Our greatest act of self-sabotage? Why it’s time for a global approach to animal welfare

Incorporating animal welfare into global policy making is not only morally right – it’s necessary for human’s continued existence.

How we treat non-human animals is one of the most divisive, complex and polarising issues of our time. While scientific research has offered overwhelming evidence that many species possess complex emotional landscapes and unique cognitive abilities to qualify them as sentient beings, progress in animal welfare legislation and attitudes has been contentious and slow. Indeed, we might now baulk at the idea of bear baiting and circuses featuring exotic animals. But the reaction to the fate of industrial-farmed animals is far more muted.

Arguably, we are no less cruel to non-human animals than we were 200 years ago; we have just got a lot better at hiding it. Hidden away in vast, windowless, cramped sheds are the billions of sentient, aware and emotionally complex beings that live and die on the production line. The numbers alone are astounding. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that 92.2 billion land animals, are killed yearly, 124 billion farmed fish and up to 2 trillion wild fish are killed every year. In terms of scale, the suffering of non-human animals has never been greater.

The damaging impact of ‘human exceptionalism’

Society tends to avoid any meaningful debate on human exceptionalism: the idea that humans are superior to other animals. Consideration of non-human entities is, at best, marginal. Animal welfare policy is siloed, if it exists at all. Global protection of animals is mainly missing from international law. The UN agenda still lacks a specific goal on animal welfare. A technocratic-industrial worldview plays out in the global policy space. It places humans as the sole repository of intrinsic worth and all other life forms as having no inherent moral consequence beyond their ‘value-use’ to humans.

Ethics aside, this prevailing attitude is increasingly becoming the greatest act of self-sabotage and an own goal in terms of human well-being and health. How we treat animals is entangled with global health in many ways and is ever more reflected in disease trends and complex global health emergencies. Research suggests 75% of emerging infectious diseases and 61% of all human infections come from animals. Or, more accurately (yet far less articulated), they come from humans’ unsustainable behaviours towards animals and the environment in the form of factory farming, deforestation and wild animal consumption. In tandem, antimicrobial resistance (when viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites stop responding to antimicrobial medicines) presents an existential threat to human health and a regression to a pre-antibiotic age. Up to 88% of antimicrobials are estimated to end up in animals raised for food.

The link between animal welfare and climate change

Human-made climate change is also intertwined with the production, use, and consumption of non-human animals. Global food production is responsible for 35% of all greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE), and the use of animals as food and livestock feed is responsible for nearly 60% of all food production emissions.

At the current rate of global meat consumption, and even if zero GHGE were met in other contributing sectors, agriculture alone will consume all the carbon the world can use if we want to stop the global temperature rising above 2C by 2050.

This means that incorporating animal welfare into global policy making is not only a moral imperative but also a strategic necessity for human welfare and existence. With so much at stake, it’s time to give this critical issue the attention it deserves.