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One of the most provocative tactics used by opponents of animal exploitation is to draw an analogy between human and animal suffering. Marjorie Spiegel’s “The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery” finds parallels between white oppression of African slaves in America and human exploitation of nonhumans. Spiegel asserts that like human slaves, nonhuman animals are subjected to branding, restraints, beatings, auctions, the separation of offspring from their parents and forced voyages.

We dominate and slaughter plants, but few people care because it is assumed that our plant victims don’t perceive any of it.

Charles Patterson’s “Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust” mines another human tragedy for comparisons to animal husbandry. The “eternal” of the title hints at one difference between the Nazis’ attempted eradication of Europe’s Jews and the raising of animals for food — the latter is an ongoing cycle of breeding and killing and not a hate-fueled extermination campaign — but genocide and animal farming can both involve objectification and efficient mass killing.

Some animal rights activists also compare dairy production with sexual assault, because cows are often artificially inseminated to get them pregnant and continuously lactating.

Such analogies are shocking. But are they sound?

Our perception of the external, of disturbing images or scenes, is sometimes a projection of our own feelings as observers; it does not match what the subjects of such treatment actually experience. Animal slaughter, for instance, looks gory and disturbing, but when the animals are knocked insensible first, the discomfort is our own — not theirs.

For human analogies to animal farming to have force, the experience of being a farmed animal should be equivalent to the human experience in superficially similar circumstances. Is it safe to assume that a cow raised for food suffers the same general humiliations, agonies and frustrated drive for freedom that a human slave or victim of sexual assault or genocide does? If not, arguments equating animal suffering to human suffering are logically flawed.

Animal activists tacitly admit that internal perception is essential when they talk about the importance of sentience. We dominate and slaughter plants, but few people care because it is assumed that our plant victims don’t perceive any of it. We are not typically challenged to imagine ourselves as industrially raised stalks of corn, with our roots stuck underground, never able to sit or lie down, pecked at by crows and brutally harvested. With the physical attributes and cognitive abilities of a human, that would be torture, but we quite reasonably assume that it’s not so bad for stiff, brainless stalks of corn.

It’s not the exploitation in itself that’s objectionable, then, but that the exploitation is experienced as harmful. This, however, raises the possibility that the domination and control of animals would be acceptable if we could do it without their minding it very much. Is there reason to believe this is so?

Yes, if we accept the following three premises:

1. Even though animals feel physical and emotional pain, it is possible to raise them for food and kill them without causing them any more suffering than what we might expect a well-off human to experience.

2. Pigs, cows, chickens, lambs, goats and other farmed animals don’t have the communication skills or access to information to figure out that the purpose of their lives, from the point of view of humans, is to use them as food.

3. To have lived a happy but brief life is no worse than to have never lived at all.

The first premise might seem hard to accept, given the brutal realities of modern animal farming. Most farm animals are raised on intensive factory farms where they suffer for the majority of their short lives. Even small, high-welfare farms tend to subject their animals to at least some painful procedures like castration without anesthetic, dehorning or the separation of mothers and their newborn children.

Yet ultra-high-welfare animal products are a possibility, not a fantasy. Consider the highest level of the “5-Step” animal-welfare rating program at Whole Foods Market. For beef, this prohibits branding, castration, ear notching, separating mothers from calves for early weaning and long trips to the slaughterhouse. For pigs, this ensures they are never separated from their littermates, which is important because of how social pigs are. For chickens, it means they have plenty of space and don’t have to endure physical alterations like debeaking.

Almost no farms meet these standards, but if more of us were willing to compromise on the price, taste, quantity and texture of the meat we eat, more farms like this could exist and thrive.

Advances in technology and breeding could also improve welfare. Selective breeding of cows who lactate for two or more years after giving birth, a practice called perennial dairying, could reduce the number of times a dairy cow needs to get pregnant to produce milk. Painless slaughter is already feasible when done carefully and would become easier if we were raising far fewer animals for food and didn’t rush thousands through a single slaughterhouse in a day.

If we treat animals well throughout their lives and slaughter them in a non-stressful way, the second premise — that animals are unaware that we are raising them for food — seems to fall into place naturally. That it’s possible to peacefully load animals onto trucks and lead them calmly to slaughter suggests that this is the case. In her book “Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals,” the animal scientist (and slaughterhouse designer) Temple Grandin writes:

Often I get asked, “Do cattle know they are going to die?” While I was still in graduate school I had to answer this question. To find the answer I watched cattle go through the veterinary chute at a feedlot and then on the same day I watched them walk up the chute at the Swift plant. To my amazement, they behaved the same way in both places. If they knew that they were going to die, they should have acted wilder with more rearing and kicking at the Swift plant. At the plant, the handling was better and they were often calmer there.

If we can take animals to their deaths without their ever connecting the dots, then with the best animal farming the existential angst over their being exploited and doomed is almost certainly in our heads, not in theirs.

Recently there have been high-concept proposals to take the painless exploitation further. Some ideas include breeding genetically modified animals who are insensitive to pain, culturing non-sentient animal products in a lab, and giving chickens virtual reality helmets so that they think they are living in a nice environment even if they’re not. These ideas may not be very practical yet, but they help illuminate the principle that could allow animal farming but not human slavery and genocide: Exploitation is harmful only when the exploited are able to notice it and resent it.

Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series.

Because the third premise — that to have lived a happy but brief life is no worse than to have never lived at all — is a philosophical assertion and not a testable empirical question, it may not have a definitive answer. However, we could defend it by consulting the Greek philosopher Epicurus and his Roman protégé Lucretius. Epicurus argued that death was nothing to fear because when existence ends for an individual, he ceases to experience anything and so cannot suffer harm or deprivation from his death. Lucretius added to this his “symmetry argument,” that since there was nothing bad for us about the time before we existed, we should see nothing bad for us about the time after we exist, and so we should no more regret dying earlier than we regret being born later. If prebirth nonexistence is identical to postmortem nonexistence, why accept the former and reject the latter? If we agree with Epicurus and Lucretius here, it doesn’t seem cruel to breed animals into existence even while intending for their lives to be brief.

I realize that even a sudden mass acceptance of these three premises wouldn’t satisfy all opponents of animal farming, because even if we remove physical and psychological suffering from the equation, there is still perhaps the intangible harm of symbolic injustice. Farm animals’ existences, no matter how pleasant we can make them, are ultimately designed for our selfish benefit, and there might seem to be something sinister in that.

But just remember that it may seem sinister only to us. If farm animals lack the complex forms of communication and access to information that would allow them to realize that they exist to become food for us, and if they don’t experience physical tortures along the way, then they avoid all the worst aspects of human exploitation.

This doesn’t escape objections of unequal treatment of animals so much as raise the bar. Rejecting pro-human prejudice doesn’t mean seeing animal husbandry as equivalent to human oppression, but if animals’ ignorance of their own exploitation is our excuse to exploit them, we have a bullet to bite: We have to endorse exploitation for ourselves so long as we’re blissfully unaware.

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Rhys Southan is a former vegan who has written about the ethics of eating animals for Aeon Magazine, Modern Farmer and his blog, Let Them Eat Meat.