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7/23/2025, 5:18:30 PM
>>40781636
The position that animal suffering doesn’t matter is really an extreme position. Think about what it’s like to be in really intense pain. It’s bad! And what makes it bad isn’t that you’re smart or are a particular species or have some kind of essence. What makes it bad is that it hurts! So if animals can hurt then we should try to prevent them from hurting. The most detailed report ever compiled https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/welfare-range-estimates/ found that chickens feel pain, on average, about a third as intensely as we do.
If animals feel pain a third as intensely as we do and their pain matters, then the fact that billions of them are going insane in grotesquely inhumane conditions is very morally serious, that we grind up baby chicks in macerators, that we slice off their beaks without anesthetic, and that half a million birds are boiled alive https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/10/26/half-million-chickens-will-be-boiled-alive-year is morally serious. We’re doing things that would be called torture if done to a dog to billions of animals, and almost no one seems to take it seriously.
Have you ever stepped on a dog’s tail by accident? When you do it, I think you can see that something bad has happened. And it’s not bad just because it made you sad. It’s bad because it hurt and frightens the dog. But if we have no direct duties to animals, then hurting dogs is only bad because of what it does to us. If a dog fell into a blender, so long as no one ever found out about it, on the indirect duties view, this wouldn’t be bad at all.
The position that animal suffering doesn’t matter is really an extreme position. Think about what it’s like to be in really intense pain. It’s bad! And what makes it bad isn’t that you’re smart or are a particular species or have some kind of essence. What makes it bad is that it hurts! So if animals can hurt then we should try to prevent them from hurting. The most detailed report ever compiled https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/welfare-range-estimates/ found that chickens feel pain, on average, about a third as intensely as we do.
If animals feel pain a third as intensely as we do and their pain matters, then the fact that billions of them are going insane in grotesquely inhumane conditions is very morally serious, that we grind up baby chicks in macerators, that we slice off their beaks without anesthetic, and that half a million birds are boiled alive https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/10/26/half-million-chickens-will-be-boiled-alive-year is morally serious. We’re doing things that would be called torture if done to a dog to billions of animals, and almost no one seems to take it seriously.
Have you ever stepped on a dog’s tail by accident? When you do it, I think you can see that something bad has happened. And it’s not bad just because it made you sad. It’s bad because it hurt and frightens the dog. But if we have no direct duties to animals, then hurting dogs is only bad because of what it does to us. If a dog fell into a blender, so long as no one ever found out about it, on the indirect duties view, this wouldn’t be bad at all.
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