Animals Ethics

Animals Per Calorie

A typical cow produces 41,000 liters of milk [5], which equates to about 18 million kcal per cow. The average cow lives 5 years [6] for about 3.6 million kcal per cow per year

The average cow yields 490 pounds of trimmed beef [7]. At about 798 kcal/lb [8], that's 391,020 kcal/cow.

A pig yields around 180 pounds of edible meat [9], which amounts to about 187,200 kcal/pig [10]

The average hen lays about 530 eggs [11]. At 74 kcal/egg [12], that's 39,220 kcal/hen.

Salmon vary widely in size, but yield (very roughly) 14 pounds of meat each [13], equating to about 10,092 kcal/fish [14]. However, farmed salmon are often feed food made from other fish; I'm ignoring this because it's complicated.

The average chicken yields yields about 0.85 pounds of edible meat and skin [15], which is about 589 kcal/chicken [16].

The average blue crab yields about 2.25 oz of meat [17], equating to about 53 kcal/crab[18]. In short, we haves

If you think that the problem with eating animals is the fact that they suffer beforehand, then you are probably more interested with the suffering per year [19]:

Animal Consciousness

How much moral weight do animals deserve. This is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult ethical questions.

Obviously, most humans' answer is "minimal" - or at least sufficiently small that no change in their own actions are required. Equally unsurprisingly, vegetarians and vegans generally believe that its a threshold enough to justify their decisions - or at least, some Pascal's wager-esque [20] argument to that effect.

The other uncontroversial answer is that there is some relationship between cognitive ability and moral weight - its why few people believe bacteria deserve moral weight but everyone agrees humans do.

Probably the most available approximate measure of "cognitive ability" is simply brain weight. If we scale the above moral numbers by this, we get [21] [22] [23] (assuming the salmon are killed a 4 years of age):

Alternatively, we could go by the number of neurons [22] [24]:

By these simple metrics, it seems that eating eggs and milk is reasonable. Eating meat is ethically questionable at best.