Oscar Wilde wrote that “a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” The price of a pound of meat is a few dollars. The value of the animal’s life? Highly subjective, widely ranging from near zero for a chicken to priceless for a dog. Because most people ignore the value of animal life and instead make purchasing decisions based on the sticker price, it is imperative that the sticker price accurately reflects the many hidden financial and moral costs of animal agriculture.
Justice – the will to give our due to God and neighbor – would require Catholics to account for the uncompensated harms of animal agriculture (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church #1807). Our continued consumption of animal-based products at artificially low prices unjustly foists the consequences of the harms of animal agriculture onto other humans and animals. This is utterly unfair because neither have they consented nor are they compensated for bearing the costs. For instance, the people affected by polluted air from factory farms are not compensated by the producers or consumers of animal products. Similarly, animals are also uncompensated victims of horrendous living conditions and painful deaths arising from cost efficient but cruel industry practices. A Catholic consumer desiring to live justly and harmoniously with God’s creatures – people and animals – would need to learn about these uncompensated harms of animal agriculture, and pay her dues accordingly.
Most people do not intend the externalized harms of animal agriculture. All they desire is a cost-efficient way to feed their families with good cuts of meat. Knowing this, meat producers assiduously keep the prices low while cleverly hiding the harms of animal agriculture. As a result, the current prices of animal products do not reflect the true cost of producing them.
The list of environmental harms is long. Animal-based food products have a carbon footprint that is two times to fifty times the footprint of plant-based foods for equivalent amounts of protein and calories. For the same amount of protein, the water footprint of beef is about eight times, and that of chicken is about four times the footprint of tofu. Water overuse has resulted in dried rivers and depleted aquifers. The runoff from the fertilizer and pesticide used to grow crops for animals, and untreated manure and slaughterhouse waste makes water bodies toxic for human and animal use. Besides, animal agriculture has an enormous land footprint. Vast tracts of the Amazon rainforests have been cleared for cattle ranching. The grassland ecosystem of the Great Plains in the US, which used to be a vast prairie, has been wiped out to make way for corn and soybean fields that supply animal feed. Free range animal farming also damages the natural flora through overgrazing and soil erosion. Finally, animal agriculture is the leading driver of species extinction through its connection with deforestation, habitat loss, water pollution, and climate change. None of these harms are accounted for in the price of animal products.
Animal-based foods also increase the healthcare costs of society because its consumers suffer from heart disease, stroke and diabetes at higher rates than those on plant-based diets. We all pay for these costs through taxpayer subsidies in the healthcare system. Furthermore, slaughterhouse workers and residents of communities near factory farms suffer from diseases such as chronic bronchitis and asthma due to exposure to toxic air. Workers also suffer from psychological injuries due to the gory nature of their work. PTSD, along with its consequent higher rates of domestic violence, has been noted in workers. Additionally, factory farm and slaughterhouse workers routinely suffer from grievous physical injuries through their inherently dangerous jobs.
Other healthcare costs include increased antibiotics resistance in human medicine due to overuse in farms. As we lose more weapons against harmful bacteria, we pay the price through higher rates of infectious diseases and even deaths. Likewise, nearly every human pandemic and its associated human toll and economic costs has originated when a disease jumped from animals to humans in an animal-based food production setting.
Most importantly, however, the ultimate externality of animal-based products is borne by the animals themselves. Besides experiencing miserable living conditions, animals also pay for our meat products with their lives. To state the obvious, animals must be killed to produce meat.
What is the price of animal life? This is not the cost of raising the animal, but the price of life itself. Estimating the value of animal life is, unsurprisingly, not a straightforward task. As a starting point, we could note our current estimates of the “price” of human life at about $10 million. Usually, it is couched in terms of the cost to save one human life. Considering that we spend thousands of dollars on life-saving treatments for pets, the worth of animal life should also run into thousands of dollars.
The other consideration for the price of life is the estimated remaining life span of the individual. For instance, when authorities had to make decisions about allocating scarce ventilators to seriously ill patients during the COVID-19 pandemic, younger patients who probably had more years of life remaining were allocated the scarce resource. With this reasoning, farm animals would have a much higher value than pet animals because pets usually incur expensive medical costs towards the end of their lives when little of their natural life span remains. On the other hand, most farm animals are slaughtered when they are at an age of less than 20% of their natural life spans. As a comparison, 20% of human life span equates to about sixteen years of age. Wouldn’t we be willing to spend generously to save the lives of children?
We could also consider the cost of more humane conditions for animals. Products from free-range animals are significantly costlier than factory farm products because kindness is more expensive than cruelty. Free-range animal products have higher expenses associated with more land for the animals, higher energy consumption of larger barns, and slow growing breeds that require more food and labor.
If we incorporated the prices of these harms into the cost of animal-products, we would see a significant rise in prices of animal products and resultant changes in people’s meal plans. That would be a good thing. Dietary habits are more likely to change due to price increases than in response to moral discourses on animal welfare and environmental issues. For instance, sound arguments against cruel battery cages in egg production did not deter consumers from having sunny-side up eggs for breakfast everyday. The declarative argument was: “I need eggs for protein every morning!” But when egg prices soared due to bird flu, consumers were suddenly willing to consider alternatives such as beans, lentils, and tofu. Eggs were not a “necessity” anymore. Unfortunately, when egg prices dropped, and though the cruel battery cages remained, the motivation to abstain from eggs quickly dissipated. Eggs were back on the daily menu.
Expensive animal products, reflecting their true cost of production, will provide economic incentives – which is probably the only incentive that works – for consumers to abstain from or reduce their consumption of animal-based foods. Even though such a motivation to shun unjust products would be economic in nature, the morally upright outcome would still be commendable from a spiritual standpoint. Good is to be done, and evil is to be avoided – Saint Thomas Aquinas’ basic injunction for a moral life – will be satisfied.
Justice in the Catholic tradition behooves us to account for the harms that animal products cause to others, and to modify our behavior towards greater justice. Since it is quite impossible to compensate all the victims of these harms, Catholics ought to abstain from continued participation in the cruel and economically unjust – and unnecessary – system of animal agriculture. Until the day dawns when we have environmentally clean, human worker safe, and animal cruelty free lab-grown meat, animal products ought to be off a Catholic’s dinner plate. In the meantime, a just Catholic may happily subsist on a more economically fair plant-based fare of beans, lentils, and vegetables.
Jesus commanded us to love our neighbor as ourselves (cf. Matthew 22:39). In light of the uncompensated harms of animal agriculture, one may say “use logic and reason to learn about the impacts of your animal-based foods such that you justly love all your neighbors as yourself.”