There was a nice article in today’s Washington Post about a trip to an animal sanctuary in New York state. Sometimes the question is posed to vegetarians whether farm animals wouldn’t die out if we all abandoned meat-eating, since the reason that so many cows, pigs, chickens, and other farm animals exist in the first place is because we raise them for food. As a defense of factory farming this is incredibly weak; after all, merely bringing a creature into existence hardly licenses treating that creature any way you like. But as a defense of animal agriculture (suitably reformed) it may seem to have more weight since it does seem like the world would lose something if those animals were to become extinct. However, I wonder if something like these farm animal sanctuaries provide an alternative model for how a “post-meat” society might choose to keep them around.

In his book Animals Like Us the philosopher Mark Rowlands addresses this issue:

One of the consequences of widespread vegetarianism would be a massive reduction in the numbers of these animals. But what’s wrong with this? If, say, there are only 400 cows in the world instead of, say, 400 million, why should this matter? Answer: it does not. Whether it harms any of these cows depends on the individual interests of each cow, and there is no reason to suppose that the interests of an individual cow in any way involve the numbers of others of its kind, at least not as long as there are enough of these others around to provide it with companionship in a normal social setting. The welfare of each individual cow is completely unaffected by whether there are 400 or 400 million others of its kind. Vain and complex species that we are, we tend to worry about things like “the future of the human race.” So, it might be in our interests to have large numbers of humans around, because we worry about such things, and our (overinflated) view of our role in the universal scheme of things demands our continuation. But cows, pigs, chickens, and sheep certainly do not worry about the size of their species. As long as there are enough of them to form a normal social group, they’re happy.

It might be true that the elimination of a species or sub-species is a cause for regret, even if that species has been artificially created by a eugenic selective-breeding regime. But vegetarianism does not require the elimination of species. If we are worried about this, then we can always turn over areas of land — maintained by public funds — for grazing by animals that we currently eat. In a vegetarian world, perhaps we might want to do this anyway, as a living memorial to the morally bankrupt ways of our forbears. (p. 120)

I’m more concerned than Rowlands appears to be that the extinction of species — even an “aritificial” one — might be a bad in itself, despite not affecting the interests of individual animals beyond their need for a sufficiently large social group. Each species is good in its kind and makes up a valuable part of the whole, which would seem to me to tell against its wanton elimination. I also think it might be possible for humans to have benign relationships with farm animals, as both the Post article, much farm writing (e.g. John Katz’s articles), and countless people’s experiences attest. So, preserving the possibility of those unique kinds of relationships might be another reason for making sure farm animal species don’t go extinct, in the unlikely event of widespread vegetarianism. Which is why the farm sanctuary is an intriguing model for post-animal husbandry arrangements.