Abstract
Slaughter sets the debate about what is acceptable to do to animals at an extremely low bar. Recently, there has been considerable investment in developing cell-based meat, an alternative meat production process that does not require the raising and slaughtering of animals, instead using muscle cells cultivated in a bioreactor. We discuss the animal ethics impacts of cell-based and plant-based meat on human-animal interactions from animal welfare and rights perspectives, focusing on industrial meat production scenarios. Our hypothesis is that the insertion of cell-based meat in the global meat market may alleviate farm animal suffering and potentially restore resources for wild fauna. We employed a conservative estimation of the cell-based meat contribution to the global meat market in the year 2040 to analyze the consequences for human-animal relationships for both wild animals and farmed domesticated animals. We discuss possible effects of an animal cell domestication process, previously described as the second domestication, on human-animal relationships. We consider its potential to reduce the impact of human demographic changes and land use on animal life, in particular whether there would be increased biomass availability and free land for wild animals. We anticipate a major reduction in animal suffering due to the decrease in the number of individual animals involved in food production, which justifies the adoption of cell-based meat from a utilitarian perspective. For the conventional animal food production that remains, further consideration is needed to understand which systems, either high or low welfare, will be retained and the impact of the innovation on the average farm animal welfare. Additionally, it seems likely that there will be less acceptance of the necessity of animal suffering in farming systems when meat production is uncoupled from animal raising and slaughter, supported by a deontological perspective of animal ethics. Consequent to this is anticipated the mitigation of relevant barriers to animal protection and to the recognition of animals as subjects by legislation. Thus, the development of the alternative meats may be related to a significant change in our relationship with non-human animals, with greater benefits than the prima facie effects on farm animals.
Highlights
Ever since humans first domesticated animals for the production of food, our manipulation of animals for the process has been expanding in scope. Darwin (1861) recognized our growing intervention in animal form and function in his Origin of Species: “Man selects only for his own good,” living as he did in an era and a country in which selective breeding was becoming widely used in agriculture
According to our analysis of the reduction in the number of animals used in the production for the year 2040, we discuss the impacts of alternative meats on the environment and biomass distribution, on farm animal welfare, and on the human-animal relationships
As for the welfare of animals in the remaining conventional meat production in the year 2040, we present the total number of farm animals per main species and their position in terms of animal welfare, in the unlikely case of all meat being produced through conventional processes (Figure 2A), and we discuss two main scenarios for the year 2040 (Figure 2): (A) average farm animal welfare decreases due to a pressure for low-cost conventional meat and (B) average farm animal welfare increases due to a niche-market developing for traditional meat, and a consequent demand for high quality meat, including the addressing of environmental and animal welfare concerns
Summary
Ever since humans first domesticated animals for the production of food, our manipulation of animals for the process has been expanding in scope. Darwin (1861) recognized our growing intervention in animal form and function in his Origin of Species: “Man selects only for his own good,” living as he did in an era and a country in which selective breeding was becoming widely used in agriculture. The main prompt for the development of these more efficient ways of producing meat is that the human population is expected to grow to 9.1 billion by the year 2050, which coupled with increased affluence that supports greater expenditure on food, requires annual meat production to raise substantially to 470 million tones (FAO, 2012). Disruption of the conventional meat systems seems fundamental Responses to this situation are under full consideration, as recently there have been much effort and investment in developing animal cell-based and plant-based meat alternatives. Technology advances may bring the attributes of plant-based substitutes closer to those of conventional meat, as well as solutions for animal-free cell growth media
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