Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrock have been talking about animal welfare. Cowen also has a new essay on the subject up.
Now, I am of the firm opinion that animal welfare is completely unimportant as far as animals raised for food/clothing are concerned. It doesn’t much matter to me how farm animals are treated. Call me callous, call me unfeeling, but I just don’t see how it’s all that important. Rights, to my mind, are sort of an all or nothing deal: either my dog can vote, or it’s okay to eat meat. I do think that once you’ve made a decision to keep an animal as a pet you have an obligation to be nice to it, but if your goal in the end is just to kill the thing and eat its flesh anyway what’s it matter if it lives in a box for a year?
That said, I really like the idea of in-vitro meat that Tabarrock mentions. He mentions in passing that such a development could be pretty economical, and I think he’s exactly right. If it becomes possible at some point in the not-too-distant future to grow meat in vats instead of raising animals, and it’s no more expensive to do so than it is to raise animals, there’s simply no reason to bother with farming. I suspect that, for a few generations at least, farm-raised meat will be a luxury item for folks who insist there’s a difference, but that everyone else will gladly move to in-vitro meat.
This will substantially cut down the land area used for raising animals, and open all of that land up to more productive uses. If dairy products could be manufactured the same way, that would free up even more. I can see a few significant positive effects, some more probable than others:
1) Land formerly used to grow animals could be put to use in any number of other ways. Think of a way land can be used, and imagine that a few million acres were suddenly available for sale and nobody wanted to use them for cattle as it just wasn’t profitable anymore.
2) Negative environmental externalities from animal grazing would be substantially reduced.
3) Croplands used to grow grains for animal feed could be converted to other uses.
4) With the elimination or significant reduction of animal farming any subsidies paid to those farmers could be eliminated or substantially reduced.
5) Elimination of meat-borne disease such as BSE, E. Coli, and salmonella. Most contamination by things like E. Coli happens during processing, and by eliminating the processing step the risk of contamination is reduced greatly.
6) A lot of other things I’m not thinking of, in all likelihood.
These things are probably a pretty long way off, especially as in-vitro meat currently runs someplace in the neighborhood of $5 millon a kilogram. I think, however, that it’s entirely possible to bring costs down to reasonable eventually. When? Who knows.
