Lewis Bollard: evaluation

Transcript context

…Potentially, we could find ways to make animals even bigger with the future forms of biological progress that some of my guests talk about. It's already the case that it's better to eat beef than chicken, because cows just have so much more meat per brain. What if we just got rid of the myostatin inhibitor genes or whatever, and then now there's even more meat per cow? Is that better because you have more meat per cow, or is it worse because it's potentially going to lead to the same dynamic of these overgrown, more suffering animals? Which way does that tilt? I think it probably tilts toward more suffering. This is what you see with the history of breeding these chickens to be the kind of mutants they are today. They've achieved a 4x gain in growth rates since the 1950s. That has led to a 2x drop in price, and that has led to a 3x increase in consumption. Because consumption has gone up so dramatically, and the suffering per bird has gone up so dramatically, that has outweighed the benefits of these birds being bigger. But the consumption might have gone up regardless. So actually then it's not clear. To the extent that we hold consumption constant, and maybe we shouldn't, they would have to be suffering 4x as much as a chicken in the 1950s for it not to be a net improvement. I don't know if you disagree with that.…

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