Animal Slaughter

Suffering is not a human invention. It is a fact about nervous systems. The capacity to feel pain, fear, and loss is older than our species, and it does not require the ability to argue for itself.

We already accept that unnecessary suffering is wrong. We prosecute people for cruelty to dogs. The only reason the factory farm is exempt is that we do not look at it. A pig has the intelligence of a young child, a social life, and a nervous system that registers pain as surely as ours does. What we do to it — confining it where it cannot turn around, cutting without anaesthetic, killing it while it is still young and healthy — is done for one reason: the taste of a sandwich.

The strongest counterargument is that morality applies only to rational agents who can reciprocate. But that standard would also excuse cruelty to infants and to people with severe cognitive disabilities, and no one accepts that conclusion. If the capacity to suffer is what grounds the duty not to inflict suffering, then the duty reaches exactly as far as the capacity reaches, and stops only where the capacity stops.

The honest conclusion is not that farmers are monsters. It is that ordinary people are taking part in something they would condemn on sight if it happened to a dog in a driveway.

If suffering counts, it counts in a body that cannot plead its own case.