Can I microdose veganism?

Before we begin this week, an announcement.

I'm doing a live event in Brooklyn at the Bell House on September 26th at 6:30 p.m.

It's with Stephen Dubner from Freakonomics.

I'm interviewing him

and he's interviewing me.

It's unheard of, it's experimental, it might be chaotic.

If you want to come see it, there might still be tickets.

We'll have a link in the show description.

The Bell House, September 26th.

And then for our European listeners, October 3rd, get yourself to Amsterdam.

We're doing a live event with the whole Search Engine team.

The venue, I cannot pronounce the name of the venue.

I'm not going to make you laugh trying, but it's a beautiful old church.

October 4th, Amsterdam.

That link will also be in the show notes.

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Welcome to Search Engine.

I'm PJ Vote.

There's big questions, there's small questions, and then there's moral questions.

You can't really answer those in a breezy podcast episode.

And if we're being honest, if you are living as a proper adult, nobody else really should answer them for you.

But sometimes other people can help.

The very first episode of our show, our preview episode, was about how sad the monkeys were in the zoo.

It was sort of a lark, but I find myself lately thinking more about animals than I ever meant to.

I've always loved my dog, but lately I've been thinking about all the other animals.

Mainly the delicious ones.

I think it's mostly a social thing.

My life has quietly filled up with vegans, vegetarians, and meat avoiders.

They're not preachy.

They're just quietly making a choice next to me, and it's hard not to notice it.

I'm a very curious, but ultimately pretty lazy person, and the commitment and effort required to not eat what most of society is eating is, I think, beyond me.

But lately I was wondering, Is there a way to be a little bit better?

Like, with climate change, I find the problem interesting.

I'm not going to stop flying, but I'm happy to fly less.

I am micro-dosing climate concern.

I'm curious, would it be possible to micro-dose veganism?

By which I mean, what is the minimum effort I could put in to derive the absolute maximum benefit?

I talked to a friend of mine who is macro-dosing all this, who thinks deeply about this stuff.

And we had a conversation I really enjoyed.

I'm going to share that conversation with you.

This person is a writer who spends a lot of time reporting on animals and our strange relationships to them.

The first thing I just need to do is say, hello.

Hi.

Can you introduce yourself?

Yes.

My name is Annie Lowry, and I am a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Okay, so I want to step back for a moment and just like talk about where you come into all this.

Like, I feel like it's not your only beat, but one of your beats as a writer, I would describe as like human relationship to animals.

Yes.

So I want to ask you about more of your reporting in general.

I also just want to ask, do you eat animals?

I don't.

And how did you decide not to?

I haven't for a long time.

I was like a slippery slope vegetarian.

So I ate meat for most of my life.

And then at some point was like, okay, I'm going to try to stop eating the low welfare stuff.

So I was like, okay, I'm going to try to eat animals that have lived a pretty good life, high welfare.

As a vegetarian for a long time, and I can talk about why I think that that's not really a useful moral category.

I think you're better off eating beef and like oysters than you are eating eggs and dairy.

Annie's perspective, which I find pretty surprising, is that if you decide to care about animals, the correct first step might not be avoiding meat.

Her point of view, and I find it persuasive, is that the problem isn't so much that we kill animals, it's everything we do to them before we kill them.

And while some of the animals we kill to eat have pretty good lives first, most of the animals we get dairy and eggs from have a very rough time.

Annie had just written a story about that, which we're going to dig into later.

But for now, I was just trying to get a sense of what is it like inside the brain of a human who has decided to look directly into the sun of animal welfare.

A choice I can feel my brain strongly avoiding.

I guess one of the reasons I ask is like, it's something I've wondered about with you

I feel like we've eaten meals together.

We have.

One of the things that I appreciate is like, I knew you were either vegan or vegan-ish, but I never feel particularly like

I've had vegan friends.

When your story came out, I sent it to a friend of mine who had grown up vegan.

It's like, check this out.

My friend of the story.

He immediately messaged me back.

Let me actually find it.

It was really funny.

He's such a dick.

He said,

God, I'm like blowing him up on a podcast.

I love it.

Not Not by name.

Name him.

Name him and say his phone number and his social.

How dare he care about things?

Okay, I said,

this was my friend's piece.

And he said, did your lactose intolerance switch to ethical intolerance afterwards?

Wow.

And then he said, sorry, sounded more confrontational than

that.

I love it.

I feel like you're trying to lead by example, but I never feel like you're trying to lead by persuasion, which I guess I appreciate.

Yeah, I wrote a whole piece about this.

You can't persuade people.

It's so fascinating to me.

We have had 50 years of animal animal rights and vegan activism that has not increased the share of vegetarians in the United States at all.

None.

Zero.

Zero.

Like a completely unsuccessful social movement.

Completely and totally unsuccessful social movement.

You can get people to kind of maybe go veganish or vegetarian a little bit on the margin.

It never sticks.

Yeah.

It's a really hard cause.

People don't want to be told that they are participating in something evil.

They don't want to feel bad about themselves in that way.

And it's just a really hard sell.

Like, oh, all those meals that your grandmother made you, those were cruel and immoral.

That's an awful message to deliver to somebody.

Like, oh, you want ice cream because your boyfriend broke up with you.

Why don't you think about the animal, right?

Nobody likes it.

Well, what I appreciate about your work is that you're kind of like, you're not that at all.

But what I often see you doing is kind of just like asking in this very curious and open way,

well,

why does our compassion extend to animals at all?

And when it does extend and when we find the walls and boundaries of it, can we look at those walls and boundaries and like try to understand them?

Okay, so here's our plan for the episode today.

I'm gonna get Annie to tell two stories about animals.

And what I like about these stories is I think we have this idea of moral intuition, this idea that our gut will tell us the right thing to do.

And sometimes it works.

But in these cases, I think our gut sends us totally in the wrong direction.

I think you'll see what I mean in a second.

So the first story is a tragic comedy about a very, very bizarre form of mistreatment of birds that upset a lot of people and upsets me.

And also, confusingly, makes me giggle.

Can you just, can you tell me the Yellville story?

Yeah, Yellville, Arkansas.

It's beautiful.

It's in Ozarks and

a really tiny town.

And it happens to be in a part of the United States that has a lot of turkey processing.

So they grow a lot of turkeys and they process a lot of turkeys.

And they've had this tradition for like 70 years.

It's at this kind of fall festival that they have called the Turkey Trot.

And they would throw turkeys out of low-flying aircraft.

What's this?

It's turkeys in the sky as part of Yelville's 22nd annual wild turkey balling contest.

This is the most arranged archival footage I've ever witnessed.

1969, a little turboprop plane in a bright blue sky, some lunatic aboard merrily tossing turkeys from the heavens.

In the air, they flap as wildly and desperately as you would in the same predicament.

Flying down is easy for the big birds.

Their troubles only start when they get caught.

You see a man walking away holding a giant turkey.

This is a fun, wholesome activity for the whole family every year in this rural town.

The town dropping around 10 turkeys from a plane, the townspeople gathering below, hoping to catch one for dinner.

The only problem, contrary to what this smooth-voiced anchor has just claimed, flying down is not, quote, easy for the big birds.

Stop and ask yourself, when was the last time you looked up at the vast blue sky and watched a turkey soar majestically through it?

Turkeys don't really fly.

Right.

They can kind of catch the wind sometimes.

So the turkeys you probably eat, like a butterball turkey at Thanksgiving, that turkey is not going to be able to fly at all.

They are so big.

They are so heavy.

They might like flap a little bit, but it's, you know, it'd be like sticking two tiny wings on like a dishwasher, right?

Like it's just not going to be able to fly.

And so they're dropping a flightless bird from a flying plane.

And so what happens is what you would assume would happen, which is that the bird falls to the ground and either dies or is terribly injured.

Yes.

And they're using generally sort of the heritage turkeys.

So the dark feathered ones.

If you're buying like a really nice Thanksgiving turkey, it might be one of these.

And those turkeys are better flyers.

And I would also note, because I always get commentary about this, wild turkeys can kind of fly, but they're not good flyers.

They're not going to fly long distances, right?

Like they can get up into trees and things like that.

I'm not saying that they can't fly, but they're not.

It's funny sometimes seeing a peek into someone else's email inbox, like the stuff you can do.

These people are like, I've seen them.

And I'm like, trust me, they're bad flyers.

These are not hawks.

These are not eagles.

They're not sparrows.

They're not pigeons.

And

that was exactly it.

So, anyway, in Yellowville, so they throw the turkeys out of this like low-flying aircraft.

They do this for literally decades.

And some of the birds die immediately.

Some of the birds die of shock or stress.

They have like heart attacks, basically, because they're so upset by this.

A lot of them are injured.

Some of them survive.

Annie says, News of the Yellowville tradition really began to pick up heat when tabloids got a hold of the story.

The National Enquirer sent reporters to Yellville in the 1980s.

They published a gruesome report about a turkey hitting a power line on its way down from the sky, then trying to run on two broken legs, before finally being crushed to death under a scrum of children who were competing for possession of the bird.

The whole scene like something out of a Deadpool movie, albeit one that's been recast with poultry.

The National Enquirer article, very generous with details such as these.

They have this like really amazingly overwritten story.

And then at some point, PETA hears about it and PETA gets involved.

And PETA is just great at whipping folks up.

They're like, this is terrible.

There's this whole campaign to shut it down.

An outrageous 80-year-old tradition.

Stateline, Yellville, Arkansas, where locals throw live turkeys out of airplanes during an annual turkey trot.

Turkey terrorism.

Yeah, it's true.

Whammo, verify it.

Turkey terrorism.

To many Americans, what was happening here was outrageous.

And yet, here's where it begins to get tricky.

Our code of conduct towards the animals we eat is pretty unwritten.

The rules with people are clear.

You can almost never kill them.

And as we have established on this show, under no circumstances should you eat them, even if they're already dead.

But those animals like turkeys, who we do eat, to many Yellow citizens, it was not so clear why dropping them out of a plane first was so bad.

Was it against the law?

We checked Arkansas law, and yes, this does violate animal cruelty statutes.

It's cruel and inhumane.

So why isn't anyone being charged?

We dialed up the Marion County, Arkansas Sheriff, Clinton Evans.

He says for them to pursue any kind of investigation, somebody's got to go to their office in person and formally file a complaint.

And since the cops weren't going to do anything about the turkeys, like these are people from this community.

Why would they stop it and be like, okay, let's get that plane's tag number and go and try and find it?

People had tried to get the FAA involved because they were like.

They wanted the FAA to regulate.

Exactly.

They were like, can you throw turkeys out of planes?

This doesn't seem like a great idea.

And the FAA is basically like, yeah, we're not getting involved in this.

It's so funny, though, because they're asking the questions that I think you're asking in a much more serious way, which is like,

who's the regulatory authority who would actually intervene on behalf of an animal who we believe is being mistreated?

They're just asking it in a very like

disorganized fashion.

Yeah, completely.

The turkey tossing goes on for decades.

Danny says that over the years, the local Chamber of Commerce receives thousands of angry messages, some callers threatening to throw the town's children from airplanes.

Finally, the town relents.

In 2018, an announcement is made that while the town's turkey festival will continue, it will no longer feature turkey drops.

And Annie decides this is the year that she wants to go to Yellville to check things out.

So I went to Yellville to talk to people about this,

in part because there was just so much, there's such strong partisans on either side.

And a lot of folks in Yellville, many of whom work in turkey processing, are like, you have national media attention.

Over 10 birds, not all of whom die, some of whom survived, at the same time that we are like an agriculturally dependent community where, you know, every fall we eat 45 million turkeys that live life in warehouses and get slaughtered when they're like a few months old.

Isn't there some irony here?

This is the first fact that's abundantly clear when Annie arrives in Yellowville, a piece of context mostly missing from the national stories.

Many Yelleville residents make a living slaughtering the turkeys that the rest of us mindlessly eat.

Unlike us, they are familiar with the conditions in turkey slaughterhouses.

I'm not going to go full PETA on you here, but here's one postcard.

One way we kill turkeys is to shackle them by their feet upside down on a kind of demonic conveyor belt and then dunk them into electrified water.

It's called an electric bath.

Their throats are slit and then we toss them into a separate pool of water, this one scalding hot.

The Yellville residents in the turkey slaughterhouse were used to this.

It's part of why our outrage was so confusing to them.

You can shock a turkey to death, but you can't toss them from a plane?

It seemed like a strange standard.

But in 2018, when Annie arrived in Yellville, she found a town adjusting to life under the new no turkeys from airplanes regime.

I didn't see any turkeys thrown out of planes, but you know, I'm talking to a ton of people.

And then towards the end of this conversation, I was talking to this guy who was involved.

And he was like, oh, you know, there were turkeys that were thrown out of planes.

I was like, what are you talking about?

I was there the entire time.

And he was like, oh, well, they weren't thrown out of planes, but they threw them like off of a truck.

Like they had gone to someplace high and thrown them out of a truck.

And again, I was like, I did not see that.

I was not there.

And he was like, well, I wasn't there either, but I heard about it.

And so I managed to get Daisy chained to this guy.

And he was like, yeah, we decided to have like a little festival within the festival to do some turkey throwing.

And like, you know, nobody got hurt.

It was wonderful.

Everybody loved it.

And that was the kind of end of the piece.

Wait, so they threw turkeys off a truck and the turkeys actually, it was from a height at which the turkeys would not, they may not have enjoyed it, but they would not have died.

Yeah, I don't think it was like so high.

A satisfying victory for political moderation in America.

Turkeys thrown from a reasonable vehicle, a truck, not an unreasonable one, a plane.

I find this whole story nearly perfect.

It's dark in a way I appreciate.

Parts make me laugh.

Other parts kind of hurt.

The part that hit me most directly in the chest is this moment where Annie visits a local animal sanctuary.

This is where the turkeys who have survived the plane drop and not been eaten have been left to live out the rest of their lives, which must be profoundly confusing lives.

At At the sanctuary, Annie meets this one turkey named George.

In the piece, she writes that this encounter with George made her cry, and that she felt surprised by her own reaction.

I asked her to read a section from the story.

There was like two excerpts from that story.

I want to ask you if you could read your own writing.

Is that okay?

Yeah, totally.

I felt nothing.

for the turkeys whose legs were for sale at the Yelville turkey drop and nothing for the birds in the surrounding hills.

Even when I knew they were sitting crowded by their neighbors, legs broken and beak cut, awaiting the electric bath and the scalding tank and the dinner table.

Felt nothing for the turkey toms threshed to death as soon as they were born.

Something for the birds chucked out of the plane, flapping wildly to stay upright.

I felt something for the birds panting and panicking when caught by children below, pinned down with their heavy breasts and thick thighs and thin bones.

I felt perhaps too much for George, that fabulous ham of a turkey that had rushed out to greet me, but was too shy to take some tomato out of my hand.

To think this way and to feel this way is, of course, to be human.

To paraphrase Joseph Stalin, one turkey thrown out of a plane is a tragic comedy.

46 million turkeys killed in a slaughterhouse is Thanksgiving dinner.

You can hold the suffering of one being in your head and your heart, but the suffering of many becomes static.

I mean, when you're writing that, like

you're someone who is actually kind of holding the suffering of many beings in your head, like you're making a decision as someone who doesn't eat meat or dairy or eggs to live in a way that is socially inconvenient and a little weird and that everyone's like, are you judging me?

And you're because you're like, I just want to make a choice to do something that will cause less suffering.

When you encounter people caring about some some turkeys and not caring about other turkeys and like throwing turkeys from planes, but then grabbing those turkeys and taking them to sanctuaries and like when you see people living in a land of what is almost certainly like cognitive dissonance, what do you as a human think and feel?

I get it.

One, when I was earlier in my veganism, I had this rule for myself, which was that if I was maintaining a vegan diet and avoiding things like buying leather or fur or products that I knew were tested on animals, that I didn't have to like go look at vegan propaganda or really just go look at what the food system was actually doing.

But if I wanted to eat meat and dairy and buy leather goods and all of that, that I should really understand what I was doing and what I was purchasing.

And I had to go look at it.

And the information is out there.

In other words, the deal Annie made with herself a long time ago was that if she was going to eat animal products, she had to know a lot about the lives of the animals that were providing those products.

She could be a vegan and not have to know, or she could eat meat and cheese, but have to know.

She did this because she knew that she had empathy for animals, but she had this intuition even back then that the system was set up to estrange her from that empathy.

And I actually think that I, in that sense, was similar to everybody, which is that people don't want animals to suffer at all.

Your average person is an animal lover, and I think is really sincere about that.

You can look at how people treat their dogs and their cats and they don't want animals to live lives of pain and fear and then have this really horrible end either, but they also don't want to think about it.

They want somebody else to think about it.

They want to trust that there is a system that is protecting animals.

What Annie is saying is that this funny moral glitch that we care about 10 turkeys shot from a plane more than the 46 million turkeys slaughtered for Thanksgiving.

That glitch is actually something you could maybe work with.

People care.

You can start with that.

They don't care enough to go vegan en masse, but they do care enough to try a little harder if you give them a way to do it that's easy.

And the best way to do that might be to improve the underlying food system.

The same way nobody really minded a few years ago when we all switched to LED light bulbs.

It was just better for the environment.

It didn't ask very much of us.

Maybe you could do something similar here.

That's the good news.

But the thing is, right now, our version of that more humane system, it's not working very well.

Annie's second story is about exactly that.

It's about dairy and why it's very hard, even if you're willing to pay through the nose, to find milk you could drink in America that's been procured in a way that's really any kinder than the Yellow Turkey Drop.

After the break, the story of Cow 13039.

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Welcome back to the show.

So the second story Annie had for me was not about turkeys.

It was about cows, one cow in particular.

Okay, so can you just tell me the story of how you first met cow 13039?

In the fall, I was contacted by the head of a farmed animal advocacy group called Farm Forward

and a guy named Andrew.

He used to be involved with the organization that checks the welfare and sort of sets the welfare standard for the meat that you see in Whole Foods.

And he said that he had gotten information from a number of whistleblowers, both people who had worked on these farms and worked with the farm

over a period of years.

And he says this is significant because typically a whistleblower report might just come from one single person with some cell phone videos.

This case was already unusual just in how many people had been alarmed.

I've read the report.

It's pretty hard to look at.

What stuck in my mind are just these close-up shots of cows in the late stages of severe eye infections with pus or what looks like a bloody hole where an eye should be.

There's also just lots of cow skeletons.

According to the report, there was at least one instance of mass cow death.

One of the whistleblowers alleged that a hay delivery had come so late that the hungry cows had stampeded and trampled each each other, many dying in the stampede, other cows having to be euthanized soon after.

It's grisly.

It's also very strange.

What made this report so unusual was the specific farm it targeted.

A family-owned dairy farm with an incredibly sterling reputation, customers paid a premium for their milk.

The price works out to over 17 bucks a gallon, in large part because they were told the cows here were treated exceptionally well.

This wasn't like a big factory farm company.

This was a farm that is almost kind of famous and considered really best of class in terms of dairy production.

That interested me about it in part because I was skeptical, right?

I was like, you're telling me that this farm that's really notable for having high animal welfare standards is abusing animals.

So I was looking through all of these photographs and videos and I was just like, well, how do I know what's going on here?

What annie knows what i didn't know is that sometimes photos that look gruesome can just be images of ordinary and acceptable practices at an american dairy farm without context a lot of things look bad so annie decides to do some more reporting she flies to california she goes to a cow auction house like where people bid on cows they want to buy according to whistleblowers cows from the dairy farm had been showing up at this auction house looking very sick.

So we decide to go to the auction.

Wait, can I ask a stupid question?

Yeah, of course.

So

there's like cows that we eat.

Yes.

And there's dairy cows that we get milk from.

Yes.

We also eat them.

Okay.

So when a dairy cow, when we are done like getting dairy from a dairy cow and we're talking about a dairy cow going to auction, they're going to auction presumably to be slaughtered and eaten.

Yes.

So dairy cows are kind of beef cows with a job to do first.

I see.

Beef cows, they're both male and female, and most beef cows in the United States are kept on range.

They're kept outside in big herds, and they're not really messed with, right?

Until they are brought to a feedlot to fatten up, and then they're sent to slaughter.

That's the life cycle of your average beef cow in the U.S.

Dairy cows are inseminated or bred.

The calves are taken away.

The male calves are generally not worth very much because they can't become dairy cows and they don't make great meats.

You're not going to spend a lot of money raising them and fattening them up.

So the male calves often are slaughtered quite quickly and they become something like dog food.

The dairy cows then are milked for a couple years, somewhere between usually two and six years, and then they also become sort of lower quality beef.

Something I didn't notice talking in the room, but which struck me later listening to the tape of this conversation.

Annie has a careful and specific way of talking about all this.

She is someone who, by her current social standards, cares too much about animals, which means in order to fit into our society and in order to have a shot at showing people how she sees things, she has to talk about this stuff pretty gingerly.

She has a neutral, almost clinical way of saying, yes, factory farms do force mother cows to be pregnant all the time and take their sons to make dog food, but she has to say stuff like that without too much passion.

Because someone telling you this stuff, even though it's true, can pretty easily feel like emotional manipulation or breakfast terrorism.

It's completely possible we will use animals this way forever.

It's also possible we might one day look back at this as barbaric.

If we do, our descendants will wonder, how did the people who'd already figured out that this was wrong live among the rest of us?

They must have felt completely crazy all the time.

watching us pet our dogs while drinking a glass of milk.

Which brings us back to these dairy cows.

We milk them their whole lives.

When we're done with them, some of them are sent to auction houses, like the one where Annie now found herself.

And the auction is, you know, this isn't Sotheby's.

It is like a small kind of rickety roadside operation.

This is in the far north of California.

It's like four or five hours north of San Francisco.

So it's sort of in the middle of nowhere.

And it's a public auction.

You can go sit on like it's these plywood bleachers and cows come in, and the auctioneer sort of mumble chants.

And the cows get a fire.

It's the same, like, like the auctioneer picture in my head, where it's like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Exactly.

That's what's happening.

That is precisely what's happening.

There's cowboy hats involved.

And a lot of the cows are going for like a couple dollars per pound, $2 per pound, maybe.

And then some other cows go for really, really cheap, like five cents a pound, 10 cents a pound.

And after the auction was over, later that night, all of the animals that were sold are kept in these pens back behind the auction house.

And so we went with one of the buyers of some of the cows to look at them and got a copy of the auction affidavit, which is a legal document kind of showing the chain of title of who's owned a cow.

And you can look at the cow's ear tag and see who owned it.

And some of these cows came from this farm.

One of the cows from the farm who Annie meets is a small brown cow with the tag number 13039.

This was the cow that would grab her attention above all the the others.

There's a video of you asking about this specific cow.

Can you just describe what happens in that video?

Yes.

So this is in the back of the auction, and that was when I saw

more closely just how kind of little and skinny cow 13039 was.

Oh, little baby.

Annie was here with some of the whistleblowers.

They were helping her understand what she was witnessing.

Just explain what you just did for me.

So she's still producing milk, so this cow has been recently milked.

Absolutely.

This is your A2A2 milk.

This is A2A2 milk.

And one of her eyes was like cloudy and roomy, and then the other one was covered with a denim eye patch.

Okay.

Which was notable.

She was the only cow there with a denim eye patch.

So I kind of helped to sort of work up the denim patch's edge, and the patch was glued directly onto her orbital rim.

And I'm kind of like very, very gently gently like using my finger, right?

Like to sort of get it.

And at some point, one of the folks who was there just pulls it off.

And

her eye

kind of half falls out.

It swells out of the socket.

Wow.

And it's still attached to her skull by sinew and some of the tissue internal to the eye.

And there's, you know, musculature there.

My question to you guys is, shouldn't they have done something about this?

This is like something out of a horror movie.

Yeah.

It was bloody and pussy.

It smelled really bad.

And I asked when the ranchers there, I was like, what has happened here?

And all of the folks there who work in the dairy or the cattle industry were like, well, that's cancer eye.

It was so surprising to me.

We didn't know that there were going to be any cows from this farm when we went there.

And we did not know that there was going to be a that so clearly should have been euthanized probably some time ago.

Yeah.

A cow this sick shouldn't have been transported, should have received medical care a long time ago, shouldn't have been sent to auction.

This was a cow that, you know, if you were facing the question of do you send this cow to auction or do you euthanize on site?

I don't know why you wouldn't have euthanized on site.

This cow's poor health was a strong piece of evidence that the whistleblower report might be accurate.

But remember the problem from Yellowville.

Annie needed to find out not is there something here that might make people upset,

she needed to find out, is an actual rule being broken?

You look at this cow and you feel like, as a person, like something here is wrong.

A lot of people have looked at this cow and thought something here is wrong.

Maybe this is too basic a question, but is this a crime?

Is the right way to think of this as a crime?

What

is criminal is

socially socially constructed, right?

And in the case of animals,

we might think that we have a standard for how we want to treat animals in our care in this country.

And we kind of set that standard that they should have medical care, that they should have adequate food and water, that they shouldn't have painful things done to their bodies without anesthesia, that they should be euthanized quickly if they are in pain and they can't be treated.

But what I think has happened is kind of the opposite.

We've understood what it takes to produce food inexpensively and reliably at mass scale.

And whatever that requires of animals is what is legal.

Well, it also sort of reminds me of the Yellowville story, where it's like, it's both, yes, we have animal cruelty laws, but perhaps how those are going to be interpreted by the local law enforcement is subjective.

And in a community where a lot of people are working in farming, this is their job and they're there every day.

And they're used to even things like killing animals, which like a lot of Americans would just not want to do.

And for them, the idea that like all of a sudden the cops would run in and start arresting people for what was happening to a cow probably just seems completely insane.

Absolutely.

To zoom out here for a second, I have this habit sometimes of being too persuaded by whoever I'm talking to.

I find other people's ideas very contagious.

But I'm not saying I think the police should be arresting more people for cow mistreatment.

It's more just talking to Annie about all this, I realize I've misunderstood vegans, or at least I've misunderstood her.

I thought the people who didn't eat animal products found the idea of killing animals to be too abhorrent, and sure, some of them do, but vegans like Annie are saying something else.

What they're saying is, we've built a system that largely just cares about our food being cheap.

That system does not care enough about how much pain it inflicts on the animals it depends on, or the environment, or the lives of the workers.

And some vegans would like to reform that system.

But because the system resists reform, they're abstaining from it instead.

I get that now.

So, to return to the story of the small brown cow who Annie met, Cow13039,

here's how that story ended.

Cow13039 ended up selling at auction for 10 cents a pound.

It worked out to about $119.

But even at that price, the cow was a bad deal.

She was too sick to have her infected eye removed.

And so instead she was condemned, shot by a farmhand about 10 hours after Annie had met her.

Annie kept reporting, and a couple of months later, she decides she's ready to go talk to the people who run the farm.

She would go there, and they would say the story the whistleblowers were telling her, it wasn't quite true.

That the real story was a lot more complicated.

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Welcome back to the show.

So earlier this year, after months of reporting, talking to veterinarians, lawyers, whistleblowers, Annie goes to visit the dairy farm.

This is one of the largest organic dairy farms in the country.

4,500 cows producing 4,000 calves per year.

It's actually on multiple farm sites with hours of driving time between them.

The farm is just impossibly beautiful.

In this kind of, you know, there's like wild elk roaming around and flocks of wild birds.

And the cows are really out there on pasture.

They really, really are.

This is Northern California, so it's really mild, wet weather.

And they're kept out in these kind of like beautiful fields all by the ocean.

Lots of space.

If you were reincarnated as a cow in America, this would be one of the farms you would think you would want to be reincarnated into.

I would rather be a beef cow than a dairy cow, but this is, it is physically beautiful.

And I think that there's a lot of things about the farm where they're doing it well.

This dairy farm, I should say, has more than 10 different industry certifications.

The fancy labels you would see on the side of the milk carton, regenerative organic, certified humane, USDA organic, which just means that coming into this final leg of her reporting, Annie was trying to figure out how a farm with so many gold stars for how they treated their cows could end up with a cow like a cow 13039.

Can you just describe what it's like to meet the family at the farm?

Yeah, I'm really grateful that they sat down with me and answered all of my questions.

And it was awkward and it was tense,

but I appreciated getting their perspective.

And I also came away from my meeting with them thinking that I'm not sure that

I'm not sure, especially with dairy specifically, I don't know how much better you could do than how they're doing.

I think that one thing that I took away

was that

they were just so big.

There were so many cows.

The whole operation was so enormous.

And so it did have that kind of element of industrialization.

Second thing is that the organic prohibition on the use of antibiotics, it just creates terrible incentives and results in a lot of animal cruelty.

We're going to pause here for a second because I want you to notice the phrase, the organic prohibition on the use of antibiotics.

What we've encountered is a rule, one of the billions of rules that exist in our country.

I have a habit I've been told is pretty annoying, which is that when someone tells me a rule, I almost always ask, why is that?

I want the story behind it so that I can then decide if the rule makes sense to me or not.

Like, is the airplane actually gonna crash if I take my phone off airplane mode?

Anyway, the story behind this rule, that in America, a cow stops being organic if it receives antibiotics, I wanna tell it to you so that you can then decide if this rule makes sense to you.

So the story goes like this.

Once upon a time, we got our milk from farmers who lived on small farms and milked their cows by hand.

In the 20th century, that process changed.

Dairy became much more industrial.

The red barn mostly disappears.

We invent lots of different factory machines to milk cows.

In the 1990s, someone even invents robotic milking machines.

Now we can milk cows faster.

We can milk them more often.

Milk gets cheaper to buy, which is great.

But we're also packing huge numbers of cows in warehouses where they live in relative squalor and get get sick a lot.

So someone realizes, okay, what if you just constantly gave those cows antibiotics?

You don't even have to wait until they're sick.

You can just give the cow antibiotics to prevent them from getting sick.

Now, you could put even more cows in even smaller warehouses.

But then somebody else realized it might not be so great for humans to constantly be drinking antibiotic-tainted milk.

It could weaken our response to antibiotics when we're sick.

In the EU and Canada, they made this rule, which is that if a cow had had antibiotics, the farm had to wait until the antibiotics were out of its system before selling its milk.

But in America, we made our rule differently.

The United States has an extraordinarily rigid rule in its organic program that any animal who's given an antibiotic at any point in its life is no longer organic.

So if you had an organic dairy cow who was given a course of antibiotics for like, you know, pneumonia at week seven of its life, it's a conventional cow for the rest of time.

Five years later, it still can't be an organic cow.

But this is problematic because it incentivizes farmers not to give organic cows antibiotics even when they really need them.

Right.

You'd rather, or you might prefer to let a cow get very, very, very sick, not have antibiotics so it could keep its status.

It's like a place where when we talk about organic or when we talk about sort of higher quality meat, are we privileging our own health or are we privileging animal welfare?

Totally.

And it means that, you know, if a cow is not going to die from an infection, like the maths suggest that you should withhold the antibiotic.

There's a rule also in the organic program that you cannot withhold antibiotics in order to maintain a cow's organic status.

But talking to folks in the industry, it happens all the time.

Okay.

So to return to the story of Annie visiting this organic dairy farm, the whistleblowers had alleged that the farm was regularly denying antibiotics to their sick cows.

And so these cows were getting all sorts of nasty infections.

Annie asked the family that owned the farm about all this.

We also emailed the farm.

They said they use antibiotics when needed, even if it means losing that cow's organic status.

They also said that their first response to a sick cow isn't antibiotics, but instead natural treatments, like tinctures or a saline solution with cod liver oil for eye infections.

But they did acknowledge in the specific case of cow 13039, their system had failed.

They said that had been a mistake and it had caused them to change their procedures.

They had instituted a policy and they actually showed me it that they had written out in English and Spanish for all of the farmhands just about what to look for cancer eye.

They said they didn't get a lot of cancer eye because it's pretty cloudy there and UV exposure is one of the things that seems to be a factor in the development of cancer eye.

But they admitted they were like, yeah, that cow should have been sold to auction or euthanized way sooner.

That shouldn't have happened.

What happened after you published your story?

It was interesting.

I had been bracing to get a lot of angry emails from farmers and organic farmers about, you know, did an isolated incident really mean a pattern of abuse?

And I actually got a ton of notes from farmers, both organic and non-organic, saying that they thought that the substance of the piece was a little bit shocking and that it shouldn't have happened.

And a lot of them saying, basically, yeah, like with a farm that big, I don't know how you would have really high standards for that many cows.

I also got notes from some farmers who I think are really committed to doing it right.

This was two dairy farmers in the Northeast.

And they said that they don't like the system as it exists either because there's some really high-quality animal welfare certifiers, nonprofits, but there's some that are just industry fronts.

If you can just like slap, you know, ethically sourced or certified as humane by so-and-so on any product, that means that it's not fair and an even playing field for all of the farmers either, right?

It's harder for them to say we're charging more because it costs us more to produce this because we're really doing it right.

You might have noticed that we haven't named the dairy farm in this story, the one Annie reported about.

That's partly because in the grand scheme of dairy farms, this farm, which we are using as a bad example, it's still almost certainly doing a better job than most.

I personally am still convinced I'd rather be a cow there than at the factory farms where most of our milk comes from.

But if the question of this episode is, can I micro-dose veganism?

Can I do a little bit better?

There are some answers.

One thing is you could try to buy milk from genuine high welfare dairy farms.

Although Annie's reporting does suggest that means doing more research than just trusting the packaging you see on the expensive milk at Whole Foods.

If you don't want to become a full-time animal welfare investigator and you also don't want to become vegan or vegetarian, There is one other possible route.

I guess the thing I've been trying to figure out is like, as someone who is more than anything else, a lazy person,

what like

right now, I just eat the things I want to eat and I try to make them healthy.

But the only ethical thing is like, at some point, I was like, no octopus.

Yeah.

Like they seem very smart.

It's not that tasty.

I was just like, I'm going to make one ethical decision.

I'm drawing a line at octopus.

What is like for someone who's like, I'm never going to be vegan, I don't think I'm going to be vegetarian, but I would like to do almost like the minimum viable thing to behave more compassionately.

Like what is the like toenail in the door of caring about compassionate food consumption?

Absolutely.

So my answer to this is always, you can just eat less.

You can just reduce your meat, dairy, and egg consumption by cutting it down.

You don't have to go all the way.

You could do it like once or twice a week, like one meal per day.

That's great.

That's like a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful start.

Sometimes I hear people and they're like, My consumption doesn't matter.

There's this massive machinery of agricultural production in the United States.

What does it matter if I'm not eating it?

Or if I am eating it, I'm such a tiny, tiny part of demand.

But there's actual studies that really do show kind of like two things.

So one is that supply is responsive to demand.

Absolutely.

So if you stop eating animal products entirely, there's like a measurable number of animals that won't die and won't be part of the food system for that.

And the second thing is that there is a kind of subtle social contagion effect that people do kind of tend to do what the people around them do.

So if you're like, yeah, I'm trying to eat higher quality meat or I'm trying to eat less of it.

I do think that that matters.

So there's an answer.

If you want to micro-dose veganism without spending more money or dramatically reorganizing your life, You could just eat fewer animal products.

There's actually a movement much less intimidating to me than veganism or vegetarianism called Meatless Monday, which even for me seems pretty doable.

And I will say, since we started working on this story, one member of our team is now only eating meat and dairy on the weekends, one skipped meat this week, and our fact checker is starting to go vegan.

As for me, I solemnly refuse to eat a turkey that's been dropped from an airplane.

Annie, thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks to Annie Lowry, she's a reporter at The Atlantic.

We will include links to her piece about the dairy farm and to her piece about Yellville in the description of this episode.

There's one part of our conversation we didn't include here, but I found pretty helpful.

Annie just went through what I jokingly called the Animal Misery Olympics.

Just going through, like, if you're gonna eat meat, but you feel sort of bad, what's what's the least miserable meat you could eat?

For instance, did you know some vegans actually make an exception and eat oysters, since oysters don't have a central nervous system?

Anyway, if you're curious, you can find that guide on our bonus feed, which is located at searchengine.show.

We call it incognito mode.

Go check it out.

Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions.

It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Truthy Pinamaneni, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John.

Fact-Checking This Week by Mary Mathis.

Special thanks this week to Kayama Glover and Salome Faulter.

Theme, Original Composition, and Mixing by Armin Bazarian.

Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Rhys-Dennis.

Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perello, and John Schmidt.

And to the team at Odyssey, J.D.

Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchison, Matt Casey, Maura Kern, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Scheff.

Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA.

If you'd like to support the show, and get access to our incognito mode feed with no ads, no reruns, and bonus episodes, head to searchengine.show.

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We'll see you next week.

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