Garcés, Leah. Transfarmation: The Movement to Free Us from Factory Farming. Beacon Press, 2024.

The treatment of animals troubles me. Factory farming, in its modern form, is indefensible. Packing chickens into tiny cages, stuffing cows with grain until they collapse under their own weight, and force-breeding pigs in conditions that leave them mad with stress—all of this is horrible. That said, we are not separate from Nature. We are part of it. A lion does not wonder if its dinner was happy in life. A wolf does not apologise to the deer it runs down. We too are, by nature and by necessity, carnivores. I suppose we are strictly omnivores: we can survive on vegetables. But, however much the vegan activists may wish it otherwise, our bodies grow strong and healthy in proportion to how much animal protein we consume.

Leah Garcés’ Transfarmation is a well-argued book with all the best intentions. Its pages are filled with moving accounts of struggling farmers who, disillusioned with industrial agriculture, have turned their backs on factory farming. It lays bare the horror of industrial-scale animal husbandry and does an excellent job of humanising the creatures we have used so badly. The story of Norma the dairy cow, sentenced to death for defending her calf, is a particularly powerful example.

Yet, for all the author’s commendable concern for animals, she has far too much concern for how we should be governed. In her world, the solution to cruelty is yet more state intervention. New laws. More regulation. More bans. More incentives and subsidies. The same government that has subsidised industrial grain production, encouraged the grotesque overuse of antibiotics in livestock, and created the conditions for factory farming in the first place, is somehow meant to be trusted to put things right.

One must always ask what problem is being solved, and at what cost. Garcés wants an end to industrial-scale animal suffering. Fair enough. But she also wants another expansion of state power to achieve it. This is where the book becomes not just misguided, but dangerous. When governments interfere in the production of food, the result is starvation, not abundance. Just look at the famines of the Soviet Union or Maoist China. Even in more developed economies, state meddling has consistently distorted the food supply in ways that harm both animals and humans. The “low-fat” dietary guidelines, imposed through public health campaigns and government food pyramids, are a case in point. The result? A fatter, sicker population gorging on sugar and carbohydrates while real food—meat, eggs, dairy—is demonised.

Garcés seems to believe that free markets exist only to brutalise. This is a tired and predictable assumption. In reality, when properly left to function, markets innovate. The same forces that have made food abundant beyond the dreams of our ancestors are already working to make it more humane. The rise of cultured meat, which replicates animal protein without requiring the suffering of actual animals, is just one example of how capitalism—not government—is finding solutions. Given a free market, this new source of protein will not poison us in the ways plotted by the ruling class. Instead, it should allow us to mistreat fewer animals.

This is where the author misses the point. If factory farming is a horror, it is a horror driven not by the free market but by its distortions. Government subsidies that make grain artificially cheap encourage the mass overproduction of sickly, obese cattle. Health regulations written by industry insiders keep competition out of the meatpacking business, ensuring a handful of corporate giants dictate how meat is produced. Remove these artificial interventions, and better alternatives will emerge. But for Garcés, the only possible solution is a more “compassionate” managerial state. She does not want a better meat industry. She wants to abolish it altogether and replace it with a system in which government dictates what is acceptable to eat. Saving animals must not be made yet another excuse for enslaving humans.

Then there is the final, uncomfortable truth. If we eat fewer animals, fewer will be born. A world in which we do not breed chickens for the table is a world with far fewer chickens in it. The animals we eat exist because we eat them. Take that away, and they are gone. The natural world does not care about mercy or compassion. It cares about survival. Wild cows, left to their own devices, are hunted by wolves or die of starvation in the winter cold. A pig on a factory farm has a short and miserable life, but it has a life.

If Transfarmation has value, it is in its exposure of the horrors of industrial farming. It is right to call for an end to factory farming as we know it. But its solution—more state control, more bureaucratic meddling—is the wrong approach. A truly humane future will come not from legislation, but from technological progress and market forces. When meat grown in factories becomes cheaper and better than meat from suffering animals, the problem will solve itself. Until then, those who love both animals and liberty should reject the false choice that Garcés presents.