grinding. Adding these and other practices to the calculation might double or triple the total.