by Thomas Lepeltier, L’Amorce, 24 September 2026
After half a century of efforts to persuade humans to give up meat, what if we turned the question around? Rather than changing the eaters, the article proposes reducing the capacity of farmed animals to suffer, and perhaps one day breeding organisms without consciousness.
In brief
- The starting point is stark: despite half a century of activism, global meat consumption and the number of animals killed continue to rise.
- Cultivated meat was supposed to change everything, but its cost (culture media, bioreactors, contamination risks) and the difficulty of reproducing a thick cut make it uncompetitive for now.
- Hence a graduated strategy: improve farming conditions, make animals less sensitive to pain and stress, and, at the limit, imagine a ‘zombie chicken’ with no sentient brain.
The article’s three arguments
Change what people eat, not who eats
Humans do not seem about to give up meat, which is tasty, nourishing and still cheap. Rather than banking on converting them, the animal advocacy movement could seek to transform what they consume.
Gains that are possible today
In ovo sexing, vaccines, early disease detection, better stunning, hornless cattle: these techniques reduce suffering without waiting for the end of livestock farming. Selection carried out in the 1990s brought the mortality of hens housed in groups down from around 68% to under 9%.
An organism that has never been conscious wrongs no one
The author acknowledges that the idea is shocking. But an animal born without consciousness would be deprived of nothing: disgust is not enough to show that a victim exists, and the question is what reduces suffering the most.
‘If the movement’s overriding aim is to eliminate suffering, then this prospect of transforming animals deserves better than a reflex of revulsion.’Thomas Lepeltier, L’Amorce, 24 September 2026
Why this debate interests us
Reducing animal suffering is at the heart of our work on food. This text follows the reasoning through to its end, which is what makes it valuable: it forces us to specify what we are really seeking, the end of suffering or the end of livestock farming. The author states that his article is freely adapted from an essay by Aidan Kankyoku (August 2026).
Questions for debate
- Should a farming technique be judged by the suffering it avoids, or by our idea of the nature of animals?
- Should the animal advocacy movement support innovations that also improve the productivity of farms?
- Is an organism without consciousness still an animal, in the moral sense of the term?
To go further on apala.fr
Summary written by Claude (Opus 5.5 model), an artificial intelligence, for APALA, based on the article published in L’Amorce on 24 September 2026. The views expressed are those of the author. An error? Write to us.
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