Animal Husbandry Machines of Loving Grace
Because I am an urbane cosmopolitan who got animal welfare pilled from the effective altruists rather than firsthand experience interfacing with animals, I've been finding Wendell Berry's agrarian writings to be very illuminating. This idyllic scene in The Need to be Whole has grabbed me by the throat since I read it:
An Amish family long dear to me bases the commercial part of its economy mainly on a dairy herd of forty-five Jersey cows, for which the family’s small farm produces the necessary feed. From this modest enterprise the family achieves a “quality of life” that is admirable. They recently built themselves a new house. At the time of my last visit the farmwife and her two daughters, then seven and ten years old, were busy at the evening milking. It was a happy scene. The mother and daughters cooperated perfectly, each doing her share according to her strength. They kept steadily at work without haste or fuss. Each of the cows was known by her looks, character, and name. The family’s living was being made within a pattern of familiar relationships. The people and the cows knew, understood, and respected one another, which was why the barn stayed so noticeably quiet. The physical work, to which our society has cultivated an aversion, was done with skill, with care, without stress, without lasting too long or becoming in any way a hardship, and allowing for conversation with visiting friends. This twice-a-day chore was taking place where both the people and the animals were at home.
Until reading this, I had no real idea of the... depths? heights? of the ethical treatment of farm animals. The EAs crunch the numbers and focus on the reduction of the cruelest practices that one might find in the factory farms, and I am deeply grateful for their important work.
It is not their fault that I somehow had no notion that the animals could be happy, and in relationships with humans, instead of just being marginally less miserable. But now I have this notion, and it is one that I find beautiful. It makes me happy to think about.
Berry goes on to point out that somewhere between fifty and a hundred cows, a farm operation will no longer be able to form familial relationships with the cows. At scales of over a hundred cows or people, it becomes functionally impossible to not treat them as identical, expendable, replaceable. These days, it is not uncommon to have 10,000 cow dairies, and the biggest ones in the world have over 100,000.
We are currently living in the middle of an intelligence explosion. A question that is useful to ask these days: what can we do if we are able to wield a billion times the intelligence that our civilization currently has?
Some animal welfare effective altruists are starting to think about this. Itsi Weinstock wrote The State of the AIxAnimals Field in April 2026, there was an AI x Animals week on the EA forum over the summer. This lit review highlights eight sub-themes of the fledgling movement:
- Getting the values we align AI to to include animal welfare
- Farm sensor and camera tech
- Anti-poaching and biodiversity monitoring
- AI models that could replace animal testing
- Decoding animal communication, like sperm whale codas
- Animal advocacy uplift
- AI-guided genetics to reduce animals’ capacity to suffer
- Longtermist wild animal suffering reduction
I am not surprised by the list! It's very EA, urbane cosmopolitan data spreadsheets coded. Probably it is a reasonably good list of what priorities we should have. But now I want it to be more ambitious, more wholesome.
If we do not get rid of animal husbandry as a practice, I hope some of our additional intelligence goes directly to the cows. I hope each individual animal that depends on humans for survival has a little robot guardian angel, who knows it as well as it deserves to be known, and exactly where it prefers to be scritched.