And, in the wild, things are probably vast orders of magnitude worse
Probably not so many more OOMs, unless you count insects or fish or worms without discount. Not so long ago, I made a guesstimate that half of all the bird deaths per year on this planet are chickens.
Ah, thanks for letting me know! I'll have to look into the numbers more. I probably wouldn't discount fish as much as you so that's where we'd likely disagree.
I think this poem conveys my response better than I can:
A Brief for the Defense
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
Jack Gilbert, 2012
People are powerfully blinded to these hells by the unconscious mechanisms of Motivated reasoning.
I think it's very hard to acknowledge them because they produce too much sorrow and imply too much of a demand of us.
Another poem:
So few grains of happiness.
measured against all the dark.
and still the scales balance.
I recently asked a philosopher of welfare biology if he thought that nature was net negative for animals, and he said he was unsure. Also, from what I've read, humans generally consider their lives to be net-positive. And, factory farming does seem quite net negative. So, overall, I think it's hard to say.
The scales balance for human beings that have the freedoms to strive for a meaningful life even among all the pain. I don't see how they balance to the chicken who only know unbeliavable pain and stress their whole life.
This is a crosspost from my blog post. It's meant as a bit of an introduction to an extreme-suffering focused worldview.
We spend most of our lives caught up in the boring details of our everyday life - thinking about what we’ll have for lunch, how to complete that assignment for work, and what we’re going to tell our friend after that awkward interaction from a couple of days ago. From this perspective, our world looks a bit better than purgatory. It has its ups and its downs, but the ups certainly outweigh the downs, and there’s almost always enough hope to go around.
But, despite this, we must remember that our world contains hell.
Every year, five million children under the age of five pass away. This means that, every six seconds, parents have the worst thing that could ever happen to a person happen to them. They have the most special and important thing in their entire life irreversibly and permanently taken away. And, as much as we want to help them, we know that there’s nothing we can do to lessen their grief.
For another example, currently, there are three million adults worldwide who live with cluster headaches, which are widely regarded as the most painful experience one can have in their entire lifetime, far exceeding the pain of breaking a bone, getting shot, or giving birth. On a scale from one to ten, sufferers, on average, rate them a 9.7/10. And, because sufferers often attempt to kill themselves while experiencing them to escape the pain, they’re often colloquially known as “suicide headaches.”
And, that’s just within the realm of human suffering. If we’re focusing on animals, things look even worse.
Each year, more than 4.5 billion chickens are confined to cages, where they are given less space than a single sheet of paper to move around. Because they’re so severely confined, they live in a constant state of distress. And, worse, because they can’t exercise, they bones becomes brittle, causing extraordinarily painful keel bone fractures. The research on this is still developing, but our best guess is that they experience at least a couple hundred hours of pain so intense that they’re unable to focus on almost anything else. As you can imagine, virtually every person who has ever researched their lives in depth believes that they would be far better off dead.
And, in the wild, things are probably vast orders of magnitude worse.
To give just one example, the new world screwworm is a fly that lays its eggs in the wounds and body openings of warm-blooded animals such as cows and dogs. Its larvae, upon hatching, burrow in their host’s bodies, devouring from them inside out. This is so extraordinarily painful that the standard response for humans is to immediately give the patient morphine before cutting the screw worm out of their flesh. Since 2023, over 185,000 cases in animals have been reported in Latin America. And, since this is mostly just pets and farm animals, we can assume that it’s an extreme undercount of how many wild animals suffer from them too.
We all would really like to believe that the world is a good place, but we must also remember the vast suffering that it contains.
When we go about our daily lives, commuting to work, gossiping with coworkers, and eating lunch, there are living beings all across the world experiencing unimaginable suffering.
This is why I think that everyone should, at least once in their life, seriously consider giving a substantial amount of their income or their time to working to solve these problems.
It’s easy to want to pretend that they’re not happening, but, when you acknowledge them, the idea of working on them can be pretty motivating.
And, in fact, each of the problems that I’ve mentioned so far are completely solvable.
First, five million children die each year, but the vast majority of these deaths are from preventable diseases. Because developed nations give so little aid to the undeveloped ones, the marginal cost to save a life is currently around only $5,000. By making personal donations or working in global health, you could easily help to save tens if not hundreds or thousands of children’s lives in your lifetime.
Second, three million adults suffer from cluster headaches worldwide, but there are known and effective treatments for them. The main problem is that they’re simply illegal because they often make use of psychedelic substances. By supporting research or advocacy in cluster headaches, you could help to make them a thing of the past.
Third, 4.5 billion chickens are confined to cages, but the cage-free movement has had some incredible successes. In 2007, 3.2% of US chickens were cage-free, but now, as a result of corporate campaigns, only 45% are. By supporting these campaigns or otherwise working within the movement, you could probably, in expectation, help hundreds of thousands if not millions of chickens.
Lastly, at least millions of animals are devoured by screw worms each year, but, from 2006 to 2023, governments had completely eliminated the screw worm from North America. By supporting research and advocacy, you could help eliminate screw worms from the whole world for good.
And, even if you don’t have money to donate or time to spare, you can still bring these issues up to your friends.