This is a reply to the article Nițoaia, P. (2024, July 12). Embracing Kindness. The Moral Argument for Veganism, which appeared here on Daily Philosophy. We recommend looking at the original article for context first:

Which animals, or group of animals, have the best lives? Certainly not those victims of factory style meat production. This whole business should be ended.

But think of the animals in the relative freedom of a humane farm, and then think of wild animals, and then companion animals or, as we used to say, pets. Best lives? I say it’s those in the first group. There are farms, and farmers – there are many where I live – geared to taking animal welfare seriously; these animals live in ample space, with other animals of their kind, they’re given appropriate food, shelter, health care. Their quality of life is generally high. The quantity of life is much less than it might be, of course, but they typically live longer, and much easier than wild animals. Watch almost any nature programme and you’ll be glad you’re not a wild animal. Companion animals live the longest lives, but they’re often too long, as their owners, for selfish reasons, strive to keep them alive even when their best days are gone. Their food is often inappropriate, and they’re too often left alone. Maybe it can be ok to be a pet, but you’d want to choose your owner.

What should we think about pain? I think it’s always bad, bad in itself, or intrinsically, even if it’s sometimes useful, or good instrumentally. And so of course, I think it’s always bad for animals, and that we should want animals – all animals – to have less pain, and a high quality of life. But I think also, and controversially – and I argued this in ‘Against Veganism’– that a sudden and painless death isn’t bad for animals. So I don’t think it’s bad for farm animals that they have relatively short lives, and are killed, painlessly, before their time. Petrică Nițoaia, in discussing my paper, unsurprisingly takes issue with this, claiming that even if I’m right to say that animals don’t have an express desire to live, still it can be, and very often is, in their interests to live, and so against their interests, and so bad for them, to die. Even if most animals, unlike us, lack self-consciousness they all, like us, have a strong survival instinct.

This doesn’t do it for me. Trees have a strong survival instinct, searching out water with their roots, fighting disease, growing protective tissue over wounds. We might say that death is bad for living things – premature death anyway – without thinking it’s bad, or a bad thing, that they die. We might think, …

Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)