My living journal peer Glen (don't go here because he is much funnier than I am, and I fear the loss of readership) has an interesting post. Specifically, near the end he asks for a straight answer about the value of human life relative to the lives of animals.

...Therefore, there has to be a finite number of animals whose lives are worth killing a human.

So, in an effort to reach heretofore unseen levels of callousness, I will attempt to answer him.

First I need an animal. One that's useful to society, not too ugly, nor too small and therefore easy to acquire. One that has a clear statement attached to it about its value to the world ie. PRICE.

I pick this gorgeous animal to represent the value of an animal's life: Moohamed Ali. You could own this cow for a mere $3,000.

So, since Glen uses public opinion; "Most people believe that the rights of animals are significant to some extent, after all, they generally frown upon strangling puppies and such," as his reason for concluding that some number of animal lives is equal to one human life, then I will use the exact public opinion of the value of this animal.

For the value of a human, I will use the WTC victims compensation fund model. Here!

Compensation for pain and suffering is/was capped at $250,000 per family. Total compensation per family averages $1.6 million, so economic losses are averaged at about $1.35 million per family.

This model is considered to be pretty generous by most economists.

So, the economic value of the person $1.35 million divided by the economic value of the cow $3,000 = 450. Basically, each person would be expected to earn as much as 450 cows.

BUT! You might suppose that cows, or their offspring also feel suffering like humans do. You might suppose that the amount of suffering they are able to process mentally is about the same as their productivity (note, this isn't meant as a value statement for people). OR they feel one-four hundred fiftieth of the suffering of a person. So, $250,000 / 450 = ~$555 worth of suffering by Moohamed's family.

Moohamed suffering a grisly death (like being destroyed) causes approx $3,555 worth of damage while a person being killed in a terrorist attack causes $1.6 Million worth of damage. We still have 1 person equaling 450 cows because I derived the $555 from the $250k that was added to the economic losses number, follow?

Hmm... at the rate that cows get destroyed for suspicion of BSE, perhaps we should just take the human casualties? Can the rate the disease spreads really justify slaughtering millions of cows? I don't know...


Of course, this isn't a scientific finding, you might not want to throw yourself in front of a train to save cows. Another way to find the value of animals V. humans is to look at the punishments for killing them (animals I mean). In New Jersey apparently the punishment was only $250 in 2002. Philly news

Using that as our model, a person is worth 6,400 animals. (1.6mil / 250)

Don't worry, cicadas are worth much less...