But most people are not philosophers or activists. Most people are like Mark, a hog farmer in Iowa I spoke to last fall. He has 4,000 sows. He shows me a video on his phone: a newborn piglet, shivering, and Mark’s teenage daughter wrapping it in a towel and putting it inside her coat.
“I love my pigs,” he says. “I hate the day they go to the plant. But this is my mortgage. This is her college fund.”
He has installed enrichment toys—chains and rubber balls—because bored pigs bite each other’s tails, and tail-docking is bad for business. He has not installed open pens because open pens lead to more crushing deaths of piglets. He is maximizing welfare within the constraints of profit.
Is he a monster? No. Is he a liberator? No. He is most of us: trapped in a system he did not invent, doing small kindnesses while participating in a large violence.
For centuries, the relationship between humans and animals was framed by utility. Animals were tools—for labor, for food, for clothing, and for scientific progress. But over the last fifty years, a profound philosophical and ethical shift has occurred. We are no longer asking simply, "What can animals do for us?" but rather, "What do we owe them?"
This question has fractured into two distinct, often conflicting, camps: Animal Welfare and Animal Rights. While the general public often uses these terms interchangeably, understanding the chasm between them is essential to navigating the modern debate about our moral obligations to non-human beings.
I began with Gus the golden retriever and No. 8471 the pig. Let me end with one more animal: a battery hen in a conventional cage. The cage is the size of an iPad. She cannot stretch her wings. Her beak has been seared off with a hot blade to stop her from pecking her neighbors to death—a behavior that emerges only because confinement drives her mad. But most people are not philosophers or activists
She will live 18 months. She will lay 300 eggs. Then she will be sent to a gas chamber.
The welfare advocate says: give her a larger cage, a perch, some straw. The rights advocate says: there is no such thing as a humane egg. The farmer says: this is how you feed eight billion people.
And the hen? She has no words. But she has a brain stem that floods with cortisol when the light flips on at 4 a.m. She has feathers that itch to be spread. She has, in her small, fierce way, a life that she is fighting to continue.
The question is not whether we can confine her. We can. The question is not whether we should—the answer to that, for a growing number of humans, is an uncomfortable “probably not.”
The real question is: what are we willing to give up to make our morals match our knowledge?
We know she suffers. We always have. What we are only now admitting is that her suffering matters—not because of what she can do for us, but simply because it is hers. He shows me a video on his phone:
That admission is the seed of a revolution. It has not yet flowered. But for the first time in human history, you can feel it growing.
And the floor of the cage is beginning to shake.
In 2022, a court in New York denied a writ of habeas corpus for an elephant named Happy at the Bronx Zoo. The Nonhuman Rights Project argued that Happy, who could recognize herself in a mirror (a test of self-awareness), was being unlawfully detained. The court disagreed, ruling that rights are for humans only.
But the dissenting judge, Jenny Rivera, wrote something startling: “The question is not whether a nonhuman animal can be imprisoned, but whether she can be imprisoned unlawfully.”
That same year, Spain passed a law recognizing animals as “sentient beings,” not objects. France followed. Germany’s constitution now mentions “animal protection” alongside human dignity. In 2015, an Argentine court granted habeas corpus to a chimpanzee named Cecilia, ordering her release from a zoo to a sanctuary.
These are not victories for full rights. They are, at best, “weak rights”—protections that still allow ownership. But they are tectonic plates shifting. But this is my mortgage
Meanwhile, the ballot box has become a battlefield. In 2018, California passed Proposition 12, banning the sale of pork from pigs confined in gestation crates, even if the pork was raised outside the state. The pork industry sued, arguing that one state cannot regulate farming methods in another. In 2023, the Supreme Court upheld the law. The message: the public’s moral disgust with extreme confinement can override commerce.
Here is the prediction that keeps me up at night: The animal rights debate will not be won by moral argument. It will be won by technology.
Cultivated meat—grown from cells, no slaughter required—is already legal in Singapore and the US. Plant-based products from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are in every grocery store. In 10 to 20 years, the cost of slaughter-free meat will drop below the cost of factory-farmed meat.
At that moment, the question shifts. When you no longer need to kill a pig to get a pork chop, what is your justification for doing so? Tradition? Taste pleasure? These are weak moral shields.
The philosopher Korsgaard puts it this way: “You cannot defend an act of violence by saying, ‘But I enjoy it.’”