On pig gas chambers and "humane" farming

Contra Charles Amos on eating pork from the UK store Waitrose

I recently read a deeply researched and provocative post from a good writer and self-described “deontological individualist thinker”, Charles Amos. In it, he lays out his ethical framework for deciding what animals he eats. He concludes that he will avoid chicken and most other intensively factory farmed products, but that it’s fine to eat humanely raised pigs and sheep.

He reaches this conclusion in an interesting way. It’s similar to the logic of the larder, but with a twist. Amos says we should analyze whether a farmed animal has a life worth living by assessing how much pain they would suffer as a hypothetical wild animal in comparison to the pain they suffer as a farmed animal. If they feel less pain on a farm, it’s morally permissible to raise and eat them. He singles out the UK grocery chain Waitrose as having such high animal welfare standards that it’s okay to eat most of the free range meat they sell.

Amos says he is “open to being swayed further to the vegan side of things.” This is my attempt to do that, focusing just on the pigs and Waitrose aspects of his post.

How bad is life in the wild?

Amos paints a pretty grim picture of the life of a wild pig. He notes that wild piglets have a high death rate, north of 60%. Many of them die of starvation, which he rightly presumes must be pretty miserable.

He uses the high rate of starving piglets in conjunction with pain estimates from The Welfare Footprint project to conclude that wild pigs feel much higher levels of pain over the course of their lives than do farmed pigs. Here are his final ratios of pain experienced in the wild vs. living on a farm and being killed by CO2 gas:

Annoying pain: 4500 : 1

Hurtful pain: 63,000 : 13

Disabling Pain: 3600 : 1

That makes sense, but does not move me as deeply as it does Amos. There’s more to life than simply avoiding pain. Most humans would choose quite bit of suffering to maintain their unfettered freedom.

ChatGPT estimates that hundreds of thousands of once captive pigs have escaped over the years. Very few return to the farm. Sure, some of the escapees don’t make it. But some of them form feral populations. These populations are not just stable, but thriving. There are now large amounts of wild pigs in the upper midwest and the south, to the point they are considered a nuisance. They basically cannot be stopped from multiplying, despite traps, poison, and the big business of paid hunting trips.

We can’t ask the pigs if they prefer dodging bullets to dodging the farm hands that push them into gas chambers. It just seems that when given the opportunity to escape the farm, they bolt. That should count for something. (A counterargument would be that domesticated animals who have seemingly cushy lives also choose to run away all the time. I’m not quite sure how to think about that. Though I have written about how the life of many domesticated pets might not be as good as most people think.)

Amos also focuses on the suffering piece while ignoring the potential joy that could come along with living the life you were put on this earth to live. I wonder if a big group of wild hogs, with few natural predators, rooting around in the woods somewhere, aren’t feeling pretty dang good most of the time. I don’t have a way of determining whether all that good qualia they feel over the years makes up for having a big chunk of their offspring die a horrible death. I just don’t find it compelling to reduce the goodness and badness of a pigs’s life down to a simple calculation which attempts to estimate how much they suffer as they die.

It’s also worth noting that a wild pig can live almost 30 years while pigs on even the most humane farms are killed at 6 months of age. Those might be 6 glorious months. But 100% of the non-breeder pigs that are raised on even the most humane farms are suffocated to death before they do one revolution around the sun, while some feral pigs live long (I hope at least somewhat) happy lives before meeting their end. I think that matters, though I can’t quantify it in the same way Amos quantifies suffering.

How good is the life of a Waitrose pig?

As far as farmed pigs go, Waitrose pigs do live a great life. Here’s what Google Gemini produced when I asked about Waitrose’s animal welfare standards

I grant that all that is WAY better than what goes on at a typical factory farm. So, big kudos to Waitrose. But the bar for pig welfare is on the freaking floor.

From what I can tell, the pigs are still artificially inseminated in order to make them reproduce. Also, this whole business where they say they only perform tail docking or teeth clipping “when recommended by a vet” leaves a lot of room for a shady vet to do shady vet things. Animal advocate Matthew Scully has visited hog farms in North Carolina where the vet’s sole job was keeping the pigs barely alive so they can reproduce. He writes about how, “Everywhere you see tumors, ulcers, cysts, lesions, torn ears — these afflictions never examined by a vet.”

Amos acknowledges that not all Waitrose pigs are free range. He only eats the free range ones. I am just much more skeptical than Amos about the good intentions of Waitrose, even when it comes to their free range pigs. I see their glossy youtube videos talking about how well they treat their animals, and my spidey sense tingles. I was not surprised to learn that in 2010 they had an advertisement banned for misleading consumers about how their pigs were raised. Nor was I shocked to learn that Waitrose has sourced from some of the worst farms in France as recently as a few years ago. They of course feign ignorance when caught, and say they are “urgently investigating the matter.”

A pig that could have ended up on Waitrose shelves

There was a similar uproar in 2022 after undercover footage showed abhorrent practices on a pig farm known to supply top UK supermarkets. When reached for comment, Waitrose did not deny they used those pigs. They simply said that “animal welfare is key to our brand” before going on to say they are phasing out the use of all cages for sows by 2025.

“see that sunlight streaming in?! we care!”

Maybe I am too jaded, but I think it’s naive to believe any giant company is actually treating their farmed animals all that well. I do appreciate that Waitrose cares much more than most. Maybe their free range pigs really do live an idyllic life. But I wonder if the farmers left the gate open at night how many would still be there in the morning.

How good is the death of a Waitrose pig?

Now let’s circle back to the matter of how all those Waitrose pigs are slaughtered. Amos does not shy away from the fact that being killed via inhaling CO2 gas is a nasty business. In fact, he says that when he first learned about this practice he stopped eating pork altogether. He spends an entire paragraph talking about how terrible it is. He notes how a group called “The Humane Slaughter Association” deemed death by CO2 gas inhumane. He links to horrific footage of the gassing and talks about how this treatment causes “screaming and thrashing around trying to escape - for up to one minute.”

Then he looked into it further and decided, as discussed above, that the pain and suffering of being suffocated to death causes less pain than what a pig is expected to experience in the wild. Bacon went back on the menu.

I can’t refute his numbers. All I can do is suggest some ways he might be playing down the harmful nature of killing pigs via CO2 gas. (10 million pigs per year are killed this way in the UK alone.)

He cites research by Temple Grandin which says that only between .6% to 46% of pigs try to “violently escape” the gas chambers, “with most abattoirs having 20% of their pigs trying it.” I don’t recommend this for the feint of heart, but I implore someone to find me a video of a pig gas chamber that doesn’t show every single pig fighting for their life.

source

I watched way too many pig gassing videos over the course of writing this, and they are all as terrible as you’d think. The pigs scream and scramble on top of each other and very much look like they want to escape. Of course, maybe those are the only ones that make it online. Maybe there is CCTV footage out there of pigs who serenely accept their suffocation. Or maybe the industry has some stringent definition of what counts as a “violent” escape attempt vs regular escape attempt. But at that point we are just playing around with semantics. In the end, I guess I just don’t trust the gas chamber operators to be truthful about the discomfort of their victims. And don’t get me started on Temple Grandin, she who works hand in hand with factory farmers but refuses to give humane slaughter advice to the hardworking folks at Elwood Dog Meat.

Even if the pigs weren’t thrashing about in extreme agony and trying to flee, wouldn’t that just prove they were somehow smart enough to realize that resistance was futile, and thus they wanted to die with dignity? That would make the whole situation even more depressing.

The process of getting the pigs to the slaughterhouse is also a horror show. Amos says that “Waitrose pigs spend an average of three hours going to the abattoir” and leaves it at that. Animal advocates who have tracked pigs as they make their way from the farm to Waitrose’s shelves show that this trip is far from an easy, 3 hour joy ride.

From the moment the pigs arrived until they were gassed, they experienced nothing but terror. Pigs were transported for as long as five hours without food and water. As they arrived and were unloaded, they were shouted at and hit with paddles. Others were hit in the face, forcing them to leave the trailer. As they were rallied into pens, they ran desperately to water; they had overheated in the crowded trailers on their way to the abattoir.

Oh, and that particular account comes from the filming of a UK abattoir during it’s annual audit. This is how things are when everyone is on their best behavior.

Pigs arrived dead inside the transporters, having died on their way to the abattoir. They were dragged out and their companions forced to walk by their dead bodies. In 2023, almost 800 pigs died on the way to slaughterhouses. Even within C&K Meats, the stress became too much for some pigs. One died of a heart attack as she was moved between lairages; a worker mocked her and took amusement from her cruel fate.

All this, for pork?

I ate a tremendous amount of meat before going vegan about 5 years ago. Pork is pretty meh, as far as meat goes. I enjoyed a pulled pork sandwich, to be sure. I went through a bacon phase in my paleo and keto days. But overall, I remember it as a pretty bland, forgettable meat. I can’t imagine why someone as thoughtful and caring as Amos would write thousands of words, and do so much math, for pork! If this was all because he was a foodie who absolutely needed to eat the most premium steaks, it would make more sense to me.

I would rather be part of a society that doesn’t feel the need to raise sentient and intelligent beings just to murder them when they are still babies so we can eat their flesh. If we had to do that to survive, of course we should. But we so clearly don’t, and pork is not tasty enough nor healthy enough to justify the brutality that brings it about.

I’ve been pretty critical of Amos, so I want to reiterate that I thought his article was really awesome and if more people thought like him the world would be a much better, kinder place. And I didn’t even touch on his thoughts on sheep and cows, I still have a lot to mull over there. Do go read his whole post!

I also appreciate that he calls out animal sanctuaries as doing great work, and directs some of his donations that way. Maybe my feelings toward pigs are too colored by the sentimentality of volunteering at a sanctuary and getting to know those sweet chonks as individuals who just want to hang out and get scratchies.

Though I guess if I had to eat one, I would pick the girl who would aggressively hump my leg, almost snapping my ankle, while I tried to set out her food bowl.

She looks innocent here, but she can throw that heft around