Farm animals are called farm animals because they are intended to live in farms or in natural areas that have been altered by humans, like pasturelands, woods, or spacious yards. The deformation of their being through intensive breeding and exploitation in factory farms is an egregious moral failure of humanity.
Advocacy for reinstating farm animals to farm life is sometimes pitched as an obligation to renew “the ancient contract” between human caregivers and domesticated animals. I jettison this terminology as flawed. I argue, instead, that it is imperative to establish as ground, again and for the first time, a primordial covenant between farm animals and ourselves. I propose the framework of The Eight Freedoms of Farm Animal Wellbeing to elucidate the specifics of that covenant.
The term “ancient contract” is beset by errors. It suggests that prior to the modern horror show of factory farming, farm animals were treated well. Certainly, industrial animal agriculture exhibits unprecedented indecency in the treatment of animals. But the notion that animals were cared for in past worlds is naïve. Of course, we can reasonably assume that in many cases they were. But not as a rule: It was not as if there was, before modernity, a now-forgotten reciprocity that characterized human relations with domestic animals, and animals lived in idyllic conditions. After all, human supremacy is not a modern invention but reaches back to the dawn of civilization and its hallmark of domestication. Farm animals have been enslaved in the hands of humans for a long time.
This fact has led a faction of the animal liberation movement to all-out reject domestication as a form of domination that lacks any redeemable qualities. Yet even as “the ancient contract” glibly overlooks a long history of subjugation of domesticated beings, so the view of domestication as inherently despicable is inadequate to a more complex reality.
Those who impugn the stolen sovereignty of animals, and desire to free them from the domestic yoke by letting them go humanely into the night of extinction, underestimate animals’ participation in the domestication process, depreciate virtue-grounded qualities in the human-farm animal bond, and underestimate the mutual existential gifts of interspecies relations that have found expression throughout history, and can be consciously embraced for another historical beginning of the human-domestic animal connection.
Yet critics of domestication are spot on in calling out “the ancient contract” as fabrication. Farm animals have always been treated as existing, first and foremost, for subjection to whatever human interests and whims. “Contract,” therefore, in the sense of an agreement between partners who see eye-to-eye, falls way short of the actualities of the past. “The ancient contract” also misfires, for a contract refers to a mutual understanding of parties that requires no deep bond between them. A contract can be struck between indifferent and even hostile participants. Its metaphoric carryover, therefore, to the human-domestic animal connection fails to invoke the sensibility of care that the term is feebly alluding to.
A contract is a (quasi) legal matter that does not, in principle, rest on abiding by virtuous principles, especially care and reciprocity, along with the sensibilities of compassion, companionship, self-sacrifice, and affection that suffuse (diversely, according to the specifics) relations grounded in virtue. These aspects are irrelevant to “contract.” But in the relationship between animal and human the flame of goodness has always blazed. For example, Indigenous shaman Martín Prechtel highlights the practice of Indigenous people rearing orphaned wild animal children. We can reasonably infer that the practice of rescuing helpless animals has been one pathway of domestication. In a Western context, the ground of virtue is signaled in the archetypal story of the good shepherd who cares for every single one of her sheep.
Humans and farm animals have profoundly changed one another, biologically, in the domestication process. Together they have also co-created new forms of life, especially new kinds of work, care, fertility, co-dependency, and nourishment. “Form of life” is a Wittgensteinian concept that captures lifeways in which elements of “nature” and “culture” are inseparably blended. Husbandry—in farmer and author Wendell Berry’s sense: “to care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve”—is a paramount example of a form of life. The art and teamwork of horseback riding, as described for example by animal trainer and author Vicki Hearne, is also a form of life. Of course, innumerable abuses of horseback riding have occurred in history (including forcing horses into battles), and continue to occur, violating horses’ bodies, dignity, and agency. These need to be abolished. On the other hand, a view of the exquisite side of horseback-riding as a partnership jumps off the pages of Prechtel’s (must-read) Horse Trilogy.
Animals participated in the domestication process by having biological, behavioral, and mental predispositions that either inspired them to initiate the process or allowed them to respond coherently to it. It is important to bear in mind that some attempts at domestication have failed, indicating that it cannot be unilaterally imposed by us. As author Barbara King puts it, “that humans imposed their superior will on animals is less likely a scenario than one of partnership that brought benefits to all parties involved.” With domestication, bonds of mutual devotion between humans and animals have come into existence, as well as novel biological realities and forms of life worthy of preservation.
The idea that domestic animals should be benevolently abandoned to vanish from the face of the Earth turns a blind eye to the benevolent and mutually enriching qualities of the farm animal-human connection—qualities which are neither random nor merely circumstantial but compose the forgotten ground of goodness that is (re)claimable as the very ground. Just as we must preserve wild nature and all wild beings, it is also ethically imperative to protect domestic animals (along with cultivar seeds) from extinction. The domestic-cultivated nexus has a place on planet Earth, albeit only on a modest scale and in its most virtuous and ecologically wholesome expressions.
Factory farms, on the other hand, inflict cruelty and suffering upon nonhuman animals, as well as on humans who work in factory farms and/or eat the products of those gross operations. Moreover, industrial animal agriculture is the most ecologically catastrophic human system—driver of mass extinction, climate upheaval, and global pollution. Shuttering factory farms is a necessity, and the technologically mediated breeding and productionist regimes imposed on domestic animals must be called out for the Nazi animal science that they are. That Nazi science, “has bred animals who struggle to conceive, who struggle to walk, who cannot give birth unassisted, and who require almost 24-hour surveillance and support,” to quote animal-welfare advocate Roland Bonney. To this intentional production of disability and misery—in the name of mass production and profit—we can add forced reproduction (less kindly, rape) through nonstop applications of artificial insemination.
The question begs to be asked: Who have we become as human beings that we can treat animals thus and, on top of that, apparently believe that there’s nourishment to be derived from products made by means of torturing animals?
On farms, farm animals can be free to be who they are and to become as they will. It is important to elucidate what freedom specifically means for a farm animal. At face value, the idea appears incongruous—how can a chicken or a pig be free? If left free, such questioning continues, they would not survive for long. The seeming contradiction, however, between “free” and “domesticated” rests on a spurious meaning of freedom—that freedom means to be unleashed to do whatever one wants and to go wherever one pleases. This widespread misunderstanding is not freedom’s meaning. Freedom is to be enabled to be the being who one is and to be supported to become in accordance with one’s mature potential. When we take on board the core meaning of freedom—unhampered being -> becoming—we can clearly see that there is “something it is like” to be a free chicken (pig, cow, etc.).
Being a free chicken does not look the same as being a free fox. If a chicken is left free the way a fox is free, fox will kill chicken and that will be the responsibility of an inattentive or uncaring human, because the chicken is, primordially, a lifeform under human protection. Under human protection and provided with all the appropriate-for-chickens conditions and comforts, chickens can live good and long lives of being who they are and becoming as they may. On the other hand, letting the chicken be “free” the way the fox is free violates the chicken’s freedom, for the chicken will quickly lose her life in a game she’s no longer designed to play.
In 1965, as factory farming was starting to come more visibly online, The UK Farm Animal Welfare Committee propounded “The Five Freedoms of Animal Welfare” as guidelines for the proper care of farm animals. They were later slightly updated and codified as follows:
- Freedom from hunger and thirst
- Freedom from discomfort
- Freedom from pain, injury or disease
- Freedom from fear and distress
- Freedom to express normal behavior
It is tragic beyond words that these freedoms, first stipulated sixty years ago, have since been increasingly trampled under human boot with the toxic spread of industrial animal operations.
The Five Freedoms, which called for a minimally decent level of welfare for sentient beings, have been trashed. As author Michael Pollner once observed, factory farms operationalize (just as vivisecting animals operationalized) the Cartesian view of animal as “automaton.” René Descartes was an advocate and practitioner of vivisection (on living, non-unanesthetized dogs, for example), and his theory of animals as machines provided the ultimate justification for inflictions of unspeakable cruelty. The Cartesian paradigm plagues today’s factory farms as gruesome reification: The idea of animal as automaton is enacted as if it is reality.
Even as The Five Freedoms have been scraped by industrial agriculture—in the name of efficiency and economy, the Devil’s industrious handmaids—they propounded but the bare beginnings of the freedoms due to farm animals. Domestic animals (cocreated through human-wild animal relations over time) are de facto under human protection. What is freedom for them corresponds to what is care for us. Freedom and care are two sides of the covenant coin. When farm animals lose their freedom (to be who they are and to become as they may) because humans fail or betray their vow to care, then animals suffer in extremity and humans fall into debasement. Doubt not: A food system that includes factory farms displays extreme corruption of the human condition. This is why factory-farm facilities are windowless and policed as vigilantly as military operations: Windows and other forms of access into these gulags expose both animal agony and human disgrace. “Monstrous beyond all norms,” in the words of Buddhist author Matthieu Ricard.
That “The Five Freedoms” fall short of what is due farm animals—yet human supremacy denies them even that minimal standard—is evident in that four out of the five are what philosopher Isaiah Berlin called “negative freedoms,” freedoms from distressing conditions. Only one of the five is a “positive freedom,” freedom toward expressing natural ways of being. The Five Freedoms entirely overlooked the spectrum of positive freedoms that are due farm animals.
And not simply because they happened to miss them. The oversight was/is beholden to the conventional denial (or ginormous underestimation) of animals’ cognitive and emotional makeup, especially in the case of farm animals who are typically stereotyped as “degenerate” forms of their wild counterparts, mindless dullards, and tokens of their kind, rather than recognized as the complex, unique and wide-awake persons that they are. Furthermore, the individual farm animal’s capacity to transform and to mature toward ever more meaningful experiences of life is roundly discounted. The Five Freedoms only (sort of) tag the bare basics of sentience—animals’ capacity to experience pain and pleasure. Like all animals, however, farm animals are far more than bare-bones sentient: They are individuals with points of view; have a robust sense of self from which they relate to world and others; have complex mental states (like knowledge, craftiness, jealousy, love, personality, preferences, and memory); are capable of creating friendships with individuals of their own kind and of other species; and evolve over time into more expansive horizons of understanding life. As a consequence of turning a blind eye to the full gamut of being -> becoming that every farm animal encompasses, The Five Freedoms remained vague and incomplete, and thus amenable to “humane-washing.”
Respecting the intricacies of every individual animal entails observance of all their freedoms. Below, I propose Eight Freedoms that farm animals indisputably have claim to. I do so by revising and expanding upon the original Five Freedoms and adding three positive freedoms. Not to be overlooked, I replace the patronizing and corrupted word “welfare,” with the word wellbeing. Finally, I’d like to note that I do not offer The Eight Freedoms of Farm Animal Wellbeing as final word, but as platform for others, more knowledgeable and experienced than myself, to add to, amend, and refine.
The Eight Freedoms of Farm Animal Wellbeing
- Freedom from hunger, thirst, malnutrition and under/over nourishment: Every animal must be ensured access and forage to their natural food sources in appropriate amounts, of healthy quality, and free of chemicals, antibiotics, and other toxic additives; every animal must also be ensured the ability to source clean water
- Freedom from physical discomfort, including heat and cold stress: All animals must be supported to live within the range of temperatures that ensure their wellness and must also be provided with the specific physical conditions that each kind of farm animal requires to experience comfort. All animals (as we know firsthand from ourselves) love to be comfortable and they should have access to the species-specific comforts that make them feel happy, content, and cared for
- Freedom from pain, injury, disease and premature death: All conditions within which farm animals live must be mindfully designed in advance to avert the possibility of pain, injury, disease and premature death to the greatest extent possible. Farm animals must be protected from predators, from exposure to harmful substances, and from conditions that could generate infectious and chronic disease
- Freedom from fear and distress: Every animal must be supported to feel safe, live free of stress- and trauma-inducing artificial surroundings, artificial light, and crowded conditions, and range in open air, sunlight and natural environments where they can experience peaceful surroundings and relations. Animals should be free to cope with the occasional eustress that may thereby arise, e.g., the fright induced by the shadow of a hawk flying overhead, a bout of unexpected rough weather, or the occasional rupture of conflict between individuals
- Freedom to express natural behaviors: Every animal must be allowed and supported to express the full range of their natural behavioral repertoire, including foraging, courtship rituals, mating, caring for their offspring, communicating, building their nests and beds, walking, running, perching, hanging out with family and friends, playing and puttering about, and the like, in accordance with the capacities and joyful expressions of each species
- Freedom to be recognized as individuals: Every animal should be given a name that they are addressed by, signaling to the animal that their human companions recognize them as the individual they are. A name is something that an animal comes to understand belongs uniquely to them. Calling animals by name reflects back to them that they are seen by their human caretaker for the unique being they are
- Freedom to experience and express affection in relationship with their human caretakers: Every animal under human protection is due generous attention and care that fosters the possibility of a profound bond to emerge. We call such a bond affection, and we also call it love as affection’s deepest manifestation. The capacity for mutual affection and love is inherent within the human-farm animal entanglement. Giving space for that relational possibility to blossom enables deeper levels of meaningful living for both parties. Freedom to love and to be loved is a paramount positive freedom due all animals under our protection. Additionally, it is a positive freedom for the human beings involved, for a loving relationship with an animal supports human transformation toward an expanded experience and understanding of the nature of existence
- Freedom to grow old: Last but not least, every animal must be allowed and provided for to grow into old age. Just like humans, all animals value living as long as possible. Respecting the will to life that nonhuman animals express loud and clear, just as we (mostly theoretically at present) respect it for ourselves, means providing farm animals with the causes and conditions to ripen into old age. This is a fundamental aspect of freedom toward one’s highest potential—longevity provides increased opportunity to get there. All animals mature in perspective, understanding, wisdom, relationship (e.g., with friends), and ways of being-in-the-world as they grow older. Such maturing is fundamental for self-realization, as self-realization is relevant to the individual and species one is
The Eight Freedoms of Farm Animal Wellbeing, to be honored by humans and enjoyed by the animals, entail that farm animals live near robustly wild nature (receiving its gifts) and within biodiverse (in their own right) cultivated lands, as well as with appropriate housing and accoutrements for them to be safe day and night. Under the rubric of The Eight Freedoms farm animals are supported to live meaningful, happy, and long lives; they will have encounters that enrich their experience of living; they can enjoy expressing inborn behaviors and capacities; and they will feel safe with and cared for by their human companions, who call them by name, attend to their needs, treat them with affection, and shepherd them into becoming elders.
These stipulations may sound like flights of fancy to human perception filtered through the grimy lens of righteous dominion. Or they may seem as well-meaning but unrealistic aspirations in the unavoidable rush to “feed the world.” But The Eight Freedoms only sound fanciful or unrealistic because, for too long, diminished by the poverty of the human-supremacist worldview humanity has wandered homeless, and forgotten that honoring the freedoms of all beings is not some confabulated idea but the only pathway to universal wellness. And, as denoted by the normalization of the crass motto to “feed the world,” humanity seems to have also forgotten that it is not in our lot, nor in that of farm animals, to “be fed” but rather to be nourished by Earth’s fertility.
It is not irrelevant to remind ourselves, at this juncture, that there will always be episodes and degrees of suffering that earthly beings are forced to endure. It is okay for suffering to arise, given that one way or another it will. It is not okay to make suffering happen. Making suffering happen minimally reflects mindlessness and maximally reveals evil. “Evil” is not an easy concept to navigate. But all philosophical and theological fine print aside, there are unambiguous terrains where we know evil when we see it. Harming beings who are helpless and who we are duty-bound to protect—pointedly, domestic animals and human children—is evil. If this much is not clear to us, then we are clearly hopelessly lost: When we excuse, avert our gaze from, or become complicit in the evil of maltreating beings we are vowed to care for, everything falls into ruin including the entire human race. Let’s find our way to the primordial covenant, watching over beings in our care with all our attention and forethought.
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