Meat

What is it good for?

Another non-ai post¹. I am moving to the bay soon. It seems like if I am both not vegan and haven’t thought about the impact of eating meat, then I will likely be incurring a social cost. This is kind of annoying², but also kind of reasonable³. I’ve been slightly bumping into this sideways in a couple different ways and my opening belief was there’s non-trivial chance a lot of industrially farmed meat is just evil⁴, and therefore eating it is evil. So, I decided to just spend a couple hours really thinking about this.

Seems like for every industrially farmed meat, the animals’ life is clearly a life of net suffering. The only standard cheap grocery store meat where it’s even close to net positive is a beef cow, and even then it still seems like a life of net suffering. The life of an industrially farmed chicken is just cursed, it can’t move and it’s breaking under its own weight. Organic does jack shit to the calculus here.

It does seem pretty clear that any time I eat industrially farmed meat I am eating something that was effectively tortured⁵. For any milk I can buy in a store and almost all eggs in stores, the animals producing it are (that’s right) being tortured. That’s gnarly. There’s something here where I’m getting a very visceral feeling that eating factory farmed meats (especially chicken and pig) is just evil.

I’ve approximately known the conditions of how chickens are farmed for many years. But, I never sat down and considered how much to care about the experience of the animal I was eating. I obviously knew it was terrible, that’s not new information to me. I’ve mostly only thought about human welfare. But, is it evil to torture a being that isn’t human? A being that can’t talk? A being that doesn’t have right or wrong? A being that isn’t a moral agent? After sitting with it for a couple hours it feels pretty clear⁶ that torturing something with feelings and pain and attachment and community is in fact evil.

Why didn’t I bother to think about this before? It’s really annoying to have big restrictions on what I can eat. Food is such a huge part of community and culture. I like being able to eat so many different delicious things from so many different places. A friend can make a meal that they are proud of crafting, or that brings them back to their childhood, or that reminds them of someone. And by golly I want to share in that experience with them! I want to revel in all the joy there is to be a human. The idea of being picky is so abhorrent to me, it feels like slicing away parts of the core human experience.

But now I’m mostly convinced that eating industrially factory farmed meat is me participating in something evil. At least now I can go in with my eyes wide open. If a friend makes their favorite recipe from their dead grandmother I don’t have to say no just because it has chicken in it, now I get to decide. I can eat a little bit. I can consider offsetting. Or maybe I do in fact say no, that participating in something evil isn’t worth it even if I can offset the expected suffering I inflict by eating that thing.

Also, our culture just so clearly doesn’t care. If this were evil wouldn’t our culture care more? I am certainly no stranger to believing something at least a little out there, but I am extremely low natural care/empathy for animals. As a child I was outvoted 3-1 on whether we should get a dog⁷. I don’t get excited looking at puppies or kittens. Animals are annoying! They’re stupid, shit anywhere, can’t talk, trick you into thinking it’s okay to not have community with fellow humans, and either live terrible miserable lives in the wild or mind numbingly boring lives stuck inside a box⁸ in your house. So like, shouldn’t all the people who seemingly care way more about animals than me be worried about this whole animal torture thing?

We’ll see. I have not actually taken the hit of what is life like without eating (most) animals. I am not suddenly not eating 80% of the food that the 5 people in my house co-create. There is some dissonance of like if it’s so evil why am I letting the fact that it would be quite disruptive get in the way and instead waiting for when I move in under 2 weeks. I only have so many time/energy/etc points right now and it will be significantly easier to try when I am not in the current communal house eating equilibrium. Still it feels weird to be this nonchalant about timing for what is effectively torture, hard to feel the torture when everyone is so chill about it. And there’s certainly a feeling of like I can toss 1k to an animal welfare charity if it’s important for me to feel like I am net doing good here.

Oh man that last sentence feels a little weird. For many things I think offsetting or some sort of accounting of total harm/good is very reasonable. Basically everyone who does anything AI safety uses AI (usually a lot) which slightly contributes to the economic success of the labs that are creating the very same AIs. That feels totally fine, there’s a balance of like how much does that economic support⁹ impact the lab and therefore their ability to scale to larger models vs. the value of the tool. Something about actively inflicting suffering on living beings feels categorically different, even if I give money s.t. my net impact on animals is less suffering, there is still this feeling that I have done something wrong niggling away if I have personally contributed to what is effectively the torture of animals. I eat a lot of chickens per year. Obviously this is something for me to spend some more time with, so far I have spent the barest speck from the sands of time on this¹⁰. And yet at this moment it feels very alive and worth publicly committing to¹¹.

Okay, so most animals I interact with as part of what I eat are living cursed lives. That doesn’t mean all animal products I eat are contributing to net suffering of living beings! In fact it seems like it is perhaps good to eat some animals. If my consumption leads to more animals living net happy lives (that then end with me eating them), that seems better than if I ate something that didn’t contribute to more net happy animal lives being lived. Here is my preliminary list of things that seems good to eat, I am mostly focusing on the most tractable/most likely ones to actually come up and be relevant. Unless otherwise stated I am talking about buying in the normal ways one buys things¹². This is approximately sorted by my confidence eating this isn’t contributing to an animal living a life of suffering.

1. Oyster, clams, mussels

   1. They don’t feel, they’re just chillin. Also for the most part they are good for water quality

2. Bison

   1. The process of raising bison is very not industrialized, they spend the vast majority of their lives grazing, don’t get separated from their parents, and have very few painful things done to them. Many of them are feed lot finished with grain in the last couple months but that process is both short enough that it doesn’t really have time to cause pain or disease (in the way it does for grain fed cows) from that unnatural diet, and they are given way more space (due to being super aggressive and hard to deal with when they get too cooped up). They also live the longest lives of basically any animal raised by humans for eating.

3. 100% grass-fed/finished beef (AGA, PCO, AGW, GAP 4+)¹³

   1. Feed lot cows live a pretty gnarly life while they are on the feed lot, but cows that spend 100% of their life grazing on grass live kind of the ideal cow lifestyle. They do have a couple painful medical procedures but not really any that lead to chronic pain. An 100% grass fed cow basically just hangs with its parents and eats grass and walks around until it is slaughtered early. They don’t really develop any of the gnarly internal problems from digestion issues that feed lot cows can develop, because grass fed cows are eating what cows are designed to eat.

4. Wild salmon

   1. This one is interesting, it seems like the life of a wild salmon is probably net positive (although with pretty wide error bars), but even if it wasn’t it’s not clear to me that it would be bad to eat wild salmon. The natural cause of death for salmon is super gnarly¹⁴. The process of dying from a human killing you seems way better than the natural death process for salmon, and also better than say being eaten alive by a predator.

5. New Zealand lamb

   1. For those curious why I am including something as seemingly hard to get as New Zealand sourced lamb, in fact NZ is a huge exporter of lamb and I have bought it at stop and shop before. NZ has some of the best animal welfare laws (at least when it comes to lamb). Basically the entire calculus around whether NZ lambs live net happy lives is about how bad “tail docking” is. Lambs raised for meat live for about 7.5 months before they are killed. Tail docking is the process of removing the majority of the tail at around month 1 of life. The evidence is unclear but it seems like tail docking can be anything from pain in the moment and not much after, to potentially 3+ months of somewhat chronic pain. In the worst case that’s about half of the lamb’s life with somewhat chronic pain. Other than that NZ lambs basically just graze and hang out and never have to worry about predators. I am relatively confident that this is not enough pain to be a net negative life. If I was given the option of either not living at all, or living a life where I get to do what I was designed to enjoy and for at most half of my life I have slight chronic pain I would take that over not living. I would be killed in a somewhat traumatizing way, but it would be quite fast and I wouldn’t know it was coming. This is the most marginal one, but it still seems comfortably a net happy life.

6. Local¹⁵ eggs (pasture raised), beef, lamb, pork, chicken, contingent on some questions¹⁶

   1. This is of course super case by case, but smaller farms that aren’t industrialized or working at scale are probably net positive for the animal. If they get to do what they naturally want to do without being overcrowded or worry about predators that’s probably a net positive life.

I find it kind of surprising that I haven’t heard anyone talk about eating animals as a clear moral good. For every animal above I would feel actively good about eating it, that animal enjoyed its life and it got to have that life because I (and others) ate it. There is of course the argument that if demand suddenly went up 500% for any one of those animals then they would likely industrialize¹⁷ and then the animals would have net negative lived lives. But certainly on a personal consumption level I think consuming any of those is (from an animal welfare perspective) net good for living beings - more living beings leading net happy lives.

To some extent this post today is just me getting super nerd sniped by an interesting topic! I am very curious how I will feel about this in a month!¹⁸

1. I’ve been really trying to setup good tools and procedures while my life is mostly stable for good long term AI safety productivity. This means I have done less “actual work” which feels bad. Also, I have lots of things that are in the middle of being done. Also, I got totally nerd sniped by this after talking to someone who really made it clear to me how important this topic would be in the social spaces I am likely to be in while in the bay. It’s also just quite interesting. How do you figure through whether the life of an animal is net happy? How much should I care? Am I secretly putting human values on something not human? Is pain actually just universal?

2. groupthink boo

3. exerting costs on other people for doing something you think is abhorrent is good

4. Causing lots and lots of suffering

5. Other than the standard grain fed cow. I don’t think grain fed cows live a life of being tortured (still a net unpleasant life don’t get me wrong). Pigs and chickens though, that’s a life of being tortured.

6. In this moment at least, we’ll see how I feel in a couple days

7. I thought dogs were a waste of resources, imagine how many more humans we could have if there were no wasteful pets, and like what does a dog get us? Nothing!

8. Size of the box depends on size of the animal of course, here in NYC dogs get an apartment sized box!

9. Although in many cases given their current pricing people are net costing the company money. My individual customer relationship with Anthropic certainly has caused them to have less profit now than a year ago.

10. Four hours of talking to Claude, sitting in it, talking to Zack, writing this, etc… is in fact not that much time

11. Certainly trying for at least a month minimum

12. For example obviously if I raise my own chickens that is different from buying chickens in a store.

13

14. Claude says “organs deteriorate, immune systems collapse, and their tissues literally begin breaking down as all energy reserves are redirected toward reproduction. After spawning, the salmon’s body is essentially spent. Death follows within days to weeks from a combination of exhaustion, starvation, organ failure, fungal infections, and tissue degradation. It’s sometimes described as a kind of rapid, programmed aging.”

15. most likely farmers market

16. Chicken: "What breed?" Anything other than Cornish, (or) “How old are they at slaughter?”: 11+ weeks (Cornish will be 8 weeks). Pork: "Do they live outside?” Yes, “Do you nose-ring?" No. Lamb: "Do you dock tails?” No.

17. In the case of 100% grass fed beef that’s certainly a mature enough market s.t. if suddenly 5x as many people wanted to eat that instead of feed lot beef I think after the market settled in the new equilibrium those 100% grass fed beef would still be living net happy lives. Part of the reason I picked the others was because they are easier to distinguish due to being an entire category of animal as opposed to having to find the specific labels that correctly identify whether a given piece of cow was actually 100% grass fed. (And someone can always just lie and label their feed lot beef as 100% grass fed, which has happened at least one known time before)

18. As always, here are Claude’s thoughts on this piece