Time to ask how the annual slaughter of 82 billion farm animals can be justified

COMMENT

by Gerry Boland

Today, October 2, is World Farmed Animals Day, an opportune time to ask how the annual slaughter of 82 billion farmed animals can be justified

A little more than a half century ago, meat was considered a luxury. All that changed with the advent of intensive farming, which began its journey of growth and expansion after the second world war, when it was discovered that chickens could be raised successfully indoors. Fast-forward to 2025 and the situation is unrecognisable from the animal agriculture landscape of the 1970s, with over 80 billion land animals raised and slaughtered annually, the majority of these on factory farms, where they never see the light of day, never feel the sun on their backs, their brief, confined lives ending in the cauldron of the slaughterhouse.

These days, when animal agriculture comes under the spotlight, it’s invariably on account of its devastatingly adverse effect on the climate. Rarely do we hear about the lives and deaths of the animals, who are at the heart of these massive industries. Our World in Data estimates that 900,000 cows, 1.4 million goats, 1.7 million sheep, 3.8 million pigs, 12 million ducks, and 202 million chickens were slaughtered every day in 2023. In the time it will take you to read this article, approximately 1,250 cows, 1,944 goats, 2,360 sheep, 5,277 pigs, 16,666 ducks, and 280,555 chickens will have succumbed to the slaughterhouse knife. These are nothing short of mind-boggling numbers, yet every one of the 80 billion animals are individuals, with their own unique DNA, their own personality, their own ability to experience a wide range of emotions. Ask anyone who has spent time on a farm animal sanctuary and they will tell you the same thing: that every animal they take in will start to express their own personality as soon as their recovery allows it. Unfortunately for the animals raised indoors on factory farms, the massive numbers ensure that the individual animal will never be seen or heard.

Most children are fascinated by animals. They feel a close connection to, and a natural empathy towards them. If you’re an infant or a child, animals are everywhere. They feature in many nursery rhymes and in joyously happy, feel-good picture books. They are the soft toys children play with and take to bed. Much of daytime TV for children centres around animals. And yet, while all this animal celebration is happening, animals are being fed to these same animal-loving children. A relatively small percentage of young children reject the eating of animals precisely because they cannot understand how they can love them and eat them. However, given that the eating of animals is so deeply embedded in our culture, it’s little wonder that the majority of children simply eat what they are given and do not make the connection that what they are eating was once a living, breathing animal.

“We’re carnivores, we’re top of the food chain, we’re genetically programmed to eat animals” is a common refrain of meat eaters when arguing with a vegan. While humans may indeed be top of the food chain, we are, and have always been, omnivores. The modern human (Homo Sapiens) has existed on planet earth for about 200,000 years. For the vast bulk of that period, these ancestors lived off a diet of fruit, seeds, flowers, nuts, leaves, roots, tubers, occasionally fish and, less frequently, they would feast on an animal, but this was invariably an old, or very young, or injured animal. Carnivores have a set of sharp teeth, or fangs, with which to tear open the tough skin or hide of an animal. Human teeth are not fit for purpose in this respect; we couldn’t, even if we wanted to, sink our teeth into a sheep or a cow. We think we are carnivores because animal flesh makes up so much of our diet, but in fact we were primarily herbivores before we began to farm animals, and that was a mere 11,000 years ago.

We eat animals because those closest to us, as well as the vast majority of those around us, eat them. We eat them because we like the taste when they’re cooked and placed before us on a plate. We eat them out of habit, and habits are hard to break, especially when almost everyone we know is a meat eater like us. We eat them because we instinctively know that if we allowed ourselves to think too deeply about the animals who sacrificed their lives so that we could eat their flesh, we would be faced with a very challenging dilemma, and life is complicated enough without introducing new and unnecessary challenges into our busy, complex lives.

The world isn’t about to go vegan anytime soon, that much is obvious. But do we really need to be raising and killing 80 billion sentient animals every year, especially when the predominant medical advice is to reduce our intake of animal products and increase our intake of plant-based foods? It is up to governments to show a hitherto reluctant determination to push back against an animal agriculture lobby that is powerful, inflexible and wedded to growth. There is no more room for growth in what is already an out-of-control industry; there is, instead, an urgent need to reduce the numbers of animals raised and killed every year.

Gerry Boland is an Animal Rights and Vegan Lifestyle Campaigner