Animal Domestication and Suffering

Key Insight

Beyond crops, humans also made a 'Faustian bargain' with animals like sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens. Domestication began with selective hunting, preserving fertile females and young, then actively defending herds. This progressed to corralling and ultimately selective breeding, favoring submissive, fatter animals over aggressive or overly curious ones. Examples include slaughtering aggressive rams or keeping only appealing lambs to procreate.

These domesticated animals provided food (meat, milk, eggs), raw materials (skins, wool), and muscle power for tasks like transportation and ploughing. From a narrow evolutionary perspective, measuring success by DNA copies, the Agricultural Revolution was a 'wonderful boon' for these species; their populations exploded from a few million confined to Afro-Asian niches 10,000 years ago to billions globally today. Domesticated chicken is the most widespread fowl, and cattle, pigs, and sheep are the second, third, and fourth most widespread large mammals.

However, this evolutionary success came at the cost of immense individual suffering. Domesticated animals often live short, brutal lives, slaughtered at weeks or months old for economic efficiency, despite natural lifespans of 7-12 years for wild chickens and 20-25 years for cattle. Practices like castration, locking in pens, training with whips, and mutilations (e.g., slicing pigs' noses in New Guinea, gouging out pigs' eyes) were common. Dairy cows are kept almost constantly pregnant, with calves separated at birth and females reared for more milk production, illustrating a stark discrepancy between species' evolutionary proliferation and individuals' miserable experience.