Published on July 28, 2025 2:35 AM GMT

For context, I'm trying to get a sense of how bad factory farming is (and, by extension, our treatment of animals more generally). It seems obvious that factory farm animals feel some pain, but do we have any sense of how much? 

Let's say that a cricket can feel, at the absolute most, the pain that a human feels when pinched lightly on the hand. I consider this negligible (assume it doesn't increase in intensity after the first pinch). Now say, hypothetically, that all factory farm animals could feel, at most, no more than this cricket. And at that low threshold, I don't think I care if the pain is aggregated, even if it's a trillion crickets. Hurray! Moral catastrophe averted; I could now consume animal products with zero reservations as to their welfare (though there are still other considerations like climate change). 

But obviously, factory farm animals feel more pain than crickets. The question is just how much pain? 

To what extent can we measure pain in beings that can't report, through language, their conscious states?