Weighing up edible animal suffering

An article at Vox argues that giving up beef, but at the cost of eating more chicken, results in a net increase in animal suffering.   Meat bred chickens have a much worse life than your average beef cattle, and it takes huge numbers of them to match how much meat you get off one cow.  In fact, I am a bit surprised by these figures:

Cows are big, so raising one produces about 500 pounds of beef — and at the rate at which the average American eats beef, it takes about 8.5 years for one person to eat one cow. But chickens are much smaller, producing only a few pounds of meat per bird, with the average American eating about one whole chicken every two weeks. To put it another way, each year we eat about 23 chickens and just over one-tenth of one cow (and about a third of one pig).

I would have thought Americans (and Australians) eat a lot more of a pig in a year than that.   And one cow takes 8 years for one person to eat?   I just checked on my calculator - that's only about 500 g per week.   I guess that's possibly right, but it sounds on the low side to me.  (Wait - the calculation is based on per capita consumption - so taking into account those who eat no beef, I guess that means that those who do would take less than 8 years to get through a cow.)

Anyway - the ethics of working this out is all pretty slippery.   How upset should we be that millions of unwanted day old rooster chicks are sent through a meat grinder due to the egg industry?    I mean, they haven't lived long, and presumably not much has gone on in their brains...but they're sort of cute too and it feels - I don't know, wastefully wrong? - to bred something to only want to kill it on birth.   Is the small scale level of an individual suffering compounded when it's happening every day in the tens of thousands?*   (Fortunately, technology may put an end to the practice soon, anyway.)

At least there is one thing I feel pretty confident about - I am never going to be worried about bivalves and crustaceans and animal suffering.   Probably any fish too - although I don't want to think about octopuses too much!

 

* Again, my calculator tells me that if estimated of 12 million killed every year in Australia is correct, that's 32,000 every day.  :(