How Does the Animal Cause Fare on the Priority Criteria?

Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume VIII, p. 19 of the PDF edition · English translation

2.1. Introduction

Animal advocates are often criticized for fighting for animals while there are still humans in need of help. However, if our goal is a world with less suffering, it makes no sense to neglect nonhuman animals or to give them less importance. If we do so, we will be neglecting, or giving less importance to, most of the suffering that occurs in the world. In that case, we will not be efficient at reducing suffering: on the contrary, we will probably increase it even further. Thus, it is not animal advocates who need to explain themselves. Those who need to explain themselves are those who focus on humans, since most of the suffering in the world is endured by other animals.

Because of the predominance of speciesism, most people, when they choose to support a cause, opt for human causes. However, if we apply in an unbiased way the widely used criteria for determining a cause’s degree of priority, which we saw in Chapter 1, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that the animal cause should be one of our top priorities. To illustrate this point, below we will see how the situation of nonhuman animals fares against these criteria.

2.2. Seriousness of each victim’s situation

The vast majority of nonhuman animals are born either into the system of exploitation or in the wild. In both cases, the norm is for them to have lives full of suffering (in many cases without any positive experience) and a very premature death, usually an extremely painful one. Of course, there are humans who have lives full of suffering, die prematurely, and have very painful deaths. However, humans do not usually endure a fate equivalent to that of animals on factory farms or in the wild.

2.3. Number of victims

Counting the deaths of vertebrates and invertebrates, terrestrial and aquatic, animal exploitation kills between 34 and 54 trillion animals annually⁹. Important: this number refers only to the deaths of animals resulting from their exploitation. It does not include deaths that are an indirect result of human activities or of natural processes.

For comparison, consider that human deaths (adding up all causes, including natural causes) are estimated at 55.3 million annually¹⁰. The difference between these numbers is so gigantic that it is hard to visualize. For the sake of argument, let us set aside the number of invertebrates killed and count only the number of fish, birds, and mammals killed annually: “only” about 2 trillion¹¹. This amount alone means that in animal exploitation around 5.5 billion vertebrates are killed per day (compare this number with the world’s human population, which is 8 billion). If we include invertebrates, somewhere between 93 billion and 147 billion animals are killed per day.

In addition, literally astronomical numbers of animals living outside direct human control (such as those who live in the wild) have lives full of suffering and die prematurely because of natural processes themselves. There are no precise statistics on this number of victims, but according to some estimates, at any given moment there are between 1 and 10 quintillion sentient animals in the wild¹². The difference in size compared to the human population is so astronomical that, to visualize it clearly, we have to resort to analogies. For example, if we draw an analogy with the span of a year, the human population would be, at most, 0.25 seconds of the year. All the rest (364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 57.5 seconds) would be the animals in the wild. It is like taking a sheet of A4 paper and making a dot with a ballpoint pen (the dot would be the human population; all the white space would be the population of animals in the wild).

2.4. There are so many victims that even speciesists would have to prioritize the animal cause

These numbers are so gigantic that, even if much greater weight were given to the good of humans, curiously, we would still have to conclude in favor of prioritizing trying to change the situation of nonhuman animals. Let us see why:

Suppose that suffering of the same magnitude mattered 10 times more if the victims were human. This would mean that, for us to invest the same amount of resources in helping nonhuman animals as we would invest in helping humans, there would have to be 10 times more nonhuman animals suffering the equivalent (or else, equal numbers of humans and nonhumans suffering, but with the nonhumans suffering 10 times more).

Now suppose that the annual number of nonhuman animals in a situation of extreme suffering were much smaller than it really is: imagine it were “only” one trillion individuals. Imagine that the annual number of humans enduring suffering equivalent to that endured by nonhuman animals were much greater than it really is: suppose it were the entire human population (that is, 8 billion individuals). If human suffering mattered 10 times more than the equivalent suffering of nonhuman animals, then the suffering of the 8 billion humans would be multiplied by 10 (that is, it would be equivalent to the suffering of 80 billion nonhuman animals). The suffering of each nonhuman animal, in turn, would be multiplied by 1 (that is, 1 trillion). Even making all these concessions, in this case we would still have to invest 12.5 times more resources to help nonhuman animals.

If we take the real numbers into account, the ratio is astronomically greater. As we have seen, the world’s human population is around 8 billion and that of sentient nonhuman animals is 1 to 10 quintillion¹³. That is, for every human there are somewhere between 126 million and 1.26 billion sentient nonhuman animals. To deny the priority of improving the situation of nonhuman animals, one would have to postulate that human suffering matters at least 126 million times more than the equivalent suffering of nonhuman animals. From an unbiased point of view, there is no justification even for giving slightly greater weight to the good of humans, much less for a discrepancy of this magnitude.

2.5. How many people already care about this issue?

The number of people devoting themselves to each cause and the resources raised are not proportional to the number of victims each cause deals with.

For example, of all donations made in the United States, 97% of the amount raised goes to human causes¹⁴. The other 3% goes to environmentalist and animal advocacy causes (and it is not known how much of this 3% goes to the animal cause; it is known only that the popularity of the animal cause is much lower than that of the environmentalist cause).

Even among people who usually donate to the animal cause, on average more than two-thirds of their donations go to human causes¹⁵. Moreover, part of the resources allocated to human causes is used to buy products of animal exploitation, which contributes to increasing the number of animals who suffer and die.

Thus, it is not just that other animals receive less help than humans do: in the vast majority of cases they receive no help at all and, moreover, they are used as if they were things, which normally entails their deaths and a life of extreme suffering.

As we saw in Chapter 1, section 1.7, the more neglected a cause is, the more difference each additional person working on it makes. Thus, if our goal is to make the world less bad efficiently, the fact that the animal cause is widely neglected (despite the enormous number of victims and the seriousness of the victims’ situation) is an additional reason for us to prioritize it.

2.6. Tractability and the amount of benefit that could be produced

One might think that there is nothing that can be done to change the situation of nonhuman animals and that, therefore, the fact that they represent an astronomical number of victims says nothing in terms of priority, if there is nothing we can do to help the

majority of them. But there are many things we can do for nonhuman animals, and our decisions affect a large number of them. Below are some examples.

(1) With regard to exploited animals, it is possible to choose not to consume them, thus reducing the demand for animal products and the number of animals who would be born into a life of suffering.

(2) Still with regard to exploited animals, it is possible to invest in the development, cost reduction, and deployment of substitutes for the use of animals, such as cultivated meat.

(3) It is also possible to call for changes in public attitudes and in legislation with the goal of recognizing animals as sentient beings who should be protected by rights¹⁶.

(4) There are several ways in which wild animals are already being helped, and much more could be researched in this direction. Studies of this kind could contribute a great deal to increasing efficiency in the use of resources to reduce suffering. For example, studies on the impact of each type of land on the birth rates in the species of those animals who tend to have predominantly negative lives or positive ones could be conducted. This could prevent literally astronomical numbers of animals from being born only to experience extreme suffering.

2.7. Conclusion

If the above analysis is correct, the animal cause meets all the priority criteria very well. The predominance of a speciesist mentality is what keeps it from receiving the importance it deserves.

However, two questions remain: (1) The animal cause deals with several problems. Which ones should be prioritized? (2) Are there other topics that meet the priority criteria just as well (or perhaps even better), which even animal advocates usually fail to notice? We will discuss these questions in the next chapter.