The Cheapest Mercy | Christian Engel<br>Post<br>Cancel<br>In 2024 we slaughtered 87,896,729,120 land animals for food.1 About 76 billion of them were chickens. The rest were ducks, pigs, geese, sheep, goats, turkeys and cattle, in that order. We kill around 240 million land animals a day.2<br>That is the small number.<br>The large one is harder to write down, and it took me a while to find it. We count land animals to the last animal, but we count fish by weight. The FAO publishes the global catch in tonnes, not in fish.3 When we turn the tonnes back into animals by dividing the total weight by the weight of an average fish, the numbers get very large. Somewhere between 1.1 and 2.2 trillion wild fish are pulled from the oceans each year. Another 124 billion or so are farmed and killed in pens. Between 255 and 605 billion farmed crustaceans go with them, mostly shrimp.4 Add the farmed insects, on the order of a trillion a year, and the totals stop meaning much.5 Counted one creature at a time, the number of vertebrates and crustaceans we kill for food is somewhere around 4 to 8 billion a day.<br>Large numbers tend to switch the moral part of the brain off rather than on, so set the total aside and take one practice at its real size. Because male chicks cannot lay eggs, and the laying breeds grow too slowly to be worth raising for meat, the egg industry kills its males on the day they hatch, either by dropping them alive into a grinder or by gassing them. This happens to roughly 6.5 billion chicks a year.6 It is how egg production has been designed to work for decades, an ordinary line item, costed and scheduled like any other.<br>The usual reason for not minding is that these are only animals, and the distance between them and us is wide enough that what happens across it doesn’t really matter. That is getting harder to believe. The view that fish feel pain is now the scientific mainstream, and the evidence that some invertebrates feel it too, including the crabs and lobsters we boil alive, is strong enough that several governments have written them into their animal-welfare laws.7 Their nervous systems are built from the same parts as ours, including the parts that produce pain and fear. They are closer to us than we like to think.<br>I think a later century will look back at this the way we now look at things earlier centuries accepted as normal, and will struggle to understand how people who were decent in every other way sat inside a catastrophe this large and mostly thought about lunch. Every widening of the moral circle has looked obvious afterward and impossible at the time, and every one of them was slowed for generations by people who were sure the current edge was where it naturally stopped. In raw numbers this case may be larger than all of them.<br>I should be straight about my own position. I have been vegan / vegetarian for ~22 years now, and I have made the moral argument when I was younger more times than I can count. It does not work. Not at the scale that matters, anyway. Global meat production reached about 365 million tonnes in 2024 and is forecast to keep climbing for at least another decade, led by exactly the two categories, poultry and farmed fish, that kill the most individuals per tonne.8 The number of people who will read something like this and change what they eat is a rounding error against the demand growth of a single year in Asia. The moral case against all this has been available for 50 years. You can win that argument every time and still watch the numbers go up, which is what has happened.<br>So I am not going to ask anyone to go vegetarian, or try to reduce their overall consumption. Partly because I don’t think the asking does much, and partly because I have come to think it was never where the leverage was.<br>The leverage is in how moral progress actually happens. We like to believe the great moral advances were won by persuasion, by someone making the case so well that the public’s conscience finally turned. Persuasion matters, and the people who make the case early may matter enormously. But the majority does not move on persuasion. It moves when the better choice becomes the cheaper one. The killing in the numbers above does not continue because billions of people have weighed a chicken’s life against their dinner and decided the dinner wins. It continues because the alternative has cost more and tasted worse to many. Close that gap and the moral question answers itself, with no one having to win it, for the large majority who were never going to be argued out of a habit but will switch the moment switching is free.<br>Which is why the thing I find genuinely hopeful is not a change in values but a set of cost curves, and why the people that will end the largest cruelty in history are not the activists but the engineers and the companies that will never once think about the animal.<br>There are two families of technology that matter, and they sit at very different stages. The first is precision...