Category Archives: animals

So You’re Not Ready To Go Vegetarian

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[Content warning: Moralizing about what food you should eat, descriptions of bad things happening to animals, eating bugs. Also, lots of people can’t go vegetarian or significantly alter their diet at all due to health, cost, time, sensory issues, strong preferences, lack of options, inability to pick your own diet, etc. Most of the ‘alternatives’ posed here take money, time, or majorly changing your habits. If reading this post is likely to make you feel guilty or bad in an unproductive way, feel free to skip it.]

This is a rather utilitarian list of approaches to improving the lives of animals even if you still eat meat. I’ll start with some general strategies, ranked roughly in order from “least  to most weird”. See what works with your diet, resources, and preferences.

 Basic ideas:

  • Eat less meat in general.
  • Eat less chicken, eggs, beef, and farmed fish.
  • For other animal products, eat Animal Welfare Approved, Certified Humane, or 100% Grass-Fed meat, or buy from a source where you know how the animals are treated.
  • Eat species that suffer less, either in farms or at all.
  • Pay other people to go vegan for you.
  • Support animal welfare by donating money effectively.

I suspect that some people will object to the notion that it’s ever alright to kill or use an animal, and that encouraging people to do this in a “less bad” way is just making compromises with the devil. (As opposed to veganism, which is merely selling your soul to Seitan.) If you’re one of these people, you’re probably already a vegan and this essay isn’t for you.

Not that I entirely disagree- many more people should be vegetarian. That’s not the point, though. Many people are Vegetarian Sympathizers, as I once was. As a young person, for instance, I knew that I had moral issues with the idea of eating animals- that a cow’s brain wasn’t very different from a cat’s, which also wasn’t very different from a human’s. I also knew that meat had unfortunate impacts on the environment and that global warming was a serious problem. But my developmental environment had lots of meat. And also, I had a very strong objection- cheeseburgers.

dicks

Pictured: The Seattle restaurant that was the source of my conflict. The mind is willing, but the flesh is weak. | By Jmabel (CC BY-SA)

This wasn’t a rational objection. But we’re not rational creatures, and the Cheeseburger Objection was the actual thing standing in between me and vegetarianism. And if I’m going to eat cheeseburgers anyways, why not eat steak, chicken, fish, etc.?

Honestly, the Cheeseburger Objection is a pretty good one. One cow makes a lot of cheeseburgers. One cheeseburger might make you very happy. Acknowledging that isn’t a reason to stop caring about animal welfare entirely. And Cheeseburger Objectionists can still make extremely meaningful contributions to animal welfare without depriving themselves of that cheesey goodness.

1. Only go vegetarian sometimes.

Meatless Mondays are a thing- don’t eat meat just one day a week. That’s 1/7 fewer animals you’re eating, and gaining valuable practice in cooking and eating vegetarian. If that’s too easy, up it to two days a week. Repeat.

Some other strategies that have worked for people: eat vegan before 5 o’clock (IE, meals before dinner), only eat meat outside the house, only eat meat inside the house.

Or, if you’re inclined towards vegetarianism- except for cheeseburgers- (or orange chicken, shrimp, your uncle’s venison, baseball stadium hotdogs, etc.-) consider just being a Cheeseburger Vegetarian. I think there’s this tendency to think that if you’re not doing something 100% all the way and identify as that, any tendency you have towards it doesn’t count at all. But that’s completely untrue. Given that we live in a world where most people do eat meat, conspicuously eating less meat both saves animals, and is a talking point that puts vegetarianism on people’s radars.

(Of course, if you’re being a Cheeseburger Vegetarian and hoping to talk to other people about it, people might take you less seriously. This might be a problem. You could either keep your cheeseburger habit private and secretive, hoarding McDonald’s in the dark like the world’s most gluttonous dragon – or you could acknowledge that if someone’s going think that plant-based diets are a joke and not important, they can already find whatever reason they want to do that.)

If you don’t know how to cook food or eat meals without meat, maybe the problem is educational. Look for recipes that contain tofu, beans, lentils, TVP, or vegetables. If you only know one kind of cuisine, broaden your horizons- Indian, Ethiopian, Mexican, Chinese, etcetera, all have lots of opportunities for low meat dishes.

We live in a golden age of easily available recipes. PETA, Vegetarian Times, and Leanne Brown’s free cookbooks are a few good resources. Google it. Also, if you want to make a favorite Food X vegan or vegetarian, look up “Vegan Food X” and you will instantly get 4,000 hits including step-by-step photographs and people’s life stories as told through salad dressing recipes. The internet is a magical place.

2. Eat humanely sourced meat.

This is way harder than it sounds. The good news is that meat is given labels which reflect how it was raised. The bad news is that some of these labels are regulated, and some aren’t, and it’s difficult to determine which labels actually correspond to good living environments and which are symbolic or easily falsified.

Look for the following words on packages:

Certified Organic animals may still be subject to a variety of inhumane conditions. The label means that hormones, antibiotics, and some other treatments are not allowed, and that the animal must be allowed to “exhibit natural behaviors.” I suspect that organic animals are somewhat harder to mistreat, because farmers are incentivized to raise animals in low-disease environments, so organic may be better than conventional if those are your only two options. *

Animal Welfare Approved is an independently-verified certification that has very high welfare standards, including for slaughter. Certified Humane is a less strong but similar certification. There are probably other good ones- look for what they require and how they’ve verified.

Hoofed animals: Look for 100% Grass-Fed, a legally-defined term in which all animals must be raised entirely on pasture (grass, etc) and not fed harvested grain. It seems much harder to mistreat a cow raised this way, since it can’t be confined. This is different from grass-finished, pastured, or normal grass-fed, since all cows eat some grass before they arrive at feedlots.

3. Be careful with chicken.

Chickens are extremely common and live extremely bad lives in factory farms, probably moreso than any other animal.

Cage-free or free-range eggs are better than alternatives, but I don’t think they’re humane. A cage-free chicken may have a somewhat better and more natural life than a non-caged chicken, though they’re newly at risk of fighting with other chickens, which caged chickens aren’t. They may still be subject to having their beaks cut off, slaughter of male chicks (half of all egg-laying chickens are killed shortly after hatching), bird flu, crowded environments, being raised in darkness, starvation-based forced molting, etc.

A couple examples:

  • Free-range – the amount of time or space required for “outdoor access” isn’t legally defined, and varies from facility to facility.
  • A cage-free chicken is still raised in barns or warehouses. They may have no outdoor access, or have their beaks cut or burned off without anesthesia.
  • Organic eggs still aren’t treated with antibiotics but can still be raised in factory farms.
  • More info on labels.
eggs

Putting a picture of happy chickens here seemed disingenuous, so here’s some eggs, I guess. | The Home Front In Britain, 1935-1945.

Any given egg source may well not do some or all of these- for instance, I’ve heard that there are some egg producers that don’t slaughter male chicks, and the cost of raising them is passed to the consumer as a higher price. The key here is to do your research. If you buy based on label X or Y without further investigation, even at a “nice” natural foods store or co-op, your chicken will probably have been raised in painful, inhumane conditions.

I think your best chance at getting humanely raised chickens or eggs is to buy from a home farmer or very small permaculture farm, ideally where you can see the chickens. These are likely to be significantly more expensive than other options. Farms may still slaughter male chicks.

4. Eat species that suffer less.

Quantification of animal suffering is a new field, and practices for calculating it are general estimates. That said, its numbers come from easily understandable ideas- that it’s worse to be a factory-farmed chicken than a feedlot cow, for instance. Some other ideas include that being killed is painful, so an animal that produces more food over a long period means less suffering per food unit (assuming said animal’s day-to-day existence isn’t terrible.) Also, that having a more complex brain probably means you can suffer more. It’s not an exact science, but it’s what we’ve got.

Brian Tomasik, who has studied animal suffering extensively, suggests using this metric that by eliminating chicken, chicken products, and farmed fish from your diet, you reduce the suffering you inflict on animals by an enormous amount.

Clams and mussels have very simple nervous systems and probably do not feel much pain, while full of nutrients comparable to other animal foods. Ozymandias at Thing of Things suggests that eating bivalves and dairy, and otherwise being vegan, can be a good trade-off between health, enjoyment, and helping animals. Also, you still get to eat clam chowder (if it doesn’t have bacon.)

The jury is still out on whether insects experience suffering. On one hand, insects are pretty simple critters; on the other hand, to produce any significant amount of food, you need a lot of insects, so however much moral weight they do have gets multiplied by a lot. On the third hand, about a quintillion die every year, so your own contribution is pretty marginal. (That number is extrapolation- I suspect most insects live less than a year, so the number is probably higher.)

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Chingrit thot by Takeaway (CC BY-SA)

What is known is that insects are nutritious and environmentally friendly. Sourcing insects is difficult and pricey, so try raising your own.

Exotic meats. I suspect that exotic meats (deer/venison, buffalo, ostrich, etc.) are more likely to be raised in more ethical environments, because as species they’re less domesticated, and therefore harder to mistreat as in a factory farm. However, I have no evidence for this.

5. Eat environmentally sound meat.

Most of this list comes from a moral argument, but the negative environmental impacts of standard meat is so well-established that it’s worth discussing. 30% of the world’s non-frozen dry land is currently devoted to feeding or raising animals, and 18% of human-produced greenhouse gases came from agriculture. Lamb and beef have disproportionately high greenhouse gas emissions. You’ll note that chicken is rather low on this ranking, but as in the above section, there are other reasons to avoid it.

“Don’t non-animal-product foods also have carbon emissions?” Not that much.

Fish is extremely nutritious, but many species are overfished. Eat conscientiously to avoid making the problem worse- the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch has detailed recommendations for the consumer based on your location, sorted into handy “okay to eat” and “avoid this” categories. Bycatch ratios are another thing to beware: shrimp fisheries are the worst, trawling up an average 6 times more non-shrimp than shrimp.

6. Convince someone else to go vegan.

A review (again by Tomasik) of organizations that run ads promoting vegetarianism suggest that the cost of converting a someone to be vegan for a year is, conservatively, about $100. Do you have the money to spare, and think there should be more vegans, but eating meat is worth more than a hundred dollars to you?

Utilitarianism: it works.

cool skeleton

Utilitarianism: It’s this cool. And the ends justify the memes.

This approach won’t work forever, of course – if everybody decided that they individually would eat meat but convince others not to, the cost of getting anyone to go vegan would skyrocket. But not everybody is, and for the time, it’s still low-hanging fruit.

7. Donate to effective charities.

Can we do even better? The average vegetarian saves ~25 land animals per year (and perhaps 371-582 animals per year including fish and shellfish) according to the blog Counting Animals.

The Effective Altruism movement, which is near and dear to my heart, has produced several lovely projects, including Animal Charity Evaluators– a highly evidence-based group that researches which animal welfare organizations have the most bang for your buck. (Sort of the Givewell of the greater biosphere.) An $100 donation to any of their top three charities is estimated to indirectly save or spare the lives of 7,597 animals. (Via outreach, undercover video filming, corporate outreach, and more.)

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A final note: People sometimes get annoyed at vegetarians or vegans because they think they’re being smug or morally uppity. This always seemed to me like a strange criticism – the problem is that they’re doing something good? – but if you think it has merit, imagine how smug you can feel in the knowledge that every year, you donate $100 to a certain charity, and that has the same effects as going vegetarian for thirteen years, every year.**

Updated 4/14/2017.

Further reading:

* Michael Pollen says in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemna that it’s difficult to get Organic certification, which has many requirements and regulatory steps, so some small and comparatively extremely humane farms may not (despite meeting many or all criteria for the certificate.)

**Note that you’re not allowed to use this to smugly dismiss vegetarianism unless you have actually made a substantial donation to ACE charities. If you don’t, and proceed to use the fact that that someone could make such a donation to be a dick to vegans, you’re doing negative good and the Utilitarianism Skeleton will get you.

 

 

Longtoothed bristlemouth

What’s the most common animal species?

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I tried to answer this question by doing some reading. Why should we care?

  • Most people don’t have a good sense of the scope and scale of biodiversity and common species on the planet. Whatever you think are the most common inhabitants of earth, you’re probably wrong.
  • When scientists think of “successful” organisms, they tend to think of ones with great diversity: beetles, for instance, or in terms of environments, rainforests. Looking at sheer numbers of individual species is another way of doing this.
  • “Okay,” you say, “Why animals, and not plants or bacteria? Those are way more common.” I study bacteriophage. I know. Two reasons: Animals have brains, which is one reason to focus on them- don’t you want to know who’s doing the majority of the world’s thinking? Secondly, it’s harder to find data on non-animals, but stay tuned.
  • Similarly, if you’re concerned about wild animal suffering, this may give you a sense of where best to focus your concern.

Mammals don’t come anywhere near the top, but sure, they’re furry and warm and cute and also you’re one, so let’s begin here. Humans aren’t actually a bad call as far as larger organisms- there are 7.5 billion (7,500,000,000) of us crawling around the planet, handily beating out other close competitors.

Rule 1: If you want to make an organism numerous, association with humans is a good start.

Large wild mammals are not especially common. Cows (1.4 billion) have the largest non-human large mammal population, and sheep, pigs, and goats (~1 billion each) beat out all other competitors. The curious will be interested to know that there are 50% more cats globally than dogs (600,000,000 vs 400,000,000).

What about birds? As of 1997, between 200 and 400 billion (brought to us by the excellently titled paper, How Many Birds Are There?) The most numerous wild bird is the red-billed quelea, which terrorizes African farmers in enormous flocks (1.5 billion). (The Smithsonian flagrantly claims it’s the house sparrow, but the population of those is maybe half a billion and dropping.) Again, association with human comes in- the most common bird is the chicken, at 19 billion (19,000,000,000) or 2.5 chickens per human.

Hundreds of roosters standing in a field

“Capons in Hainan” by Anna Frodesiak / CC0 1.0

So chickens are looking good so far. What about mice or rats? They’re tiny, reproduce voraciously, and also follow humans. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find good estimates on global mouse populations. Maybe there’s ten mice per human? Maybe there’s 75 billion mice. Sure. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter. Remember the grand rule of biomes:

Rule 2: Whatever’s happening in the ocean is much bigger and much wackier than anything on land.

You’ve probably never heard of the bristlemouth, genus Cyclothone, a three-inch-long deep-ocean fish with a big mouth and weird teeth. As it happens, most of the planet’s surface is deep ocean. Unspecified “icthyologists” found by the New York Times speculate a population in the hundreds of trillions (> 200,000,000,000,000).

Their sheer population has only recently come to light- they’re found many meters deep into the water column and don’t surface at night, and the extent of their dominion has only recently been discovered via trawling with fine nets and the dawn of deep-sea exploration. If these “ichthyologists” can be believed, the bristlemouth is probably the most common vertebrate on earth.

Maybe you’re confused as to how there could be so many bristlemouths, since they’re relatively large compared to, say, insects. I’m not actually convinced that the trillions number is correct, but nonetheless, consider: The oceans represent 75% of the planet’s surface, and while land animals are more or less limited to a flat surface, ocean animals can “stack” in three dimensions.

Finally, a fun fact: If a bristlemouth brain weighs as much as a goldfish brain, then:

7,500,000,000 human brains * 1,350 grams/human brain = 10,000,000,000 kg

200,000,000,000,000 bristlemouth brains * 0.097 grams/bristlemouth brain = 19,400,000,000 kg

Mass of human brains ≈ mass of bristlemouth brains

Draw your own conclusions.

Rule 3: Ant biologists need to get it together.

Ants feeding on a honey droplet

“Meat eater ants feeding on honey” by flagstaffotos / CC BY-NC

All the world’s ants are popularly said to weigh the same amount as all the world’s human beings. It takes 16 million ants to outweigh a human, and since your garden-variety ant colony has about 4,000 ants, that would be 40,000 ant colonies per person.

This sounds ridiculous, and a University of Sussex professor suggests that it is– that ants may have outweighed humans earlier in our existence, but we’ve spread too far too quickly for them to catch up. This article posits 100,000,000,000,000 (1×1014) ants.

But wait. A different article from BBC suggests 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1×1024).

What’s going on here? To our instinctive brains, both of those guesses occupy a similar conceptual space as “really large numbers”, but they’re not close. They’re ten orders of magnitude apart. One of these numbers is ten billion times larger than the other. There’s one quantity of ants, or there’s ten billion times that number of ants. What?!

I have no idea. Worse yet, they’re both from the same source. The BBC can’t be a reliable news source if they don’t have a standard journalistic value for “total number of ants” that’s rough to within oh, say, five orders of magnitude.

Fortunately, we can perform a sanity check. The earth has 1.5×1014 square meters of dry land.

1×1024 global ants / 1.5×1014 square meters = ~7,000,000,000 ants per square meter

Given that we’re not swimming in ants at every single moment, we can knock off a few zeroes and come down to 1×1019 (10,000,000,000,000,000,000 or ten billion billion ants, at 70 ants per square meter, which seems more reasonable.)

Even if the most common ant species is just 1% of all ants, where ants ranks depends drastically on which value the right value is. Bristlemouths might outnumber them, or they might not. Dear ant researchers: work on this, but at the least, stop telling people there are 1×1024 ants. That’s too many ants.

(While researching this, I also learned about the long and short scales– everyone uses the same “million”, but my “trillion” may not be the same as your “trillion”. While normally I try to avoid being prescriptivist about language, this is a terrible use of words and everybody should either use lots of zeroes or scientific notation from here on out. Ugh. Anyways.)

Antarctic krill

Antarctic krill by Uwe kils / CC BY-NC

The antarctic krill is the foundation of the antarctic ecosystem. It feeds whales, seals, squids, fish, and everything else. 500 million tons of it exist, and Wikipedia claims it’s probably the most abundant species on the planet. Using Wikipedia’s mass value of up to 2 grams (say, 1.5 grams on average), that’s 3×1014 (300,000,000,000,000) krill.

Rule 4: Maybe we just don’t know what’s going on.

Let’s talk about uncertainty. There are a couple other candidates. They may easily hold the title, but I don’t know because nobody has done the research. There are certainly plausible reasons to suspect any of them of holding the title, and we can use Fermi calculations for the sake of a guess, but I don’t expect these to be very accurate.

Most of the guesses above did come with specific numbers, but aren’t necessarily completely trustworthy. Articles written about ants, antarctic krill, nematodes, and copepods have all variously claimed to be the most common animal. It seems like this could happen because of the availability bias– if you’re a krill biologist, and someone asks you what the most common animal is, and you know that there are a whole lot of krill, you’re probably going to say krill.

Narrowing down a common species is also more difficult- I can attest (from work with tiny snails) that doing field identification via microscope is the worst. So presumably, most studies don’t do it, and focus on the broader picture.

Alternatively, invertebrate researchers have field-wide conspiracies in order to get more grant money. Invertebrate researchers are welcome to deny this in the comments.

Copepods

Tiny free-swimming ocean crustaceans, at the root of many food chains.

Some scientists say they form the largest animal biomass on earth.

[…]

Copepods almost certainly contribute far more to the secondary productivity of the world’s oceans, and to the global ocean carbon sink than krill, and perhaps more than all other groups of organisms together. – Wikipedia

Also, bristlemouths eat them. Oceanic food chains don’t always work the same way land food chain pyramids do- there’s not necessarily more biomass at the base of the chain than at the top– but as far as I know, it’s strong evidence for them having more biomass.

Frustratingly, as with the nematodes, nobody seems to know what the most common copepod is.

My probable candidate:

  • A small cosmopolitan mid-ocean-level copepod.

Copepod expert Geoff Boxshall on Plankton Safari estimates 1.3×1021 (1,300,000,000,000,000,000,000) copepods. If the most common species represents 1% of all copepods, that’s 1.3×1019 of a common copepod species out there.

But I think we can do better.One study found an average 20 zooplankton per cubic meter in the Atlantic ocean, with occasional high spikes and huge seasonal variation. If we assume that such a number is constant over all the oceans and throughout the euphotic zone (the top layer of the ocean that receives sunlight and supports photosynthesis), that adds up to at least 5.78×1017 plankton. Since we know copepods are quite common, let’s say that 50% of the zooplankton is copepods, and that the most common species represents 1% of all copepods. That’s:

5.78×1017 zooplankton worldwide x (50% copepods) x (1% of the most common species) = 2.89×1015 of the most common copepod.

Copepods

By Lennart Lennuk / CC BY-SA

Nematodes

They are ubiquitous in freshwater, marine, and terrestrial environments, where they often outnumber other animals in both individual and species counts, and are found in locations as diverse as mountains, deserts and oceanic trenches. – Wikipedia

Everyone (read: all scientists who have expressed an opinion on the matter) seems to think that nematodes are incredibly numerous. That said, Nematoda is a very broad umbrella- sort of like saying that there aren’t very many Chordates (the phylum that contains all vertebrates plus a handful of squishy sea creatures.) Bristlemouths, meanwhile, are narrowed down to a single genus of only a dozen species.

My guesses for a candidate Most Common Nematode are:

  • A small, free-living, deep ocean floor or mid-ocean-level species
  • A small parasitic nematode that inhabits cattle or bristlemouth guts.

(Why these two? My educated guess is that smaller animals tend to be more common, and that the smallest species are routinely parasites. Other small species tend to be among the more numerous free-living animals- think mice and Palegibacter ubique.)

My extrapolations (more details on those numbers) from a 2006 study of benthic microfauna – very small animals living on the ocean floor at various depths – suggest that there are maybe 9.03×1019 such critters in Earth’s oceans. These include nematodes, benthic copepods, and other species. As with copepods, let’s guess that half of these are nematodes, and that 0.1% of nematodes are in the most prolific species.

9.03×1019 microfauna on the ocean floor x (50% nematodes) x (0.1% of nematodes in the most common species) = 4.52×1016 of a common nematode species.

This aligns well with another, rougher back of the envelope calculation from a different source:

Roughly 2000 nematodes / square meter * (5.1×1014 meters on the ocean floor) * (1% of nematodes in most common species) = 1.02×1016 (1,020,000,000,000,000) of a common nematode species.

Conclusion: It’s a nematode world.

[Updated as of 4/14/2017.]