The Suffering of Livestock

A fire has ripped through a dairy farm in Dimmitt, Texas, leaving 18,000 animals dead.

Death in fire seems like an exceptionally appalling way to go — involving a combination of pain and fear that the comfortable imagination can only dimly grasp. It would be preposterous to think that cows are unintelligent enough to be immune to that fear and pain. Each of those 18,000 animals — if they were not rapidly made unconscious by the smoke — must have suffered tremendously.

Reading a USA Today report, I couldn’t help feeling a bit like I was going mad. The article dwells on the “devastating” financial losses that the farm will endure. It goes into detail about the impracticalities of disposing of 18,000 carcasses. What it doesn’t mention is the suffering of the animals. A triviality?

It seems that events like this are not all that abnormal. More than 500,000 farm animals (mostly chickens) died in fires in the USA in 2022. A fire on an egg farm in Florida killed 250,000 chickens by itself. The CFO of the egg producer that operated that farm called it “a rough day”.

Nor is it just an American problem. 20,000 pigs died in a single fire in the Netherlands in 2017. 12,000 pigs died in a fire on a Canadian farm in 2018. 9000 pigs died in a fire on another Dutch farm just last week according to the English-language site Dutch News. (Dutch outlets seem to be reporting on the same event but the news never left the local media.)

Picture credit: Daniel Quiceno

I’ve never been the sort of person who conflates the death of animals with the death of humans. An animal who dies had no dreams, or the potential to have them, or any clear sense of what it means to be alive. (Yes, I’m aware this is applicable to some mentally disabled people, too, but I’ll embrace speciesism and say that the difference is “they’re human”.)

But animals certainly experience pain. They might not be able to conceptualise pain in the manner that a human can — but that ability is not what makes us dislike pain. If I smack my knee against the beam that sits next to my desk, as I often do, I don’t regret it because of my sense of what it means to be in pain — I regret it because of the bolt of pure agony that shoots up and down my leg. You can tell that other animals feel something similar just by standing on the tail of a dog or cat (I don’t recommend doing it as a test — I mean if you happen to do it accidentally).

I’m not convinced that death by fire necessarily feels much different to a cow or pig than it does to a human. The latter circumstance is more tragic, again, because of what the human had to live for, but unless someone has time to think about what they are experiencing the sensation — the maelstrom of furious pain and desperation — might be similar.

Maybe not. I’m not a cow or a pig and I’ve never been in a fire. That’s just speculation. But the reason I’m saying this is that the disaster is not on the front page of CNN (though “Prince Harry will attend King’s coronation without Megan” is), or the Washington Post (though “What’s the future of wild sex?” is), or the New York Times (though “Is tofu good for you?” is). Thousands of agonising animal deaths don’t deserve a mention. This seems morally atrocious.

We can’t sneer at the Yanks for that. If the Dimmitt fire hadn’t passed across my timeline, thanks to one of my conspiratorially-minded mutuals speculating about mysterious industrial and agricultural accidents in the US, I’d never have bothered to Google around and locate the events reported in the Netherlands last week. British media thought that it was worth reporting that local authorities in Amsterdam have banned the smoking of cannabis on the street in the red light district but didn’t peer into the vortex of suffering that is reported to have sucked in thousands of playful, emotional and sensitive pigs.

I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad here. (How could I? I’m not a vegan.) I’m sure there are changes we could make without a single person giving up animal products. As a non-expert I’m not sure of what they are, but I assume it would have something to do with installing sprinklers and exits, and/or reducing capacity.

But perhaps we tend not to think about events like this because we don’t want to feel bad. We don’t want to think about where the milk in our latte came from. Meat-eaters, in general, definitely don’t want to think about the pig whose carcass ended up becoming their pork chop. We don’t want to think about supply because that could ask us difficult questions about our relationship to demand.

But we shouldn’t turn away from these events. I’m not going to claim to be wise enough to tell you what conclusions we should take from looking. But we should look.