Intensive animal farming can lower pandemic risk? Maybe, but we still shouldn't support it
Animal farming threatens public health by spreading infectious diseases that can jump between species, including humans. But getting people to quit eating meat is just too hard, so let’s just try to slightly reduce this pandemic risk by intensifying animal farming. This is the key message of a new study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
This is a rather shocking message, given that a) the paper does not show that intensive farming systems are unlikely to cause pandemics, only that “technological innovations” could more easily lower the risk than in extensive farming systems, and b) it barely considers the other negative impacts of further intensifying animal farming, including animal welfare, air and water pollution, antibiotic use, or destroying wildlife habitat to grow pesticide-soaked animal feed.
Intensive farming systems are generally thought to worsen disease spread because of animals being crammed together, their low genetic diversity, and poor welfare compromising their immune systems. The study looks at how a switch to more extensive farming systems - which has been proposed as a way to reduce disease risks - would actually increase the risk of animals and humans being exposed to zoonotic diseases because they require more land and higher populations of animals in order to meet current demands for meat. This is yet another reason to be sceptical that free-range or extensive animal farming can solve the problems of how we produce food rather than just creating a different set of problems, but it is not a good reason to therefore double down on intensive animal farming.
The authors of the study acknowledge that both types of animal farming are problematic. “Indoor farms are often associated with high stocking densities and relatively poorer health and welfare standards,” they write, “including increased aggression, stress and injury, though ‘extensive’ (typically low-yield) systems are associated with different welfare problems including increased neonatal mortality, parasitic burdens, thermal stress, predation, hunger and thirst.” They note that a question which remains to be answered is “How to boost livestock health and welfare without compromising yields or biosecurity?” The assumption underlying this question is that animal health and welfare can be safeguarded in intensive farming systems. But the authors do not additionally ask whether good welfare and health may simply not be achievable under such conditions.
The authors acknowledge that “dramatically” reducing meat consumption “could allow widespread restoration of natural habitats, increasing the health of wild populations while also greatly reducing opportunities for [infectious disease] transmission to livestock and people - hence reducing the risks of disease emergence.” But given that meat consumption is expected to keep increasing globally, “it is important to determine how any non-zero demand for livestock products can be met at least cost in terms of [emerging infectious disease] risks.” In short, they know that a global shift to plant-based diets is the best bet for avoiding more pandemics and protecting wildlife, but they think we should settle for a worse scenario where there is no change to levels of meat consumption.
This conclusion reveals the problems with looking at only one aspect of animal farming and how to ‘improve’ it. We have seen this ad nauseam with greenhouse gas emissions from animal farming. Reducing methane from cows has become such a focal point in debates about making food production more sustainable that false solutions like masks to catch cow burps are gaining traction (and funding). Animal welfare and other considerations fall by the wayside as companies seek out ways to make emissions savings that may not even be scalable without fundamentally changing anything about the food system.
The Royal Society paper does make a passing nod to other impacts of switching to more intensive farming, including how it could squeeze subsistence farmers in developing countries out of the market. But it then suggests that “broader considerations around environmental sustainability and food security will be heavily context dependent” and that integrating concerns about zoonotic diseases into ecosystem service frameworks could be a way to mainstream “disease control into a holistic understanding of optimal farming practices.” This is a wild sentence in a paper that present extensive or intensive animal farming as our only choices - a dichotomy that is not holistic and that does not actually represent optimal farming practices. It also isn’t hard to imagine meat producers seizing on this idea to claim that they are actually providing ecosystem services by cramming thousands of animals into barns or cages and feeding them on crops that may well come from deforested land in vulnerable habitats.
Aside from a sweeping dismissal of the potential for reducing meat consumption - which could be achieved using policy levers, financial incentives, and by implementing effective behavioural change measures - the study also ignores another option that would be even more effective than intensive farming at reducing zoonotic disease risks: lab-grown meat. This is a pretty considerable oversight since the paper assumes continued increases in meat consumption globally. Since achieving the shift to more biosecure-intensive farming systems that the study proposes would require political and financial support, it’s strange that it does not consider mobilising those same resources in favour of a promising alternative to animal farming for getting people to eat more sustainably without changing their diets.
Finally, the paper fails to consider that there is growing public concern about farmed animal welfare. Rather than expecting people to accept lower standards for the sake of avoiding zoonotic disease spread, we should be seeking to capitalise on that sentiment to encourage them toward plant-based diets.
Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.
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