We've all heard the arguments against meat, and yet in the EU and US, only between 1 and 6% of people don't eat it.

Meat is just too tasty, convenient and ingrained in our culture for most of us to consider giving it up.

Also, food is personal and nobody likes to be morally lectured.

At the same time, we love animals.

Most of us have pets and believe in animal rights.

Few things make the internet as angry as animal cruelty.

Both are true.

We love meat and we love animals.

Unfortunately, most animals we eat live in truly horrible conditions.

We don't torture them for fun, but because it makes meat just a little bit more incredibly cheap.

If we all paid just a tad more, we could avoid most animal suffering, often just for a few pennies per meal.

Disclaimer, farming is complicated.

Many farmers are genuinely trying to give their animals the best life possible, but they're trapped in a complex system with extreme market pressure to keep prices low.

No two countries have the same standards, no two farms are equal and solid data is often scarce.

We've done our best to combine data from different regions and the prices you pay in the end.

To keep things simple, we're going to classify farming practices into three broad groups.

Decent, prisons and torture camps.

This is a bit sketchy, and you've probably seen many more categories in the supermarket, like organic or grass-fed.

We'll come to that later.

So, fellow omnivores, what would it cost us to avoid animal torture and still have our fried chicken?

Chickens.

At any given time, there are about 26 billion chickens alive on Earth, as many as all other birds combined.

Chickens seem dumb, but they're social, can communicate, solve problems and feel empathy.

And yet, we keep the vast majority in insane torture.

Let's start with eggs.

Worldwide, about 90% of laying hens live in torture camps, crammed in extremely tight cages where they can barely move.

They're unable to show any natural chicken behaviour like nesting, roosting, foraging or pecking at the ground, so they become extremely frustrated and end up hurting each other badly.

To stop this, many farms clip their beaks.

In the US and Europe, legal bans and consumer initiatives have improved the situation a lot in the last few years.

But still, more than 50% of hens remain in cages.

The insane thing is that this doesn't even save a lot of money.

Let's say a dozen eggs cost you around 3.60 euros or dollars, 30 cents per egg.

How much does it cost to free the hens?

The main alternative to cages are barn systems.

Hens are still kept indoors, but have twice as much space and roam freely.

Barns are prisons.

Still not amazing, but so much better.

In the EU, barns increase the consumer price by about 2 cents per egg.

The somewhat decent alternative is free range, where hens are allowed outdoors, often with proper access to vegetation.

In the EU, this increases the price by about 7 cents per egg.

Housing aside, one of the cruelest practices is chick culling.

Male chicks don't lay eggs, so they're killed right after birth, usually by gassing or grinding.

This is a really widespread practice used for caged, barn and even organic eggs. 7 billion baby chickens are killed this way each year.

France and Germany have banned this, so many breeding eggs here are scanned early and only female birds hatch, which may have increased costs by only 2 to 5 cents per egg.

So if you pay 85 cents more for a dozen eggs, you can make a difference between serious chicken torture and pretty decent chicken lives.

And for another 60 cents, you can help end chick culling too.

Chicken meat is a different story.

Most meat chickens today are genetic freaks, bred to reach amazing weights incredibly fast.

Their internal organs are under a huge amount of stress, and they can't even walk properly because of their weight, which causes them a lot of pain for much of their lives.

It's hard to give exact numbers here, but if farmers were to switch to breeds that grow slower and suffer far less, a serving of chicken breast that you buy at one and a half dollars would become 9 cents more expensive in the US. 90% of meat chickens in the EU live in prisons or torture camps.

They're kept indoors in extremely crowded conditions, with sometimes dozens of birds per square meter, often in the dark and with poor ventilation.

So what if we moved them all to prisons?

One EU study found that giving them 30% more space, perches, fresh air and daylight would increase the price by another 13 cents per serving.

Probably less than 5% of meat chickens live free range in relatively decent conditions.

This meat is actually noticeably more expensive, double the price of regular chicken.

But chicken is the cheapest meat, so depending on the cut, you'd pay 35 cents to 1 euro or dollar more for a serving of chicken that had a decent life.

Pigs are basically dogs.

They're as intelligent, social and playful as our wolf buddies and make lovable pets.

So pigs really feel how they live and arguably have it the worst of all animals we eat.

Probably more than 90% of all pigs live in torture camps.

They spend their entire lives indoors, in extremely crowded spaces, on concrete floors without straw or bedding.

Since this is far from what they need, they get frustrated and often fight.

Piglets have their tails docked to stop tailbiting.

Most males are castrated after birth so that their meat will taste better, often without pain relief to save time.

Mothers are kept in crates, extremely tight metal straitjackets where they can't move at all.

This leads to extreme suffering for the mother and for the piglets, which are held in a barren area, separated by metal bars and taken away at just 3 weeks old.

Imagine treating dogs like that.

First, let's get to the prison level.

Getting rid of crates would raise the cost of a 2 euro serving of pork by about 20 cents.

Anesthesia for castration costs almost nothing, around 1 cent per kilogram of meat.

And a study in Denmark found that giving pigs more straw and bedding material and 30% more space and other things that are more animal friendly would increase the price per serving by another 20 cents.

This is still an awful life for an animal this intelligent, but obviously much better.

For 40 cents more per serving.

Going one level further and giving pigs outdoor access for at least 40% of their lives and 300 to 400% more space indoors would increase the price per serving by another 80 cents.

Just over 1% of pigs in the EU live in these or similar conditions.

We can't know if this is really okay for such a smart and social animal, but it starts resembling something decent.

And all for about 1.2 dollars or euros more per serving of pig.

Cows raised for meat have it the best because they usually spend about 2 thirds of their lives outdoors, making their lives pretty good.

If they were in the wild, it would be basically the same thing, but less safe.

Their lives are far from perfect though, especially the end.

The vast majority of cows spend the last months of their short lives in finishing feedlots, either prisons or torture camps, where they're fattened to reach their slaughter weight as fast as possible.

Probably less than 5% of beef cattle in the US have lifelong access to outdoor pasture.

And yet, a recent German study found that it only increases the price of beef by around 15%.

The life quality of cows varies widely even within countries and regions, depending on the available land, climates and farming traditions.

So it's really impossible to make more easy and cheap suggestions to make their lives better.

Dairy cows do have it much worse.

They're often kept indoors for most of the year and suffer pain, soul ulcers and lesions from standing on concrete.

But once again, none of these things seem to be needed to have affordable milk.

In Germany, outdoor pasture increases the price of the milk by about 10 cents per liter.

We could go on with many other animals and farming practices, but the summary is clear.

For the animals we eat the most, upgrading their living conditions from outright torture to somewhat decent may cost you about 15% more for beef and milk, 50% for eggs and pork, and 100% for chicken meat.

The meat of the issue.

Opinion part.

Meat has gotten so cheap that we have to torture animals to keep the prices insanely low.

This really is all there is to it.

Food in developed countries is the cheapest it's been in history.

In the US, the largest meat consumer in the world, an average person spends $337 a month on food, $88 on meat, eggs and dairy.

If these became an average 50% more expensive, that would increase the monthly expenditure on food by about $43.

This may sound like a lot, but relative to income, this only means paying as much for food as US consumers did in 1987.

In Germany, the average person spends about €70 a month on meat, eggs and dairy.

If we increased prices by 50% on average to make the lives of these animals better in a really meaningful way, this would rise by about €35 to about €100.

If this still sounds too expensive, it may be because around 20% of all meat people buy is simply thrown away.

Meat got so cheap that we often don't eat it before it goes bad.

It's no longer valuable.

Okay, so if you go shopping, what can you do?

It can feel like you can't do anything as an individual consumer, but this is not true.

The market follows demand.

So if you don't want to buy torture meat, look at the labels on holding conditions.

If there is none, it is torture meat for sure.

If there is, well, it's complicated.

It's often unclear what different labels mean, if they're strictly enforced or legally binding.

Some are great, others whitewashing.

And we haven't talked about the most expensive meat so far, organic meat.

You've probably noticed that many price estimates we've given here don't quite match your experience in the supermarket.

This is in part because some retailers consider ethical products luxury goods and charge an even higher price, and also because many labels like organic, natural, ecological, bio, or the worst of all, biodynamic, often contain a lot of extras or pseudosigns that have nothing to do with animal welfare.

Many but not all of these labels include some of the best practices mentioned before, but not necessarily all.

Organic brands often include, for a lack of a better word, stupid measures, like forbidding GMO feed.

As we covered in another video, banning GMOs doesn't do anything good for you or the animals.

It just makes your food more expensive and seem more natural, while you are consuming unnatural animal breeds, living a deeply unnatural life.

Unfortunately, the label situation in many countries is extremely confusing, often on purpose.

All too often we don't know what we're really buying.

So, grudgingly, if you can afford it and want at least a high chance of torture-free meat, go for the label.

If you can afford it, buy organic.

If you can afford it and have time, research local farms and get your meat from a place you've seen yourself.

There's one exception, too good not to mention.

Mussels.

They suck up carbon and filter water, making coastlines cleaner.

Calling mussels dumb is giving them too much credit.

With no central nervous system and probably no thoughts or pain, they're basically moss.

Really, everyone should eat more mussels.

Okay, let's wrap up.

You don't need to be vegan to think the current situation is unacceptable.

The conditions of most animals we eat are hard to stomach and could all be avoided if we paid as much for meat as our parents did.

Things are slowly getting better, at least in the West.

Consumers can push the industry in the right direction if we bite the bullet and pay more.

If you can't afford this, maybe eat a bit less meat.

Don't throw meat away.

Maybe avoid the worst torture meat like pork, at least sometimes.

And push for legislation that bans the most horrific practices.

We can help make the lives of billions of animals dramatically better.

It really is that simple.

You can only advocate for better policies if you have enough reliable information.

When financial incentives are prioritized, facts can be manipulated or even omitted altogether.

In 2024, many major fast-food chains backtracked on serving chicken that's free from antibiotics and do use it on sick chickens now.

But is this the full story?

To get nuanced perspectives, we draw on Ground News.

We admire them as a long-time sponsor for their aim to provide a balanced account and leave the final conclusion up to you.

This is what we're aiming for as well.

Ground News lets you easily access nearly 100 additional articles published worldwide on these policy changes.

Let's look closer.

Scripps News cites flu outbreaks in farms across the US as causing limited supplies and higher prices.

One source raises concerns that this move could increase the risk of spreading antibiotic resistance amongst humans.

At the same time, the Associated Press reports that Tyson's Senior Director of Animal Welfare noted a plan to use antibiotics known as ionophores, which are claimed to have no effect on human health.

You can easily see the different angles of each publication side-by-side and assess the situation for yourself, plus context like a credibility rating per publication and its source of funding.

Go to ground.news.com or scan the QR code to check it out.

Our link saves you 40% off their unlimited subscription to worldwide coverage and a better way to stay informed.

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