The paradox on our plates

Do ever look back on something you posted on the internet and think, well, that was cringy. Yeah, I mean, I look back at that stuff and I'm just like, it's so emblematic of the era. And it's also just like, why did I think this would age well like in the slightest? This week, I'm explaining it to me from Vox. What to do with your online regret? New episodes on Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey listeners, just a quick heads up before we start. We have some detailed descriptions of animal cruelty in this episode. Laurie Marino is a neuroscientist who studies animal intelligence and animal welfare. She walked me through a troubling thought experiment. Picture a puppy and its mother. His mother, the dog, is in a crate where she literally cannot turn around. She gets all kinds of sores on her skin because she's on this hard substrate. And all of her puppies are able to reach her just enough to nurse, but not enough for her to show them affection. So puppy, if he's a male, he is castrated without any painkillers or maybe his tail is cut off. And this dog would stay in that crate for his entire life. And we're not talking about a traveling crate that you put dogs in when you go on an airplane or travel somewhere. We're talking about an iron cage that the dog can only be in one position. This is a horrifying way to treat a dog. But how would you feel if I told you that this wasn't a dog at all? That's the thought experiment here. Laurie was actually describing the life of a factory-farmed pig. So it was a pig in a crate and a piglet getting its tail cut off. I don't know about you, but at first that made me feel better. And then I started to wonder, why? Is it actually better to treat a pig this way than a dog? Did it just feel better because one animal lives on a farm and one is a pet? From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Future Perfect. I'm Cigal Samuel. This season, we're looking at how the meat we eat affects us all. And today. Americans are giving their furry friends the royal treatment. The U.S. Society claims it found a number of abuses, including female breeding pigs, crammed inside crates so small they could barely move for virtually their entire lives. Total spending on pets hit all time my last year. More than $20 billion on food and an estimated $650 million on pet insurance. Pigs being thrown into dumpsters alive and piglets being mishandled by employees tossed into carts. Other expenses are for groomers, trainers, boarding, and pet sitters. Alright, up next. How much do Americans spend on their pets costumes? There's a paradox on our plates. Every year in the U.S. alone, we subject millions of pigs and cows and billions of chickens to conditions we would never accept for our pets. So how do we draw the lines between pets and food? And should we redraw those lines? As I started to think about this, I wondered, do we draw these lines based on animal's intelligence? Laurie Marino has done a lot of work exploring that exact question. And she's looked at a wide range of animals. She started me off with an example that she felt made the answer very clear. Pigs. Pigs are intelligence, curious, burst in with personality. Laurie knows this because she did a big roundup of all the studies on pig smarts. And she found a lot of porcine Einstein's. Pigs share a lot of the same capacities with primates. An example of that might be some studies that have been done showing that they understand a simple language where you put together actions and objects. Do you mean like I want food? No, it would be something like fetch the frisbee. You can find lots of videos of pigs fetching things on YouTube. That's when there is your toy. You go fix that for me. That's amazing because it's just like a dog, right? Like we all say that to our dogs and. It's even more than that because you can then say fetch the ball and the frisbee and the ball could be there. They will pick the ball. But that's just one example. There are other examples of how pigs respond to each other in competitive situations that look very much like what happens when you put chimpanzees in a competitive situation. They try to outwit each other. For instance, if you release two pigs into an open field where there's hiding places for food, they start to develop strategies to ensure that the other pig does not get there first, by maybe going off to another place that they know there's no food and then running back to where there is food. And so all of these strategies and counter-strategies look a lot like tactical deception that we see in chimpanzees. In order to do this, pigs need something called theory of mind. That means they have to understand that other animals also have brains and agendas. And then they have to know that their own actions can affect what other animals will do or think. Human children don't develop a full theory of mind until several years into their development. So you're telling me that a pig potentially has more complex cognitive ability than a three-year-old toddler. I tend to shy away from making those comparisons. So how does a pig compare to a small child? Fortunately, the BBC found scientists who were happy to make these kinds of comparisons. They brought three kids into a studio, a one and a half-year-old, a two-year-old, and a three-year-old. They also brought a performing pig, Nellie, and they had the kids and the pig all do a series of tasks. Nellie has no problem scoring a goal. But all of our three children find this task far harder. By far harder, they mean that the youngest girl is literally tangled in the net itself. So sure, pigs can't do some important things that a two-year-old does, like talk. But the science suggests that they hit some of the same important milestones that human toddlers do. Meanwhile, a documentary on farm animals showed that adult pigs can even play video games. This is Hamlet. They can use their mouths, and they can do a simple video task by manipulating the joystick. Scientists make it progressively harder for Hamlet, yet he succeeds every time. In order to do that, they have to have an understanding that they are manipulating this joystick which is manipulating this cursor in the interest of a goal. Can other animals do this? Here's Rex, a jack Russell dog. Rex is willing, but even after a year, he hasn't quite got it and needs help. If you look up performing pigs on YouTube, you can watch the match shapes, dunk tiny basketball balls, and drop coins in piggy banks. It's an incredible range of tricks. Nelly says, "Let's go home." She's not a hard day of eating and sleeping. Nelly the pig knows as a suitcase open and jumps in. She's packed herself for her next trip. This is how we get her into motels. No, I'm just kidding, we would never put a pig in a suitcase for longer than about three seconds. Except, of course, we do keep pigs in very, very confined spaces, and for much, much longer than three seconds, which brings us back to our paradox. Pigs are at least as smart as dogs, and maybe even match chimps in some ways. But from their earliest days, we keep millions of them in the cramped iron cages Laurie described at the top of the show. We sterilize them without anesthetic, and we cut off their tails. And they end up having a lot of psychological disturbances. The reason they cut the tails off is because other pigs will nibble on the tails of the pig in front of them because it's like a nervous habit. It's equivalent to what happens when you're banging your head against the wall if you're mentally disturbed, so they lead tortured, dirty lives. They never get to go outside, they never get to roll in the mud, they never get to raise their children or have a normal social life or even play. And so their lives from beginning to end are just pure hell. I saw a video that never left me, a video from within a slaughterhouse where these men were grabbing one pig and slaughtering him. And another pig came to the rescue and was trying to defend the pig who was being attacked. It showed how helpless these animals are in this circumstance, how much they understand the horror they're going through, and how much as much as they try to fight back, they can't win, they're overpowered. Wow, okay, this is pretty grueling, I'm looking at my producer bird here and she's like tearing up, you know, and I'm also kind of getting uncharacteristically emotional about this. Well, the only reason that I'm not tearing up now is because I've had time to process it. At this point in my conversation with Lori, I was pretty convinced of two things. Pigs are at least as smart as dogs and we treat pigs in ways that we'd never treat dogs. But I started to wonder about other animals, animals that we consider less smart. So I asked Lori this question, "If pigs are as smart as you say, does that mean that I should eat fewer pigs and eat chicken instead?" No! After the break, Lori's very emphatic answer explained. A lot of us have spent a lot of the last week watching videos of what's happening on the streets of Minneapolis. And understanding what it is that we're seeing, but also what's real and what isn't and what's AI, and who is taking these videos and how we're supposed to understand the source feels harder than ever. So this week on The Vergecast, we're talking about what's happening in Minneapolis, how information moves in an AI age, and what it means to make sense of it all. All that, plus what's new with the new TikTok, why everything feels like it's falling apart on TikTok, and more on The Vergecast wherever you get podcasts. Welcome back. Our pop culture is literally full of stupid chickens. I think the documentary in Werner Herzog spells it out most explicitly. You have to do yourself a favor when you're out in the countryside and you see chicken, try to look at chicken in the eye with great intensity, and the intensity of stupidity that is looking back at you is just amazing. You can find these stupid chickens everywhere, from the sidekick in Moana to the paranoid bird and chicken little. Chickens get the short end of the stick every time. Laurie Marino again. So not only do we not see chickens as intelligent, we don't even see them as birds. For example, if you've ever seen a photo of a chicken roosting in a tree, whenever a photo like that is posted, people are just like, well, how can it be? Was that photoshopped or what? Chickens and trees, but yes, they're birds. They're actually birds. It's the equivalent of dehumanization, but like, de-birdification. And Laurie has more than just photos of roosting chickens to prove that this de-birdification is unwarranted. She also wrote up a review paper of chicken studies a few years back. And I reviewed all the scientific literature on what we know about chickens, how intelligent are they, what kind of communication systems they have, all of that. And I was really rocked back by how sophisticated chickens are. She discovered that baby chicks can do very basic mental math. They can keep track of different quantities of things as they disappear behind screens. In another study, students were able to teach chickens basic tasks, like selecting one colored object out of a bunch of different options. And also, chickens have social lives. They've heard of the chicken pecking water. It's part of their natural social life. So if you're a hen, you are going to always be looking to see where you fall on that pecking water. So what if a strange hen comes into the backyard? How do you know how to react to her? Well, if a hen observes a known dominant hen being defeated by a strange or unfamiliar hen, she's going to avoid that stranger, because she knows if the known dominant hen can't beat the stranger, she certainly can't. You know, it's like when a new girl would come to school, and then if she got to sit with the cool kids at their cafeteria table, I was like, hmm, I guess that means she's too cool for me to sit with her. Yes. Exactly. Lori also reviewed another study showing that mother hens show elevated stress levels when bad things happen to their chicks. So they even have a maternal instinct, basically, there is somebody home. They're not just walking around blankly, pecking at the ground, looking for food. They are thinking through their lives. And that's the main take home from what we know about chickens. And yet on factory farms, if you're a broiler chicken, you are going to be genetically manipulated to grow at a very fast pace, and your growth is going that out way, the ability of your skeleton to hold up your body. So by the time you're just a few weeks old, you're lame. You can't stand up or walk anymore. If you're an egg-laying hen, you might be kept in a cramped cage with several other hens unable to move much. And they're always pecking at each other because of the incredible stress they're under. And so what they do is they take away their beaks. They de-beak them. The beak is the way the chicken experiences the world. She uses her beak to explore the world, to field the world. It has the most nerve endings. And when they cut off the beak, there's no painkiller. There's evidence that the pain continues for a long time after that. Is this like cutting off my hand? Yeah, it would be like cutting off your hand without any anesthesia or anything. So if we're trying to make the argument that we can just switch from eating pigs to eating chickens and somehow be in a morally better place, Lori's not impressed. Sometimes suffer, they feel pain, they have lives to lead just like mammals do. At this point in our conversation, I was pretty sold on the idea that pigs are thinking, feeling creatures, and that chickens are too. But that left me even more confused about the central question here. If chickens and pigs are so smart, why do we routinely treat them in ways that we would never treat a dog? It felt like even more of a paradox. Lori had several explanations. First, she told me it has to do with our own special brand of smarts. People can compartmentalize. We are able to do that so easily because we're smart. And that intelligence unfortunately allows us to develop defense mechanisms that provide a way for us to do things that we know are not right, but we do a many because it feels good. But it's not just that it feels good. It's also that from the time we're little kids, we're bombarded with constant messaging about meat and family and patriotism and manliness. Yeah, it's a chicken carcass inserted into a duck carcass which is then shoved inside a turkey carcass. At bacon strips, at bacon strips, at bacon strips. We have our traditional homemade meatballs recipe from grandmother. At bacon strips, at bacon strips, the layer of the chicken on top. And of course, it wouldn't be 4th of July without hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill. It's inculturation, so you're inculturated into eating meat. And finally, there's some research suggesting that humans have evolved to feel more empathy towards certain creatures. We like the creatures that kind of look like us humans. We especially like the ones with big eyes because they remind us of babies and trigger our parental instincts. In fact, one of the best predictors of whether people will donate money to save a certain species is how big that animals eyes are. All that to say, a combination of nature and nature is coming together to numb our empathy towards certain species, even if they're actually pretty smart. This all left me wondering, is there some notch below which the level of sentience they have is so minor that it's okay to eat them. I'm thinking about fish or shrimp or mussels. You know, a lot of people will make the argument to eat down the animal scale. Uh-huh. I mean, the whole notion of an animal scale, that thing called scalanetora, is just this mythology that we have. Wait, wait, wait. What is scalanetora? Galanetora means natural scale, and it's a philosophy of life. It's a viewpoint about life on the planet that says that all life sits on a scale or hierarchy or a ladder. Lori says that in some ways this ladder feels deceptively intuitive. Like maybe slugs are below frogs, frogs are below birds, and birds are below mammals. So guess who's on top? Our species. That's why it's so intuitive. It's a ladder made by humans, and when you're a human being, you're going to judge all intelligence based on human intelligence. But why should we value human intelligence over, say, octopus intelligence? Different intelligences are different, each is adapted to its own particular environment. But one intelligence isn't necessarily better than the other. This might seem like a radical idea, but it's one that neuroscientists like Lori Merino are increasingly moving towards. And yet, the ladder is still with us. It's been with us since the time of Aristotle or earlier, and even today in 2020, we adhere to this notion that you can go up and down a ladder of complexity, which also tells you something about value. When I asked if maybe fish or mussels were okay to eat, I was unconsciously leaning on that ladder. But Lori thinks the ladder is a crutch. We need to stop leaning on as we make our choices about what animals to eat or not eat. Of course, without the ladder. It's really difficult to draw a line because I don't think there are bright lines in nature. You're going to have to impose our own bright line and own that as we do. Maybe there is no morally objective way to distinguish between what's okay to eat and what isn't. Maybe we each just have to make a subjective choice, and as Lori says, own that. So if you're trying to be thoughtful about what you eat, you might think it makes sense to choose based on how sentient a species seems to you. Or you might think that any creature that's alive, just by virtue of being alive, shouldn't be killed for food when we don't actually need it for our survival. Whatever you believe on that score, there does seem to be one slightly easier line for us all to draw. We could stop torturing animals before we eat them. We could make sure their lives are more pleasure than pain while they're still alive. Meat would be more expensive, and we'd have to eat less of it. But it would go a long way towards resolving the paradox on our plates. For mate to nine, Wilbur planned to take a nap outdoors in the sun. It seemed fitting to pair our credits today with Charlotte's web, the classic children's book. Because it's kind of an example of how we might eat animals without torturing them. Wilbur the pig is destined to become Christmas dinner, but as you'll hear, his day-to-day schedule is pretty pleasant. From nine to eleven, he planned to dig a hole or trench and possibly find something good to eat buried in the dirt. From eleven to twelve, Bird Pinkerton produced and co-reported this episode, and Amy Drostolfska edited it. 12 o'clock, lunchtime. Midlings, warm water, apple pear. Jillian Weinberger was the senior producer of this show and Jared Paul mixes it. Liliana Mitchellina fact-checked this episode and will read Reda's selections from Charlotte's web. Lunch would be over at one. Liz Nelson is the executive producer for Vox Podcasts. Vivek Amoris from the Yale Law, Ethics, and Animals program advised us on this episode. We had recording help from Strinavast, Dremamorthy, and we're grateful to Lauren Katz and Decate Daily. From one to two, Wilbur planned to sleep. During his nap, Wilbur listened to the music in this episode, APM, Chris Sibrisky, Pottington Bear. We also had a clip from a compassionate world farming documentary on animal intelligence. We'll link to that in the show notes. From two to three, he planned to scratch itchy places by rubbing against the fence. This podcast is made possible thanks to support from animal charity evaluators. They research and promote the most effective ways to help animals. From three to four, he planned to stand perfect still and think of what it was to be alive.