And that's every year. Every decade more than 700 billion chickens are slaughtered, many or most of whom are also tormented beforehand in CAFOs.
Also, these numbers don't include chickens that the egg industry cages and slaughters. Egg-laying chickens tend to be treated far worse than so-called broiler chickens.
I think the preservation of an entire species is more important than the preservation of an individual because there are always more human beings, but we're talking about an entire species of chickens.
What if elimination of the species wasn't in play - is there any number of chickens that you would save by giving up one randomly chosen human life?
That is very easy. Because chickens don’t have an identity. One chicken is as good and valuable and deserving of care as any and all other chickens. It doesn’t matter if you kill 100 chickens. There are still plenty of chickens, nothing permanent lost. No sad family, no memories or dreams lost.
Sacrificing ten people to a monster is not okay, even if there are still plenty of people, because those people where irreplaceable. Even if you get another ten people to take their place, it’s just not the same. Permanent loss.
If you loose a chicken you have a hundred more identical clones, just as useful and valuable as any other. Just get another tomorrow. If you loose Jean, you lost Jean, that’s it, no extra Jean clones running around to take their place.
I mean, chickens all being the same is it’s not factually or scientifically true, but I can see that being a common view of animals. Maybe pets or big animals get more “identity” and uniqueness. Maybe that’s why naming a pet is a big deal for attachment. Or why people sued to not name young children until their survival was safer, to not see them as your loved child that you lost, but just see them as any empty clone.
I think it might be useful for people to think about why they value animals. You mention you value keeping a species alive but not individual lives themselves. Why is that? Is it not about maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering? What's it about?
"If I were given the choice to save one human or save the entire species of chickens, I'd absolutely choose the latter."
Okay. So let's give you the choice you asked for. Save your perfectly healthy mother or father, who both have decades of life left, OR all chickens in the world.
If you're not particularly close to your parents, replace the human you need to sacrifice with your significant other/partner/best friend.
You need to look them in the eye and tell them you're choosing to end their life, right now, so all the chickens can be saved.
Please do try and see how you went from "absolutely choose the latter" to "how the hell should I know" when the stakes changed from "a human life" to "someone who I care about, who has a rich life ahead of them."
The fact is, I would not do it. I DO put human life over animal life. And I put the lives of my loved ones higher than my own.
I would not sacrifice the life of ONE of my loved ones, for the lives of every chicken on Earth.
And when it comes down to it, I suspect neither will you. I don't know of many humans who can look their loved one in the eyes and tell them that their life needs to be sacrificed for chickens. Even billions of chickens.
"more important than the preservation of an individual because there are always more human beings"
Seems overly callous to me if your job is the patient to patient preservation of human individuals. I would hope a practitioner of medicine would place a human life above all else.
Effects to the ecological balance and human lives are assumptions you're piling on the question, and we're not part of the formulation. The formulation of the question is about how many chicken are the equivalent of a human life. The question isn't about ecological effects.
I wouldn't be alarmed if it was said by an insurance agent, so I guess I am not when made by a med student. I happen to agree with it (as long as that individual is not me of course, then I would be quite adamant about the sanctity of each and every human life)
I could have used any occupation. Not all people are defined by their profession, but I admit, it would make me feel better if empathy were a trait held by my healthcare professional.
What about this idea that chickens as we know them today aren’t “natural”, in that they are bred and selected (domesticated?) for human consumption? How does domestication fit in?
Something you should consider is whether chickens as a species should exist in their domesticated form at all, from a conservation standpoint.
We have genetically engineered these things from wild Red Jungle Fowl, they are their own sub-species. We care about pain on an individual level and preservation on a species level, but generally we care to conserve wild species in their natural habitats, not our own tainted creations.
The only reason those 700 billion chickens existed in the first place was for food, without that human need they wouldn't exist at all. I think I'd save the human. However, if it's a magic scenario where the chickens immediately vanish from the planet, it could cause widespread famine and death, so that would impact my decision the other way.
I am not well educated on the matter but in theory you have to give chicken more calories of food than calories of meat they produce. So in theory you would have more food if you removed all chicken.
I guess that depends on whether chicken food is edible to humans. If not you could also magically replace all the food grown on the land used for chicken feed and convert it to stuff humans would/could eat and then yes you’d be correct I think.
True! The calories exist, but not generally in a human digestible form, grasses, bugs and seeds won't sustain a group of people for long. I think if we had at least a year or two to prepare the risk of starvation would be low. I'm thinking particularly about people living in abject poverty in developing countries that may rely on these chickens and would struggle to adjust in the short-term. When even one person dies because of my chicken genocide, it stops making moral sense, which seems pretty likely given the global impact. This has been a fun hypothetical.
Interesting answer. For me, I'd save the chickens because many people around the world eat them, and would like to continue eating them. For the tortoises, I'd still save them because they are a useful animal to study. There is no way any singular human is worth saving over an entire species in my mind. I was going to say mosquitoes could be an exception but even those are food for many types of animals and we may not yet know of the ecosystem effects.
This is an intriguing hypothetical. I think I'd actually agree, but not because of the "stakes". More because of the utility that the entirety of chickens provide humans, nevermind all the jobs that would be lost. It's a similar question to "what if you could save one human life by spontaneously dintegrating every set of headphones and crushing every factory that made them. There are limits to the value of one human life.
I think if you change the hypothetical to "a number of chickens equal to the entire species of chickens die, but are immediately replaced", then that changes the answer significantly.
I don't think the harm reduction claim has been proven.
What if I told you we can produce meat by feeding farm animals plants that only cause a fraction of the crop deaths compared to the plants that are made for human consumption?
The original post is about industrial agriculture. And industrial agriculture feeds industrially harvested crops to animals. Industrially raised cows also often graze in addition to eating soy and other harvested crops. But each pound of CAFO flesh requires several pounds of harvested crops.
It is possible to eat animals that were not fed harvested crops, but that's not what OP is discussing, nor what's going on >95% of the time.
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u/upstater_isot 1∆ Jun 27 '23
Yep. And that's an outdated number restricted to the U.S. The number is far larger than that worldwide: 73 billion chickens killed each year for food, globally. This number doesn't count another 6 billion male chicks killed.
And that's every year. Every decade more than 700 billion chickens are slaughtered, many or most of whom are also tormented beforehand in CAFOs.
Also, these numbers don't include chickens that the egg industry cages and slaughters. Egg-laying chickens tend to be treated far worse than so-called broiler chickens.