Animal Welfare

Development of Farmed Animal Welfare Attitudes

Ethical and spiritual concerns for animals have motivated vegetarianism for several millennia. Ancient vegetarian proponents include Eastern religious leaders Buddha, Mahavira, and Lao Tzu, as well as prominent ancient Greeks such as Pythagoras, Plato, Porphyry, and Plutarch, who proposed the sentience, rationality, and kinship of other animals. Plutarch critiqued cruel farming methods practiced to improve taste, which suggests that even traditional farming involved suffering.

Vegetarianism waned in Western culture during the reign of Christianity, which relies on the human/animal dichotomy. Animal welfare writings resurfaced in the 18th century, largely [Page 33]in resistance to “Cartesianism”—Descartes's scientific viewpoint suggesting that nonhuman animals were automata with little consciousness or feeling—an instrumental attitude serving to justify animal use amid growing concerns over animal suffering in science and agriculture. In contrast, utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill acknowledged animal sentience and promoted restricting animal use to only necessary food and research. Popular sentiment dictated that causing wanton animal suffering led to inhumanity toward other humans. This anthropocentric concern for creating a peaceful civilization was common in 19th-century vegetarian writers, such as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Albert Schweitzer. Henry Salt and J. Howard Moore even promoted an early idea of extending human rights to other animals, often referring to animal cruelty as criminal.

These ideas anticipated philosophies that ushered in the late-20th-century animal rights movement, largely credited to Tom Regan and Peter Singer. Regan considered it morally inconsistent to take away the life of a nonhuman animal—a fellow subject of a life—when one would not take a human life, such as for food. Singer argued that animal agribusiness, whether free range or intensive, is a speciesist practice, meaning it discriminates based on one's species, sacrificing their major interests (life) to satisfy our minor interests (taste).

Agricultural Practices

Historically, a largely rural society supported animal farming because they witnessed animals leading wholesome, natural lives. However, over the previous quarter-century, most family farmers were forced out of business by larger corporate farms. Today's agricultural status quo severely deviates from the bucolic ideal of the pastoral “Old McDonald's Farms,” as industry has largely confined the animals behind closed doors. Pigs and birds are the most intensively confined, cows raised for dairy are semiconfined, and cattle are the least confined until sent to a feedlot.

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