Homo Sapiens started out as nomadic hunter-gatherers before colonizing Europe, Asia, and later the Americas starting about 40,000 years ago. It is believed that humans were opportunistic scavengers in early days, surviving off a diet comprising various grasses, tubers, fruits, seeds, nuts, and the occasional small animal. Humans had the aptitude to kill small animals for food, but were still subordinate to apex predators in the food chain. Due to the inability to outcompete these larger animals, humans resorted to scavenging.
During the Younger Dryas (a return to glacial conditions in the Northern Hemisphere), humans were put under an enormous amount of pressure to survive in the cold conditions. This resulted in the development of advanced new hunting techniques for the time. It was not until after Younger Dryas that humans living in Mesopotamia (the area embodied by the Tigris-Euphrates river system including modern-day Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria) discovered they could grow plants from seeds and domesticate animals. This marked the beginning of the Neolithic period (10,000-4,500BC).
This period is also known as the first agricultural revolution, a time during which humans began using animals for their hides, flesh, secretions, and labor. It wasn’t long before humans discovered selective breeding, the process by which animal and plant breeding can be used to selectively develop particular phenotypic traits. Humans realized they could accelerate evolution to their benefit and started making animals bigger, stronger, and more suited to human needs. Unfortunately, this reduced variation and genetic diversity meaning certain species would not have time to evolve in the case of a deadly disease, causing them to go extinct. [1]
The domestication of animals for food and labor was a significant turning point in human development because it meant hunting and gathering were no longer necessary and humans could start to live less nomadic lifestyles. Suddenly, birth rates started to increase as a result of food security. This foreshadowed the 8 billion people that inhabit earth today, which is no surprise considering the first permanent villages are reported to have been built near fields of domesticated animals and crops.
After the first agricultural revolution, meat consumption was still very much a luxury supplement, as it was not until the early 20th century that animal products became a primary source of nutrition. The resulting negative impact on human health [2] and the environment [3] is widely documented.
Factory farming was first implemented by pig farmers in the 1960s to maximize production efficiency and increase profits. Today, and estimated 99% of US farmed animals are raised in factory farms. [4] Over time, animal domestication has morphed into factory farming due to an increase in demand for animal products by a growing population. Fast forward to today, and over 70 billion land animals are slaughtered for human consumption each year. Humans have always domesticated animals, just not on this scale. Consequently, a common argument for exploiting animals is that we have been doing it for thousands of years and therefore it must be morally sound. However, we cannot fall victim to the dangerous fallacy that the longevity of an action makes it moral. By this logic, murder and rape are acceptable because humans have been killing and raping one another for thousands of years.
There is no denying that we have been consuming animal products for thousands of years, but a clear distinction must be made between the justification for doing so then versus now. When humans lived in caves and hunted rabbits with pointed sticks, slaughtering animals for food was necessary to supplement their gathering of plant-based nutrients: if they didn’t kill some animals, they probably wouldn’t survive. However, this couldn’t be further from the situation we find ourselves in today. For example, whenever we go to the supermarket, we are confronted with a choice: to pay for sentient beings to be slaughtered on our behalf, or opt for alternatives. Due to the ubiquity of plant foods and plant-based alternatives and wide consensus on the superior benefits of plant-based diets, it is clear that animal products are a luxury, not a necessity. This makes it almost impossible to justify eating them considering how damaging animal agriculture is for our health, ethically, and for the environment.
When people think of animal products, many do not associate them with the death of an animal or, shockingly, even an animal itself. This shows how disconnected we have become from the process by which we obtain our food. Industrial farming has shifted the window of discourse over time which has increased the psychological distance between humans and our food sources.
Many humans would be appalled at the abhorrent conditions domesticated animals are farmed in today, but the fact that these practices occur behind a wall out of sight mean they never have to experience that feeling of discomfort, and as a result never question whether what we do to animals is wrong.
“Factory farming, of course, does not cause all the world’s problems, but it is remarkable just how many of them intersect there” -Jonathan Safran Foer
[1] *Wildlife Loss through Domestication: The Case of Endangered Key Deer (jstor.org)
[2] https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/whats-the-beef-with-red-meat
[3] https://www.futurelearn.com/info/blog/eating-meat-bad-for-environment
[4] https://www.livekindly.co/99-animal-products-factory-farms/
Shocking! Great post, looking forward to future ones!
The growth of factory farming is truly worrying as more and more of the world enter the middle classes and demand more meat. This is often cited as the primary problem with meat in the future. But this is just a misdirection. In fact, developed countries still consume the most meat by a long shot and will continue to exceed developing nations in meat consumption for years to come.
Reducing consumption in developed countries would go a long way to reversing the growth of factory farming as as well as setting an example for the rest of the world that prosperity doesn't equal more meat.