Should We Fight for Animal Welfarism?

Or should we only be Abolitionists?

Vegans love fighting. We live to debate, argue, quarrel, squabble, and all the other synonyms for ‘argue’ that came up on Google. That’s why we bother you with slaughterhouse footage, and ask you to throw our soy steaks onto a separate grill. We’re pugnacious, despite the fact we’re all frail husks that risk being lost to the wind every time we step outside.

There’s only one other group that vegans like to argue with about as much as they like to argue with meat eaters, and that’s themselves. You don’t really notice it if you’re on the outside, but there are plenty of areas we disagree on. Is wild animal suffering worth caring about? Are backyard eggs morally permissible? Can we really call battered cauliflower florets “wings”? (I think it’s a bit of a stretch. They are delicious though).

One of the more prominent disagreements relates to Animal Welfarism. I think most vegans agree our work isn’t done if we merely improved the lives of farmed animals, without freeing them. Most of us just about agree on abolitionism being an end goal. However, we do disagree on what the best course of action in the meantime is. Some people think we should only fight for abolitionism, and making welfare gains in the meantime tacitly says it’s permissible to use animals, as long as you treat them kindly. Gary Francione has even expressed concerned about showing footage of factory farming, because it might only motivate people to using kinder farming practices instead of respecting an animal’s right not to be used in the first place.

I see where people who endorse this view are coming from. Ideally, I want animals to have their rights respected, even though I don’t really believe in rights per se. I just think treating beings as though they have rights has enormous consequential value in the long run. Unless we treat animals as if they have rights, it’s unlikely we’ll see a world where their lives are actually net positive. We’d probably continue to see what we see now, which is a lot of bullshitting about humane practices, while wanton cruelty happens behind closed doors.

That said, I don’t agree that Welfarism is a waste of time, or counter productive. This is mostly because I don’t see animal liberation happening as a result of a global ethical shift. Maybe, given enough time, it would happen - but realistically science is going to free them first. Given the technological trajectory we’re on, it’s likely lab grown animal products will saturate the market within the next couple of decades - but I highly doubt we’ll be able to convince everyone that animals aren’t commodities in that time. The kids of today are still staunchly carnist, after all.

So, the question is, what can we do to save as many animals from the horrors of animal agriculture in the meantime? The chopper is coming to save them. It may take 10, 20, or even 30 years - but it’ll get here eventually. However, there’s an enormous amount of animals that won’t make it. Literally, trillions of them will die between now and their liberation, and almost all of them will live in torturous conditions in the short time they’re on the Earth. How do we go about saving as many of them as possible?

This is where, I think, Welfarism has a part to play. If I were in an animal’s position, welfare gains would feel like big victories. If I sat in a small cage, with broken legs, surrounded by shit and ammonia, and someone said to me “I can’t get you out of there, but I can fix your legs, and give you a clean space to live in”, I would not turn around and say “Doesn’t that imply that it’s permissible to keep me here?”. I’d be ecstatic.

Sometimes I feel like strict Abolitionists act as though the gap between factory farming and non-factory farms is tiny - but it isn’t. It’s a gaping chasm. Being able to see the sun, have space to move, and live in a decently healthy body makes a world of difference. My day is ruined if I have a blocked nose, let alone living in a torment most people couldn’t comprehend. Do I think we should just have ‘humane’ farms? No, but there’s clearly an enormous difference between them and what we currently have. To pretend as though there isn’t one is delusional, and ignores the very real plight of the animals that have to rot in what are essentially torture chambers.

Additionally, Welfarism drives the price of animal products up. If factory farming was banned, animal products would become so cost prohibitive, that we’d slash the number of animals being killed to a fraction of it’s current number. We could save trillions of lives from exploitation. It seems unwise to abandon those gains because of a dogmatic attachment to the principle of Abolition.

I think the commitment to Abolition is admirable. It is the end goal, because a world where animals are treated as things instead of individuals is not a world that treats them well. However, I also think it’s impractical to ignore welfare. We should be trying to save as many animal lives as possible between now and the day they’re liberated by tech. Even if there are some we can’t save, it’s still good if we make their lives better. When that day does come, we’ll look back on the way we treated them as a blight on our history. It’ll probably only be then, after we’ve freed them for our own self interested reasons, that we recognise it was always wrong to keep them in chains, and gas them by the billions. It’ll be a stain that’ll never quite come out - and I think we should do everything we can to make that stain as small as possible.