Why do smart people get oneshotted by animal welfare?

More than once, an otherwise smart person has attempted to untie the Gordian knot that is the way we treat animals, and themselves come undone in the process.

Simon Sarris, otherwise a handsome polymath with a hot wife, recently wrote his attempt at “why veganism is wrong”, and the article he wrote is just bizarrely bad. It makes a lot of meandering points, which in isolation are neat curios I guess – about Icelandic beef production, interesting byproducts of cow carcasses, how American beef production has a reasonably low carbon footprint (can you see the common theme appearing?) – but which taken together are worse than an intro to moral philosophy paper written by a first-year uni student on mephedrone.

The only question that anyone has to answer with these essays is: in the main, does reducing your consumption of animal products reduce the amount of suffering in the world? And the answer is obviously yes.

Framed this way, all the weird whataboutism falls apart. Ah, what about the mice that get killed when you harvest the soy that we eat! What do you think farmed animals eat before we eat them? Ah, but what about people who just eat grass fed high welfare beef? What about them; why are we focusing on part of the food system that’s maybe a hundredth of one percent of animals consumed by weight?

The only way that people like Sarris are able to construct an answer that comes out as being “well, maybe, mostly yes but look there’s this case where it’s no” is to (in his case):

• focus entirely on grass-fed beef (even though chickens make up the vast majority of farmed animals)

• make claims about how whiskey/coffee/soy sauce have no nutritional value, but we’re willing to expend resources on them, so… something? (why is this important? I don’t think animal welfare folks are saying that we should expend no resources on food or luxuries, just that eating meat is a very wasteful way to do it)

• point out that cows produce a lot of other products which are consumed widely, like albumin and tallow (because they’re cheap byproducts of the meat industry, and their availability is what drives this usage)

• make arguments about how ruthless nature is and how nice we’re being to farmed animals, really, we give them a pretty good life (by which he means grass-fed cows)

• mention an ex-vegan who described his own veganism as “self-erasure”, and analogise it to those who avoid having children because of climate concerns (which perhaps is a motivation for some, but isn’t necessary, and isn’t in the same ballpark as those who are avoiding reproducing because of climate change which is a whole different form of erasure I suppose)

Sarris is a very smart guy, which is why it’s surprising to see him publish a multi-thousand word meander on animal welfare which manages to dodge all the important points. The comments are clear that it’s one of the worst things he’s written. How was he able to hit publish on something so bad?

There’s a kind of squaring the circle that goes on with these posts. Animal agriculture is bad, even if there are exceptions around the margin. There are ways you can write five thousand words and not come to that conclusion, but if you do so you’ve probably made some enormous error along the way. The actual underlying truth is horrible and boring: that the way we treat animals is a moral catastrophe, and we ought to personally avoid it (and even better, give away a chunk of our money to consign it to history).