The Ethics of Animal Labor

In this chapter, I identify the fundamental differences between animal husbandry and the industrial livestock industry. First, I recount my own discovery of husbandry in a semi-rural setting, and how it led me to understand that the animal produce I had previously bought without giving a thought to was the result of living work. They were the result of work demanding effort, deep ties to animals, intelligence and a common will to work together. I go on to describe my introduction to the livestock industry, and the shock that its violence and senselessness caused me. I explain how in the nineteenth century, animal husbandry moved to livestock production and how zootechnics theorized husbandry into a position of being purely instrumental and industrial, and removed from our ties with animals everything that gave them beauty and richness. As opposed to zootechnical theory, I show that husbandry is a positive dynamic in our work relations with animals, which are built on gift relations, even though the relation between humans and animals is asymmetric.

In this chapter, I shall start with Marx and show how work is a path to freedom as long as it keeps its promises. Husbandry is a clear example because through it we have been able to co-evolve with animals and to transform some predator relations into peaceful relations. In spite of this, these days animal husbandry is thought of as a nuisance that would be better to put aside. However, is husbandry really to blame? The degradation of the environment and human and animal health is not caused by husbandry but by the livestock industry and industrial systems. Animal husbandry theory is thus ensnared in the confusion between husbandry and the livestock industry, as the critiques that address it are based on an ignorance of its true nature. My research is driven by a desire to address this ignorance.

In this chapter, I revisit my experience of being employed in industrial pig farms, concerning employees as well as the violence of the work. I will go on to demonstrate how and why the industrial organization of work with animals is a cause of ethical suffering, which is experienced through inflicting suffering on others. In the livestock industry, there is a contagion of suffering between workers and animals because of the inevitable ties that exist between them. Within the industrial organization of work, animals are nothing, but for workers, they remain the animals with which they share their daily lives in the same stressful environment. I demonstrate how workers and farm managers put mental defences against the suffering in place, which allow them to keep working and to accept the violence that is inherent in the livestock industry. To understand explain this, as it is done by many farmers, I pursue an analogy (and not a comparison), between the livestock industry and concentration camps. I seek to understand what this analogy can tell us on the subject of work.

In this chapter, I revisit the results of interviews I conducted in the abattoirs. As I was sent to these abattoirs to research “animal welfare”, I was struck by the violence of the organization of work against animals, but also against workers. Animal death and its meaning have been gutted by the industrial machine, which, in production and in transformation, is concerned with animal matter, and not with animals. However, although animal death is denied by the industry, it still maintains its sense and complexity in animal husbandry. Following Jankelevitch, I demonstrate that in husbandry, as in all life, life and death are inextricably linked, for something that does not die, does not live. The challenge for farmers who give a good life to their animals is to be able to give them a good death, and as late as possible. Essentially, animal death is not the goal of working in husbandry, even if it is still an end, just as our death is not the goal of our life, but is still its inevitable conclusion. We therefore need to confront animal death, and by doing so, to confront our own finiteness.

In this chapter, I conduct a critical analysis of two positions regarding farm animal conditions. I first address the theoretical question of “animal welfare” with the aim of deciphering its place in the industrial livestock industry dynamic, and of highlighting its incapacity to bring real change to animal living conditions. I demonstrate that by not taking animal subjectivity, intelligence and competencies into consideration, experimentation necessarily fails to produce relevant results. I then consider animal rights theories, and demonstrate that by condemning domestication as exploitation relations and focusing on refusing to eat meat, these theories chisel away at the reality of the ties between humans and animals, which are above all work ties, or in other words, the shared engagement in production. By denying the life of working with animals, and by denying that their death can have sense, these positions lead to innovations such as in vitro meat, which presents the ultimate stage in animal production, and will result in food that is living death.

In this chapter, I consider the conditions needed for securing our domestic ties with animals. These ties are being threatened both by new forms of industrialization of our food, and by animal rights activists’ movement towards farming without animal husbandry. Food 2.0 (vegetable protein meat substitutes, in vitro meat) is being promoted by start-ups supported by multinationals and by powerful investment funds. Food 2.0 industrialists and abolitionists are preparing us in this way for a world without farm animals, and by the same logic, without domestic animals. Against this world view, I propose that we reinvent new forms of relations with animals that are based on our collaboration at work. This means recognizing the involvement of animals in work, whether they be cows or dogs, and placing confidence in them, so that we can develop our way of working with them. Living with animals is no longer a given, it is a utopia that we must defend.