To Breed or Not to Breed?: an Antinatalist Answer to the Question of Animal Welfare

Paper by Sayma H. Chowdhury & Todd K. Shackelford, published on May 1, 2017 in Evolutionary Psychological Science

Although Ng (2016) addresses the important question of how to increase animal welfare, he does not address an equally important question—how to prevent animal suffering. The best way to prevent animal suffering is to stop breeding them. With fewer sentient beings in existence, net suffering is lessened. Even if captive animals were bred with a guarantee of “net happiness,” they would still suffer at some point in their lives and sometimes very much. We argue that not only is nonexistence preferable to existence but also that even in research there are many preferable alternatives to the use of captive animals.