Given that plant-based agriculture also causes suffering and premature death, what would be a reasonable strategy for trying to minimise the amount of suffering and premature death of conscious animals required in order to produce your food?

Hi Rupert. You probably remember your discussion on grass-fed beef vs. tofu. Because grass-fed beef farming reduces habitat for smaller wild-animals, I think it's probably a good thing on balance, even though it might mean some painful treatment and slaughter for the cows. However, non-grass-fed animals are not a good idea from the perspective of killing animals on cropland, because non-grass-fed animals require lots more plant agriculture than does eating plants directly.

Based on the discussion in "Unethical vegetables," there are probably some plant foods to avoid, like maybe rice and sugar? However, I don't know of any detailed and comprehensive analyses of small-animal deaths from different plant-production methods.

This would be a great research topic for an environmental-ethics or ecology student. Or maybe people who have worked on a few different farms would have a sense of the relative abundances of animals on each. (Fewer animals is better, both because that means lower populations of suffering wild animals, as well as fewer animals to be plowed over or chopped up during harvesting.)

A very interesting issue!

I don't know which are the vegetables that cause less suffering, but I think it will be very difficult that people buy "ethical vegetables" if they don't care about chickens and pigs. So I think to promote anti-speciesism and veganism is conducive to get more "ethical vegetables".

Some useful info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan_organic_gardening

Daniel Dorado wrote:Some useful info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan_organic_gardening

Thanks, Daniel! It's worth mentioning that I think organic farming might be worse for insects than non-organic farming because (1) wild insect populations are probably higher on the organic farms, resulting in lots more natural insect suffering, and (2) organic pest-control methods (e.g., Bt and biological control) are probably some of the most painful ways to kill bugs.

Alan Dawrst wrote: (1) wild insect populations are probably higher on the organic farms, resulting in lots more natural insect suffering

That's probably true.

Alan Dawrst wrote: (2) organic pest-control methods (e.g., Bt and biological control) are probably some of the most painful ways to kill bugs.

Probably true in the case of organic farming, but I suppose that vegan organic farming rejects these methods.

Another interesting choice is hydroponics.

Daniel Dorado wrote:Another interesting choice is hydroponics.

In vitro plants, anyone?

I've been wondering about that. Many of the arguments for in vitro meat seem to apply - it could presumably require fewer resources to gestate a plant in a lab than to cultivate a field for it (and you save all the indirect killing from farming, plus the effort of spraying pesticides etc). It might depend on how much of the plant is edible - eg for spinach, lettuce etc, if you just stick a seed in the ground you're not wasting much, but for most fruits, for eg, you're only consuming a small fraction of the overall plant.

Its lower efficiency gain (vs in vitro meat) might also be offset by its use for non-food plants, eg cotton, hemp, wood etc.

Someone on alt.animals.ethics.vegetarian has the idea that I ought to be eating bugs.

Does it seem safe to say that replacing some of the tofu in my diet with insects would be a definite improvement? One could simplify this question if more insects had to die in order to produce a calorically equivalent serving of tofu than by eating the insects directly.

It makes an important difference whether you eat wild-caught insects or raise the insects yourself. If you raise them yourself you have to feed them and so you may not be accomplishing much. At best you might be achieving a way to recycle some of your plant food waste into more protein. It would probably not be feasible for me to eat wild-caught insects. I am told that wild-caught insects in urban areas contain traces of pesticides.

But another option worth looking into is eating oysters.

Thanks for the questions, Rupert. On some of these matters, I need to do more research.

Do you know if the person who suggested the ideas believes that insects definitely don't feel pain? Same for oysters? If so, that person might have an another reason for preferring that you switch to these animals apart from a pure calculation that this will minimize insect/oyster/etc. suffering.

Certainly if insects can feel pain, then farming them would cause a fair amount of direct suffering. Even if you raise them in humane conditions, countless numbers will die very young by the nature of their biology. (It's for this reason that I prefer to have as few insects as possible in the world, preferentially replaced by bigger organisms like cows and elephants.) And you might squish a few of them every time you poke around, or if they get loose in your basement and crawl around the floor.

If you raise them with food scraps that you otherwise would have composted, then perhaps a case could be made that you haven't substantially increased insect populations on the whole, because those food scraps would have fed insects in your backyard if not in your indoor compost bin. If you have to buy feed for them, then as you say, this raises the question of whether you're really preventing net insect deaths in plant farming.

Do you know how to harvest the insects? And how to kill them humanely? If you take the proposal at all seriously, I'd be glad to help out with research on humane insect slaughter for human consumption, because you'd presumably be killing dozens/hundreds of insects per day.

Finally, it's not clear to me whether plant farming is that bad on the whole. Yes, lots of insects die painfully due to pesticides and in the harvest, but it might also be the case (especially when broad-spectrum insecticides are used) that bug populations on farmed land are lower than they would be if the land weren't being farmed, which is good. However, I'm not sure if insect populations are lower on crop land, especially since food crops may grow faster and absorb more usable energy than wild plants. This is a topic where a little help from an entomologist or agronomist could go a long way!

As far as oysters, most people think they don't feel pain, but I haven't studied the matter in enough depth to know what the probability should be. 0.1? 0.01? 0.001? Even if it's pretty low, you'd have to eat massive numbers of oysters to equal the meat from a cow or, especially, dairy or whey protein. So the expected amount of direct expected suffering could still be higher.

From what I gather online, most oysters are farmed? It seems they don't eat fish and so their feeding presumably wouldn't augment fish slaughter. My impression is that oysters are pretty expensive, so the money saved might be better donated to veg ads than used on pricey forms of food. After all, the optimizations we're talking about here are small compared with the benefit when other people switch from meat to plants.

Rupert wrote:Does it seem safe to say that replacing some of the tofu in my diet with insects would be a definite improvement? One could simplify this question if more insects had to die in order to produce a calorically equivalent serving of tofu than by eating the insects directly.

If you are going that route, consider this. In Utah (western U.S.) there are "mormon crickets" (like a fat grasshopper) that sometimes swarm across the desert in Utah and Nevada. They keep moving because if they stop, the ones behind them will eat them. Sometimes there are so many that they entirely cover the ground or there are more than a dozen per square yard/meter. If they are at high risk of being eaten by the bugs behind them, maybe there is little incremental difference if you eat them. They are also a road hazard because when they swarm across the road they are squished, and it is slippery and dangerous for motocycles.

rehoot wrote:

Rupert wrote:Does it seem safe to say that replacing some of the tofu in my diet with insects would be a definite improvement? One could simplify this question if more insects had to die in order to produce a calorically equivalent serving of tofu than by eating the insects directly.

If you are going that route, consider this. In Utah (western U.S.) there are "mormon crickets" (like a fat grasshopper) that sometimes swarm across the desert in Utah and Nevada. They keep moving because if they stop, the ones behind them will eat them. Sometimes there are so many that they entirely cover the ground or there are more than a dozen per square yard/meter. If they are at high risk of being eaten by the bugs behind them, maybe there is little incremental difference if you eat them. They are also a road hazard because when they swarm across the road they are squished, and it is slippery and dangerous for motocycles.

that sounds horrible D: maybe a good example of suffering in the wild though?

Ruairi wrote:

rehoot wrote:They are also a road hazard because when they swarm across the road they are squished, and it is slippery and dangerous for motocycles.

that sounds horrible D: maybe a good example of suffering in the wild though?

Yeah, not pleasant. That said, death by being run over by a speeding car -- if it's nearly instantaneous -- might not be so bad compared with other ways of dying. It would be much worse if you were only partially squished (e.g., if you were on the end of the tire and only got half run-over.)

As far as insects killed by cars, also check out this article on "Green Cars, Splatometers, and Road Kill":

• The average area of the front of a car is more than 100 times the size of a splatometer, so we can conservatively assume that, for every five miles driven, 100 insects are killed.
• Americans travel about 10,000 vehicle miles per capita per year, so they kill 200,000 insects per capita.
• There are 300,000,000 Americans, so the total number of insects killed by cars in the United States each year is 60,000,000,000,000 (60 trillion).

I'm not sure I believe the numbers fully. Maybe the splatometer figure was a high outlier. But even reducing things by a few orders of magnitude is significant.

Still, it's not clear to me if death by car is better or worse than death by bird. (Maybe better if it's fast.)

The article says also:

In addition, it is estimated that cars kill about 100,000,000 vertebrates in the United States each year. This estimate seems conservative, since about 900,000 killings of deer are reported each year, and judging from the roadkill you see on American roads, the number of lizards, squirrels, possums, and other small animals killed must be more than 100 times the number of deer.

Wikipedia cites another estimate of roadkill:

Extrapolating these data nationwide, Merritt Clifton, editor of Animal People Newspaper estimated that the following animals are being killed by motor vehicles in the United States annually:[6]

• 41 million squirrels
• 26 million cats
• 22 million rats
• 19 million opossums
• 15 million raccoons
• 6 million dogs
• 350,000 deer

This study may not have considered differences in observability among taxa (i.e. dead raccoons are easier to see than dead frogs[citation needed]), and has not been published in peer-reviewed scientific literature.

havn't read this yet but seems very relevant; http://robertwiblin.com/2012/04/28/the- ... ting-meat/

Thanks, Ruairi! I replied on Robert's blog.