I guess the apparently counterintuitive idea that pork is among the most efficient meats to produce doesn’t strike me as all that strange. Obviously larger animals take more time to reach full size, wasting more energy on metabolic upkeep. But equally obviously there’s a certain amount of overhead associated with being a mammal that may not scale constantly with the total amount of food that the animal provides. Consider the relationship between volume and surface area — same idea.
On the other hand, the pig is generally considered the smartest animal in the barnyard. So if you’re looking for a reason to be uneasy about pork consumption, there you go: if you suspect that sentience works on a sliding scale, and if you believe that the moral outrageousness of a given act of violence against an animal is weighted by the animal’s level of consciousness, then your pig-slaughter is far more ethically objectionable than ordering a serving of chicken tenders. This strikes me as a much better source of liberal guilt than the difference in carbon footprint between types of meat.
In other blog news: the New Yorker has made a cartoon and it’s not funny. People are… surprised? Anyway, Ezra has the smart take. For now I think we’ll just have to cross our fingers that the New Yorker’s much-vaunted influence upon the middle-American swing voter zeitgeist has been overstated.
Yes, but you need to kill many more chickens to get the same amount of meat as one pig provides. Perhaps someone needs to compute a metric to allow people to make such comparisons, such as sentience per pound.
That’s an excellent point. Neuroscientists use the ratio between body and brain mass as a rough stand-in for a species’ intelligence, although there are problems with this (it would mean that sheep are smarter than pigs, for one thing). Using intelligence as a stand-in for consciousness is also potentially problematic, but reasonable enough, I think.
What you’d really want to do, though, is calculate a cruelty footprint score for a given piece of meat — something that takes into account how the animal was raised and how it was slaughtered. Obviously this would be a difficult score to plausibly assess. Fortunately, underemployed philosophy majors are easy to come by.
It’d be easy enough to ignore the result as meaningless. But at the very least I think an organization like PETA would be smart to try it, if they haven’t already. People go nuts for carbon offset scores; this would be a great PR tactic.
Of course, this brand of moral calculation inescapably leads to proposals like this one.