Uncoupling Meat From Animal Slaughter and Its Impacts on Human-Animal Relationships

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.

Keywords: animal protection; animal suffering; cell-based meat; human-animal relationship; second domestication.

Figure 1

Biomass distribution for kingdoms (A), animal groups (B), as per Bar-On et al. (2018) and the analysis of the impact of a 60% reduction in slaughter-based meat production (C) (Gerhardt et al., 2019) on the availability of biomass (1 Gt of carbon = 1Gt C = 10¹⁵ g of carbon).

Figure 2

Number of individual animals in each degree of animal welfare, in billions, considering the estimated total number of cattle, pigs, and chickens in 2040, assuming that total global meat production will be reduced to 40% of its 2019 level, following the projected insertion of 35% of cell-based and 25% of plant-based meat production (Gerhardt et al., 2019).

Figure 3

Direct consequences to animals and indirect effects on animal ethics of different levels of cell-based meat consumption and awareness of its animal ethics consequences.