Dairy is Scary

“Less bad” doesn't mean “good.”

My favorite animals are fish, shrimp, and insects. (Does this make me a speciesist? I don’t know.) I have a hard time caring about mammals and charismatic megafauna because there are so few of them compared to fish and invertebrates, and the things people do to them are merely horrific rather than ghastly.

Brian Tomasik, one of the few people who’s more singularly obsessed with suffering than I am, doesn’t care much about mammals either. He estimates that there are “only” between 10¹¹ and 10¹² mammals on Earth, compared to 10¹⁵ fish and 10²⁰ arthropods. If you’re just counting farmed animals, there are about 6 billion mammals being held in captivity at any moment, compared to 26 billion birds, 94 billion insects, 105 billion fish, and 230 billion shrimp.

In general, populations of farmed animals are inversely proportional to their body size. That’s why PETA once tongue-in-cheek suggested that meat-eaters should feed on blue whale carcasses to reduce animal suffering:

As the Eat the Whales Web site points out, Americans consume more than 25 billion land and sea animals each year. If blue whales, which weigh in at an average of 84 tons, were the only meat source for Americans, only 500,000 a year would be needed.

The largest animals commonly used for food in the world today are cattle. Tomasik, who used to be vegan, consumes dairy because it’s “the least bad form of animal protein in the standard Western diet […] because a cow produces so much milk per day.” If you can get 30,000 kilos of milk by torturing one cow, that’s orders of magnitude less bad than getting a single kilo of flesh from a farmed fish that lives in a disease-ridden cesspool and gets slaughtered by suffocation for up to four hours before losing consciousness. Tomasik made this handy chart to estimate animal suffering per kilo by food product:

Source: Essays on Reducing Suffering.

You might be skeptical about some of Tomasik’s assumptions. Do fish really experience greater pain than beef cattle? Do chickens? What the hell is a “unit of suffering?” Why not rely on something objective like neuron count?

Contra Tomasik, you might think farming cattle is worse than farming fish or shrimp because cattle are more likely to be sentient and have higher highs and lower lows of subjective experience than smaller-bodied animals.

But as Richard Dawkins has pointed out, simpler organisms with fewer neurons may actually suffer more intensely because they’re less capable of learning from experiences and need stronger pain stimuli to understand what behaviors promote survival and reproduction.

Source: Richard Dawkins.

And the most systematic literature review of animal capabilities to date suggests that the difference in subjective experience between mammals, birds, fish, and some invertebrates is more like one or two orders of magnitude rather than three or four as the average person intuits.

When you plug these numbers into Tomasik’s chart, you don’t get wildly different results. Foods derived from slaughtering fish are the most intense in suffering, followed by birds and mammals. Farming shrimp, insects, and other invertebrates is presumably even worse than farming fish.

Source: Essays on Reducing Suffering.

But don’t get the wrong idea here. Every major category of animal product on the market today involves horrifying amounts of suffering. How do we know? Because they’re all worse than dairy, and the dairy industry is horrific.

The following are all standard practices on dairy farms certified as humane by the leading humane label certifiers in the United States:

• Dairy cows are forcibly impregnated. This is necessary for cows to begin producing milk in the first place. Like humans and other mammals, cows don’t produce milk unless they first become pregnant and give birth. Usually, they’re confined in a cage while a person inserts an arm into the cow’s rectum, locates the vagina, and manually deposits semen that was obtained by electrocuting a bull in the anus until he involuntarily ejaculates. This is done once a year starting at age two until a cow is rendered unproductive by excessive pregnancy and milking.

• Calves are separated from their mothers shortly after birth. Cows have a relatively long gestation period and have evolved to invest significant resources into raising their offspring. This makes the separation of calves from their mothers extraordinarily stressful. Although the weaning period naturally lasts up to ten months, humane certifiers only require calves to be kept with their mothers for five to six weeks, and 95% of calves in the United States are separated within two months.

• Female calves are disbudded. This involves pushing a hot iron into the calf’s skull to destroy horn-producing tissue. Afterward, the calf is moved to a feedlot where she’s raised to sexual maturity before being forcibly impregnated and continuing the cycle of milking and reproduction.

• Male calves are deliberately kept anemic and slaughtered within weeks after birth. Calves raised for veal are fed an intentionally low-iron all-liquid diet to produce the light meat desired by consumers. As a result, 70% to 93% of veal calves develop stomach ulcers, and many engage in repetitive stereotypic behaviors like tongue rolling and biting inanimate objects. Most are slaughtered at 16 to 18 weeks old.

• Most cows suffer debilitating injuries. Many cows are kept in cramped, concrete-floored enclosures. This causes sole ulcers and lameness in between 10% and 50% of cows. Many also develop mastitis, or inflammation of the mammary glands, due to bacterial infection from excessive milking. These injuries and others usually render dairy cows unproductive after three to four years of pregnancy and milking, at which point they’re sold to the meat industry and killed. The average dairy cow lives to between four and six years of age, even though their natural life expectancy is 20 years.

Remember, these are the things that happen systematically on humane-certified farms. If you make an effort to buy only grass-fed, free-range, high-welfare, super-duper happy milk with a big red barn and a toothy smiling cartoon cow on the jug, this is what you’re getting.

And here’s the kicker: This is the least suffering-intense major animal product on the market. Anything from a smaller-bodied animal is hundreds or even thousands of times worse.

If you’re going to consume animal products, you should drink cow’s milk—or better yet, whale milk. But you shouldn’t do that either. Dairy is still scary!

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