Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Furthermore, animal husbandry implies that killed animals are replaced
by new ones. These new animals would indeed not otherwise exist.
(After all, it is not the purpose of animal husbandry to produce animals
as such, but to produce animal products, i.e. to turn animals into prod-
ucts for human consumption.) Furthermore, it is assumed that the
animals can be killed painlessly and more generally that the killing does
not produce any unbalanced negative (side-) effects .
Does actual practice live up to the conditions of the Replaceability
Argument? In order to answer this question, we must know whether
'animal-friendly animal husbandry' can fulfil the criteria that are speci-
fied in the Replaceability Argument. I have already mentioned that the
purpose of animal husbandry is to turn animals into products. At a
certain stage, animals leave the farm in order to be killed (or are killed
on the farm), and new animals take their places. Either the animals are
killed all at once and replaced by new ones (as I remember, this was
the case with geese on a German farm, which all suddenly disappeared
before Christmas) or the replacement happens gradually, as when once
in a while an older animal goes out and a younger animal comes in.
No matter how it happens in practice, the principle is that animals
are replaced and that the existence of the new ones might somehow
compensate for the death of the killed ones. Above, I have expressed
this idea more schematically, in a model. So, the second condition of
the Replaceability Argument is fulfilled in practice. Therefore, there are
two conditions left, which deserve closer examination. First, would the
animals in 'animal-friendly animal husbandry' indeed have pleasant
lives? This is the first condition of the Replaceability Argument.
Secondly, what about unbalanced negative (side-) effects of the killing?
This concerns the third condition of the Replaceability Argument. Let
me explore these questions in turn.
4.1 Do the animals have pleasant lives?
Do the animals that are kept in so-called animal-friendly husbandry
systems actually have pleasant lives? In order to answer this question, we
first need to know what 'animal-friendly animal husbandry' would mean
in practice. Proponents of 'animal-friendly animal husbandry' often
refer to organic animal husbandry when it comes to putting the idea into
practice. At least, there seems to be a broadly shared image, according to
which organic animal husbandry is animal-friendly. 4 The organic sector
re-enforces this image by depicting happy and healthy animals in natural
surroundings. The organic sector tells stories about farmers who had a bad
conscience about their treatment of animals in regular husbandry systems
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