by Joe Miller
As I write this, the U.S. Senate is debating the latest farm bill.
The bill does a lot of important stuff, like funding nutrition assistance, supporting farms and farming and funding rural economic development. Most years, it passes with broad support from both Republicans and Democrats.
That popularity is why Iowa hog farmers got Representative Ashley Hinson to embed the Save Our Bacon Act into the bill.
The name sounds innocent. The reality is more sinister.
An estimated 98% of the pork produced for sale in the United States is produced in what are euphemistically called “concentrated animal feeding operations,” but which are more commonly known as factory farms.
Sows spend the 16 weeks of their pregnancies confined to farrowing crates that measure 7 feet by 2 feet. That’s too little space for them to move or even lie down.
Once they give birth, they are confined to an even smaller crate, one that is too small for them to turn around and see their young.
These practices didn’t emerge by accident. Farmers calculated that preventing pigs from moving means that the animals burn fewer calories and therefore require less feed.
In 2018, voters in California passed a law requiring that any pork sold in the state must come from farms that allow breeding pigs at least 24 square feet of space. That’s basically enough room for a pig to stand or lie down and to turn around.
The pork industry fought the law all the way to the Supreme Court. They lost.
Now they’ve run to Congress, where they are trying to sneak the law into effect. And I do mean sneak. A majority of House representatives wanted to remove the Save Our Bacon Act language from the House’s version of the farm bill.
The Republican leadership would not allow them to do so.
It is almost certain that the Senate will remove the provision. Still, the pork industry has attempted to push this legislation through every year. They keep getting closer.
I don’t think it takes much moral imagination to understand that confining a pig to a space too small to turn around is wrong.
We can unpack this particular intuition a little more, though.
Imagine that you come across a machine that is slowly crushing a dog to death. You can stop the machine by pressing a button—though the button will also deliver a mild, unpleasant electric shock to whomever presses it.
Supposing that you are a normal, healthy adult (that is, you don’t have a pacemaker or a medical condition that makes small shocks risky), should you press the button?
It seems pretty obvious that you should press the button. The shock is mildly unpleasant, but not dangerous to a healthy adult. It’s an acceptable tradeoff to saving a dog from immense suffering and death.
We can derive a simple moral principle from this thought experiment: If I can prevent suffering without taking on comparable harm myself, then I ought to do it.
That moral principle is the basic intuition behind a moral theory called utilitarianism. A philosopher named Peter Singer is probably the most famous living advocate for the view.
Singer famously gives away something like 33% of his income every year, on the grounds that, for example, spending about $3,000 on mosquito netting will save a human life, and giving up $3,000 is a lower harm than dying from malaria.
Singer is also a vocal advocate for vegetarianism. Here his arguments are similar: Killing animals causes them pain and I can live a perfectly healthy life eating plant-based proteins, so therefore I should avoid eating animals.
My first year teaching at West Point, I was in charge of our speaker series. It was a lot of work (which is why the job was dumped on the new guy). I had to contact people, organize dates, schedule rooms for lectures and plan a dinner.
Highland Falls, New York, (the town right beside West Point) was not exactly a culinary hotbed. The best restaurant in town was a steakhouse. I ate there pretty regularly.
I realized, though, that I probably shouldn’t take the world’s most famous vegetarian to a steakhouse for dinner.
I also realized that, as someone who is sympathetic to Singer’s moral theory, I was going to need some sort of justification for eating meat in front of him.
Readers, I could not come up with one.
It was pretty distressing. I liked eating meat. In my mind, dinner had always just meant meat, potatoes and two vegetables.
We ended up taking Singer to a kind of mediocre Mexican restaurant. I ordered a vegetarian meal. I’d like to say that I never looked back, but the truth is that while I haven’t eaten red meat since then, it took a couple more years to give up poultry and a couple of years after that to give up fish and seafood.
I’ve no moral objection to hunting or to humanely raised and killed animals (aka, the type of meat raised by farmers here in Pocahontas County).
But factory farming is objectively a horrible set of practices that inflict immense amounts of pain on animals for the sake of shaving a few cents off the price of ham. I don’t have the energy (or, frankly) the discipline to ensure that I eat only humanely raised meat, so I abstain from meat entirely rather than inadvertently support the practice.
I don’t expect that anyone reading this column is likely to convert to vegetarianism.
I do think we can probably all agree that confining pigs to 24 square feet of space is already pretty bad and that actively attempting to inflict even more pain on pigs by cutting that space back to just 14 square feet is fairly monstrous.
As it happens, there are no factory pig farms in West Virginia. It’s pretty reasonable to ask our representatives and senators to oppose inflicting unnecessary pain on pigs in order to benefit a handful of corporate farms in Iowa and North Carolina
joe.miller@fountaindigitalconsulting.com
