{"id":625958,"date":"2026-09-16T02:24:32","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T02:24:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/625958\/"},"modified":"2026-09-16T02:24:32","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T02:24:32","slug":"how-to-help-a-lot-of-animals-without-going-vegetarian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/625958\/","title":{"rendered":"How to help a lot of animals (without going vegetarian)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many people, when they learn about the horrors of factory farming<\/a>, become vegetarian or vegan. I\u2019m one of those people, and it stuck \u2014 I haven\u2019t eaten meat in 20 years. For most, it doesn\u2019t stick<\/a>. But new research<\/a> highlights how ditching meat isn\u2019t the only option to help animals on factory farms. There\u2019s actually one thing that\u2019s almost as effective and probably way easier for most people: eating fewer small animals.<\/p>\n

The number of animals who suffer to produce food products \u2014 and how much they suffer \u2014 varies widely. Bigger animals, like cattle raised for beef, are raised in lower numbers and aren\u2019t treated as terribly as smaller animals, like farmed fish and chickens.<\/p>\n

And because fish and chickens are so small, far more of them must be farmed to produce the same amount of meat as large animals. A family sitting down for a steak dinner, for example, will probably consume about half a percent of one cow, while a family eating a rotisserie chicken might eat the whole bird.<\/p>\n

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A salmon covered in sea lice at a fish farm in Scotland. Viva!<\/p>\n

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Inside a Maryland chicken factory farm raising animals for Mountaire Farms. Joseph Allman<\/p>\n

Animal advocates call it the \u201csmall body problem,\u201d<\/a> and it\u2019s the subject of a new analysis<\/a> published by Chris Bryant<\/a>, an honorary research associate at the University of Bath in the UK, and Faunalytics<\/a>, an animal welfare research group.<\/p>\n

The researchers wanted to answer a simple but consequential question: How much animal suffering is embedded in each bite of meat we eat or egg we consume?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are somewhat used to seeing, especially from the climate movement, data and other kinds of tools that help us think about the carbon footprint of the choices that we make, and we think that\u2019s really important,\u201d Allison Troy, Faunalytics\u2019 research director, told me. \u201cBut we felt like there was a gap in terms of thinking about more of a \u2018suffering footprint\u2019 when it comes to choosing to purchase animal products.\u201d<\/p>\n

This gives us a new way to think about how we eat, and how it affects the animals trapped in factory farms. If you don\u2019t want to go fully plant-based, what about cutting back \u2014 specifically \u2014 on meat from small animals?<\/p>\n

Unpacking the small body problem<\/p>\n

To quantify the \u201csuffering footprint\u201d of everyday animal products consumers eat, the researchers analyzed data from the US Department of Agriculture, the United Nations, and other sources to determine how much edible meat \u2014 or eggs or milk \u2014 each type of farmed animal produces throughout a typical lifespan on a farm.<\/p>\n

They also incorporated indirect sources of animal suffering in their calculations. For example, some farmed fish species are fed other fish, and these \u201cfeeder\u201d fish were factored into the data.<\/p>\n

Then the researchers crunched the numbers to figure out two things: how many days of animal suffering are embedded in a pound of various animal products, and how many animal lives are slaughtered per pound for those products.<\/p>\n

The analysis found that the vast majority of animal suffering from our diets comes from one tiny animal: shrimp.<\/p>\n

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That means that a single bite of your shrimp scampi is far more harmful than devouring an entire burger.<\/p>\n

But seafood doesn\u2019t account for a large portion of most Americans\u2019 diets<\/a>, and many of us eat none at all<\/a>. When seafood is removed from the data, cutting back on poultry products \u2014 chicken meat, turkey meat, and eggs \u2014 is the most effective way to limit the amount of suffering caused by one\u2019s diet.<\/p>\n

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This enormous disparity in poultry versus other categories \u201cis driven by the fact that those are smaller-bodied animals \u2014 it just takes a larger number of animals to produce consumable products for people,\u201d Troy said. \u201cAnd I don\u2019t think that that\u2019s often a way that people think about animal products when they\u2019re making these decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chickens and turkeys also tend to be treated worse than cattle and pigs. Chickens raised for meat, for example, have been bred to grow so fast<\/a>, and so big, that many have difficulty standing and walking, while half of hens raised for eggs in the US are confined in small cages<\/a> for their entire lives.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean pigs and cattle have it easy \u2014 far from it. Pork producers, for example, typically castrate<\/a> and teeth-clip<\/a> piglets without pain relief, and the pigs spend their lives indoors. Female breeding pigs<\/a>, like caged hens, are confined in tiny cages. And beef cattle are branded and dehorned<\/a>, often without pain relief, and spend their final months in feedlots. But because these animals are so much bigger, each produces a lot more meat than smaller animals.<\/p>\n

In other words, their suffering is spread out across many more bites of bacon or burgers.<\/p>\n

The report wasn\u2019t peer-reviewed, and I reached out to Trevor Woolley<\/a> \u2014 an assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison \u2014 for his thoughts. Woolley told me over email that it\u2019s \u201cimportant to recognize that the numbers that are included in their equation are estimates,\u201d and that \u201cthe exact numbers should not be taken as precise, but in the right ballpark.\u201d<\/p>\n

How should I think about eggs? <\/p>\n

It might come as a surprise that eating fewer eggs is one of the best actions you can take to help animals, considering it doesn\u2019t require killing animals.<\/p>\n

Still, egg-laying hens tend to have poor welfare; about half of them in the US<\/a> are in tiny cages where they can\u2019t flap their wings for their entire lives, and the tips of their beaks are seared off without pain relief. Once their productivity wanes \u2014 at about 1.5 years of age \u2014 they\u2019re slaughtered for meat.<\/p>\n

Eating fewer eggs<\/a>, and getting \u201cpasture-raised\u201d eggs when you do buy them, can help (if you\u2019re looking for information on what the various buzzwords on egg cartons actually mean, we\u2019ve got you covered<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\u201cComparing animal products in terms of lives and (especially) days broadly makes sense,\u201d Woolley added. \u201c\u2018Days\u2019 is a really nice metric because farm animal species have such drastically different lifespans on the farm.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is, however, one major limitation to the research: it doesn\u2019t factor in the severity of suffering that different animals experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe made a choice methodologically to define \u2018animal suffering\u2019 as days of life [on a farm],\u201d Troy said. \u201cAnd I think that that\u2019s a useful, albeit simple, metric. But it is not the only one.\u201d<\/p>\n

For example, on a day-to-day basis, dairy cows don\u2019t seem to have it as bad as an egg-laying hen in a cage. But dairy cows tend to be farmed for twice as many years as hens. Does that suffering over many years compound in a way that, if we could fully understand it, would change the calculation? This analysis can\u2019t answer nuanced questions like that, though other animal welfare researchers<\/a> are working to provide a more comprehensive picture.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you can stand to think about it long enough, the problem becomes paralyzing,\u201d my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has written<\/a> about factory farming. \u201cTens of billions of land animals are slaughtered every year; hundreds of millions every day; thousands in the time it takes to read this sentence. The number grows by billions more every year, into multiples that feel as abysmal as they are mind-numbing.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s enough to cause a lot of people to tune out and ignore the problem altogether<\/a>. But shrinking these figures down to the impact our own diets have on animals is much more manageable. We can think smaller and maybe, while we\u2019re at it, eat fewer small animals.<\/p>\n

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\"Swati<\/p>\n

Swati Sharma<\/p>\n

Vox Editor-in-Chief<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Many people, when they learn about the horrors of factory farming, become vegetarian or vegan. I\u2019m one of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625959,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[54867,246,4098,61,60,82],"class_list":["post-625958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-animal-welfare","tag-environment","tag-future-perfect","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}