Abstract
Precision livestock farming (PLF) promises to allow modern, large-scale farms to replicate, at scale, caring farmers who know their animals. PLF refers to a suite of technologies, some only speculative. The goal is to use networked devices to continuously monitor individual animals on large farms, to compare this information to expected norms, and to use algorithms to manage individual animals (e.g. via changes in climate, feeding, or reproductive decisions) automatically. Supporters say this could not only create an artificial version of the partially mythologized image of the good steward caring for his or her animals, but to also improve on it. As one paper in favor of PLF has said, “We can not only replace the farmer’s ‘eyes and ears’ to each individual animal as in the past, but several other variables (infections, physiological variables, stress, etc.) will soon be measurable in practice” (Berckmans, in: Geers, Madec (eds) Livestock production and society, Wageningen Academic Publishers, Wageningen, pp 287–292, 2006). Yet these methods of monitoring and control raise a host of ethical issues, including alienation of laborers, further consolidation of farms, and further cover for meat consumption (a possibly independent ethical problem depending on one’s views of eating meat). In this paper, I will address these ethical issues, and suggest a different, under-examined concern: namely, that though PLF may indeed improve the lives of livestock, and the sustainability of livestock operations, it is possible that it will do so at the cost of a loss of identity and relationships for farmers, as well as for the animals in their charge.
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Notes
In this paper, I will focus on livestock farming. There are other kinds of precision farming, but the arguments for how that technology, plants, and farmers interact are different from how PLF, livestock, and farmers do.
Except when drawing a distinction between humans and other animals, I will mostly refer to non-human animals in this paper as “animals,” or even “livestock,” but this is for ease of reading and to maintain congruity with the literature, rather than a reflection of some metaphysical commitment. Though it reads better, it is worth being aware of, and acknowledging, the category error in contrasting humans and animals.
For a discussion of the different conceptions of animal welfare, see Thompson (2015, 137–142).
For an early discussion of this extensive discourse, see Heffernan (1972).
Note that this is true regardless of whether one thinks those animals should have been brought into existence in the first place.
Note that this responsibility on the part of farmers could be justified by animals possessing particular rights, or it could be justified by non-rights-based welfare considerations such as some inherent value of the animals, an inherent disvalue of pain, etc. It could also be partly justified by various virtues we want farmers to have, such as careful stewardship. One advantage of this framework, in fact, is its flexibility or over-determination of justification.
One may well wonder at this point—do farmers almost invariably fail in their duties in this analogy because they send their charges off to be slaughtered? Relatedly, do farmers almost invariably fail in their duties in this analogy because they conceive of these animals as “livestock”? Presumably we would think that parents or pet owners were wildly derelict in their responsibilities if they needlessly sent their charges off to be killed and thought of them in these terms. I am quite sympathetic to this line of argument, though there are those such as Portman (2017) who explores farmer responsibility toward animals in the presence of their possession and incorporation. A full exploration of whether these responsibilities require veganism or vegetarianism is beyond the scope of this paper; instead, if the farmer/parent or farmer/pet owner analogy holds, one should say that farmers at least have responsibilities of care to their animals while those animals are alive.
For a discussion with a different emphasis, but which shares the worry here of a potential distortion of animal welfare via PLF, see Wathes et al. (2008).
See Jensen (2004) for a discussion of the phenomenon of denying our communication with other animals and our intuitive opinions about their mental states.
One way to understand the harm of not listening to animals, over and above the ways in which it may directly reduce their welfare, would be to see it as a kind of “epistemic violence” in silencing them. If silencing is defined as refusing to take up the testimony of others by reliably ignoring them as a source of testimony, it is surely the case that, as Dotson (2011) points out, this ignorance is sometimes justified, as when a three-year-old is not allowed to vote. Sometimes our ignoring non-human animals as speakers is justified in this way. However, the analysis of whether ignoring is pernicious requires context-sensitive understandings of power relationships and harms (ibid.). When we do not listen to animals expressing dissatisfaction or pain because it would be inconvenient to respond to it, it is difficult to see this as anything other than epistemic violence.
They presumably still keep their individual identity as recognized by their conspecifics, though in considering that question, it is worth thinking about the loss of individuality those animals experience when in much larger groups than they would maintain if left to their own devices.
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Werkheiser, I. Precision Livestock Farming and Farmers’ Duties to Livestock. J Agric Environ Ethics 31, 181–195 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-018-9720-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-018-9720-0