The farming of animals—raising, using, and ultimately killing animals for human purposes—is a tradition that dates back to the Neolithic Revolution, about 11,000 years ago. That’s only 3 percent—a mere blink—of our existence as Homo sapiens. Stretch the timeline further to include our hominin ancestors, who thrived for millions of years without the practices of farming animals or growing crops, and the practice accounts for much less than 1 percent of our history. For most of our time on Earth, we’ve lived without it.  

Yet animal farming has undeniably shaped human culture, providing work, sustenance, and, as far back as ancient Egypt, a sense of identity. George Washington wrote in a letter to John Sinclair in 1794, “I know of no pursuit in which more zeal [and] important service can be rendered to any Country than by improving its agriculture—its breed of useful animals,” and part of the title of a 1797 lithograph of Washington at Mount Vernon describes agriculture as “the most healthy, the most useful, and the most noble employment of man.” In the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt romanticized the “vigorous” life of a cattle rancher. Today, advocates of so-called regenerative agriculture argue that because grazing animals have “co-evolved” with grasslands for millennia, livestock are essential to restoring ecosystems, a claim that is hotly disputed. 

Today, the ethical harms and environmental devastation caused by farming animals are indisputable, and the practice has become obsolete. We must break free from outdated traditions that are harming both humanity and the planet. We must reject the exploitation of animals for human use entirely and boldly envision a future in which we don’t intentionally cause the suffering and destruction of animal life. The future we create must be one where animals are no longer raised for human use—because they simply don’t need to be. 

Inside the Torture Factories

Globally, more than a trillion animals are slaughtered annually in the modern animal farming system, which is dominated by industrial-sized factory farms that house around 142 billion animals at a given time. (For context, the Population Reference Bureau estimates that approximately 117 billion humans “have ever been born on Earth.”) Worldwide, approximately 94 percent of farm animals live on (and are thus products of) factory farms. The definition of a “factory farm” varies, but what they all have in common is their massive scale, which necessitates cramped, inhumane conditions for animals. 

The numbers are staggering. A factory might contain over 1,000 cattle destined for slaughter and crammed into pens. Imagine 700 dairy cows, their bodies exhausted from relentless milking. Or 2,500 pigs confined in spaces so tightly that they can barely move. Envision 30,000 chickens packed wing-to-wing in dim, excrement-filled sheds, or 82,000 hens, their lives reduced to a monotonous cycle of laying eggs inside cages stacked up to the ceiling. Consider 55,000 turkeys, 500 horses, 10,000 sheep, or 5,000 ducks—all trapped in a system that reduces living, feeling beings to mere units of production. This scene isn’t a dystopian nightmare—it’s the reality of what the U.S. defines as an “industrial animal farm.” 

The horror lies not just in the scale but in the individual lives behind them: each animal, a sentient creature, enduring an existence stripped of dignity, freedom, and comfort.

Dairy cows endure relentless suffering, as they are valued only for their ability to reproduce and produce milk. Female cows are artificially impregnated, gestate for nine months, and then give birth, only to have their calves removed within hours or, on what are called “higher welfare” farms, within five months—far short of the natural weaning age of eight months. This separation causes visible distress, as cows are social animals who care about their young. Male calves are often slaughtered immediately or raised for veal. Female calves are forced into the dairy cycle. While cows have a natural lifespan of up to 20-30 years, dairy cows are slaughtered at just 3-5 years old (or 16-18 weeks for veal). The few bulls that do survive face lives of forced ejaculation until they are no longer useful, at which point they’re slaughtered. This cycle of exploitation happens worldwide.

Illustration by Kasia Kozakiewicz

Animals: A Call for Moral Inclusion

The horror of animal farming becomes more apparent when we consider that animals are sentient beings capable of experiencing pain, joy, and suffering. Their physical, mental, or social differences from humans, or variations in abilities, are not valid reasons to dismiss their value or exclude them from our circle of care. Throughout history, thinkers have grappled with animal sentience and its implications for how humans use them. In the 5th century B.C., Pythagoras first argued that animals were not mere objects, and in 1190, Maimonides saw animals as beings in their own right, not just existing in relation to humans. Much later, philosophers like Jeremy Bentham (in the 18th century) and Peter Singer emphasized suffering as a key measure of sentience. While suffering may not capture the full picture, and modern thinkers have different ideas about the definition of sentience, two key principles that should guide our thinking are that all animals are alive and that every one of them, from the largest to the smallest, desires to live.

Just look around you and notice the ladybug on your window sill, those ants carrying many times their weight on their backs, the squirrel running across the park, the fox rummaging in your bins, or fish swimming upriver. Each is experiencing their one and only life in whatever way and to whatever extent is relevant to them. This universal truth was beautifully captured in 1928 by American naturalist Henry Beston, whose reflections on our relationship with animals remain as poignant today as they were nearly a century ago. He wrote: 

[T]he animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

Today, scientists have shown us that animals lead rich emotional lives. Ecologist and evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff’s 2007 book The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Animal Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy—and Why They Matter is full of examples of such scientific discoveries. Bees, for instance, “can get depressed, feel pain, and be optimists or pessimists.” Fish feel pain and are “cunning, deceitful, and display cultural traditions,” while iguanas seek sensory pleasure and experience a rise in body temperature and heart rate, “physiological responses that are associated with pleasure in other vertebrates, including humans.” Cows “play games with one another and form strong life-long friendships. [...] [T]hey also sulk, hold grudges, and act vain.” And, in a striking act of interspecies solidarity, three mugger crocodiles in India used their snouts to push a stranded dog to safety “when they surely could have enjoyed an easy meal.” Even in death, animals express emotion: a waxwing bird, after their mate died in a widow strike, lay beside them, “heads touching,” and passed away too. And ants, as ethicist Susana Monsó describes in her 2024 book Playing Possum, will “mobilize themselves” to save a trapped comrade, biting through nylon snares to free them.

Animal agriculture, then, strips animals of their most basic desires: the freedom to eat, socialize, roam, or mate. “They are not treated like the individuals that they are,” says Monsó. Instead, they are reduced to mere objects for consumption. At its core, this “system of oppression” denies animals the right to their own lives—something they are entitled to, just as we humans are. 

Horrors for Humans

Animal farming and related industries, such as slaughtering, often exploit both animals and marginalized human communities. These industries set up their operations in economically deprived areas and take advantage of vulnerable groups—including ethnic minorities, people of color, migrants, and refugees—to staff their workforce, offering them jobs that are hard to refuse due to a lack of alternatives. 

Slaughterhouses are perilous workplaces. Since 2015, the U.S. government has required severe injuries, including amputations, to be tracked. In the first nine months of this tracking, Tyson, the largest U.S. meat company by sales, averaged over one amputation monthly. Over seven years, Tyson reported 279 severe injuries, but this is likely an underestimate because injuries are underreported due to workers’ fears of job loss and employers’ desire to avoid costs. In 2016, Oxfam released a report documenting the use of diapers among poultry workers who needed to avoid asking for bathroom breaks in order to keep up with work quotas. Between 2020 and March 2021, COVID-19 deaths among meat and poultry workers surpassed all industry fatalities from the previous 15 years. Additionally, significant percentages of chicken and pig processing workers (81 percent and 46 percent, respectively) are at risk of developing bone, joint, or muscle disorders, which come about due to work that requires thousands of repetitive forceful motions daily. Piece-rate work—in which workers are paid by piece rather than by the hour—incentivizes workers to increase their speeds, which contributes to the risk of bodily harm. Chicken workers, for instance, may handle 140-175 birds per minute.

Andre Noble, a former slaughterhouse worker, described his work in 2023 in Newsweek:

Pigs would come in on trucks and get offloaded into the [...] building. They would then pass through a machine to get killed. I don't know how. The sound of countless pigs screaming was heard a quarter of a mile surrounding the entire plant when this was happening. I did not see them getting killed, but I saw them come out of the machine and into the [...] building on meat hooks. Thousands of workers would then spend over 12 hours a day cutting the meat.

Another slaughterhouse worker anonymously recounted the following in 2020 for the BBC:

I'll never forget the day, after I'd been at the abattoir for a few months, when one of the lads cut into a freshly killed cow to gut her—and out fell the foetus of a calf. She was pregnant. He immediately started shouting and throwing his arms about. I took him into a meeting room to calm him down—and all he could say was, "It's just not right, it's not right," over and over again. These were hard men, and they rarely showed any emotion. But I could see tears prickling his eyes. Even worse than pregnant cows, though, were the young calves we sometimes had to kill.

As Oscar Heanue detailed in On Labor in 2022, slaughterhouse work, due to its violent nature, inflicts profound psychological harm on workers. This harm has been likened to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Other negative consequences include substance abuse and addiction. One study from 2009 found an “uptick in violent crime associated with slaughterhouse employment.” As Noble put it: “[M]y drinking had gotten completely out of control. I was self-medicating—I fell into alcohol in order to relieve the stress of what I was doing. I just wanted to escape reality.”

Aside from workplace exploitation, humans are harmed on a large scale by the practices of industrial farms. People who live near the farms experience “noise, smell[s], toxic air, chronic disease and water pollution.” Industrial animal farms also rely heavily on antibiotics to prevent disease or to treat animals that get sick in their unhealthy and overcrowded living conditions, and this practice contributes to the creation of antibiotic-resistant germs, which can then infect humans. Additionally, the rise of industrial farming since the 1940s has increased zoonotic diseases (those that are transmitted from animals to humans) and panzootics like avian flu (H5N1), which can spark pandemics across species. The dangers posed to human health and well-being ought to remind us once again of our interconnectedness to other species. When we harm animals, we harm ourselves.

Deforestation and Land Use

The practice of farming animals is also disastrous for the environment. It contributes most of the greenhouse gases (GHGs) related to agriculture. It’s also the key driver in deforestation, which significantly contributes to GHGs. Animal agriculture furthers water depletion, soil degradation, ocean acidification, and biodiversity loss. This destruction accelerates climate change, which itself is a threat to all life on Earth. 

Currently, 80 billion land animals are fed annually on vast amounts of land. Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, and three-fourths is used for animal agriculture. If we continue with our current trend of meat production, we’ll need to turn about 80 percent of the world’s remaining forests and shrublands into land to raise animals to produce meat, dairy, and eggs. This would simply be catastrophic for the planet.

Transitioning to plant crops instead could reduce global agricultural land use by 75 percent, freeing up space to restore forests (which would help absorb greenhouse gas) and biodiversity. Research shows that we need to redirect crops from their current uses (a mixture of human consumption, livestock feed, and biofuels) to direct human consumption. Expert findings have made it clear that a food system based on plant crops is both sustainable and desirable. Animal agriculture is simply not a sustainable component of a habitable world.

Fashion Backward

We don’t just eat the consequences of animal farming. We wear them. Every year, the fashion industry fuels the suffering and slaughter of billions of animals for clothing and accessories. A staggering 3.4 billion ducks and geese are plucked for down and feathers, while 777 million cows, sheep, lambs, and goats are killed for leather and meat. The demand for fine wools such as merino, cashmere, and alpaca drives the exploitation of 672 million animals, many of whom endure painful shearing practices that leave them wounded and exposed to infection and the elements. The fur trade alone is responsible for the deaths of 107 million animals, each of whom is subjected to horrific conditions in tiny pens before being killed by gassing, electrocution, or sometimes neck-breaking. Foxes and mink on fur farms suffer psychological distress, self-mutilation, and even cannibalism before being killed.

Even exotic leathers, sourced from animals like crocodiles, pythons, and stingrays, account for the slaughter of 3 million wild creatures each year. While it is easy to assume that leather is simply a by-product of the meat industry, it is actually a co-product, a highly valuable item that can be sold for profit. As a 2023 report by the Australian nonprofit Collective Fashion Justice explains, “Leather sales effectively subsidise beef production,” and without this subsidy, “beef would become more expensive.” 

Beyond the nightmare for animals, the fashion industry exploits human workers, particularly in the leather industry. In places like India and Bangladesh, tannery workers—including children—are exposed to toxic chemicals such as chromium, which is used in 80-90 percent of all leather processing. In these tanneries, environmental and labor regulations are often poorly enforced. Chromium, known to promote the development of cancer, pollutes local water supplies, and cancer, respiratory diseases, and skin conditions have been documented among workers and people in nearby communities.

Small-Scale Pseudo-Solutions

As we confront the devastating impact of industrial animal agriculture, it’s tempting to view small-scale farms as a perfect antidote. Small-scale animal agriculture isn’t a universally defined term, but sometimes it’s simply referred to as traditional farming. In recent years, small-scale farms have been supported by King Charles, the EU, and the U.N. In the U.S., supporting small-scale agriculture is viewed as a way to “revitalize rural communities.” And the support is warranted—to an extent. There are myriad benefits to small-scale crop farms, from sustainable food production to the promotion of biodiversity. However, the solution isn’t as simple as downsizing the problem.

First, industrial animal farming has become so efficient in rendering animals into products that a small-scale equivalent could never replace it. Animals would still need grazing lands and feed, and greenhouse gases from animal agriculture would continue to be generated. Second, from an ethical standpoint, whether animals are raised on factory farms, with thousands living in cramped, squalid conditions, or on a small pastoral homestead, where they might receive better care and more space, the fundamental issue remains the same: exploiting sentient beings for human use. This core question—whether it is justifiable to exploit and kill animals for human benefit—cannot be avoided. The answer depends on the context. For a subsistence farmer relying on animals for survival, sacrificing one may be necessary—there may be no alternatives. But the moral gap between this and the industrialized slaughter of factory farming is vast. For those of us with supermarkets full of choices, justifying such harm becomes indefensible.

The Myth of 'Ethical Meat'

If smaller farms are not the answer, we might ask whether “ethical meat” could offer a viable alternative. We might look to animal products with higher ethical ratings in an effort to reduce animal suffering. But while less suffering is better than more, does ethical meat (or ethical eggs or dairy) do anything more than assuage our own conscience?

There are now numerous labelling and marketing strategies that often create a false sense of moral purity about the products being described. Terms like “humane,” “ethical,” “pasture-raised,” “grass-fed,” “free-range,” “Certified Humane,” or “Animal Welfare Approved” are used to convey care for animals. The reality is that these terms are often poorly defined, defined by the producers themselves, and/or undergo little verification or enforcement. Many certifications allow minimal improvements over standard factory farming practices, and even when there is a more rigorous meaning behind a label, the producers often carry out harmful practices. There is also sometimes an appeal made to nostalgia for an idyllic past, one in which chickens are “slow-grown and well roamed just like the ones your grandparents would have eaten.” Such read one ad I saw for an online grocer selling chicken.

Above: The east side of a chicken house on a multi-building industrial egg-production farm. This company markets its eggs as laid by “Free Roaming” hens, but on this farm, no outdoor access is apparent. Pennsylvania, USA, 2023. Gregory Kemp / Animal Outlook / We Animals

These marketing practices work because people are concerned about the suffering of factory-farmed animals and the wider effects of animal farming. In 2023, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) commissioned an opinion survey about industrial agriculture and found that the overwhelming majority of respondents desired more humane agriculture. One study in the journal Food Ethics found that while U.S. shoppers are concerned about animal welfare, they don’t understand what the various labels mean. At the same time, they tend to overestimate the guarantees provided by animal welfare labels: they believe that such labels indicate that animals were treated “better-than-standard.” This misunderstanding leads to purchasing decisions that do not align with the buyer’s ethical intentions. And when investigations demonstrate that the public’s perception and the reality don’t match, scandals can result, such as the one in 2024 in the U.K. over “high welfare” farms. What happened was that a report by Animal Rising exposed systemic failures in the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (“RSPCA”) Assured farms, revealing that many fail to meet even basic legal welfare standards despite the organization’s "high welfare" claims. Investigators found widespread issues across 45 farms, uncovering 280 legal breaches and challenging the RSPCA’s role in promoting factory farming under the guise of animal protection.

Ultimately, animals from all farms face the same fate in the same slaughterhouses. While reducing suffering is better than allowing more, we have the power to choose no suffering at all—so why wouldn’t we?

Change is Progress

In an age defined by the climate crisis and a deepened understanding of ethical responsibility, we can no longer afford to simply question animal agriculture. The devastating impacts on animals, humans, and the planet demand action. Because farming animals is no longer compatible with a sustainable, compassionate, or just future, we must end it. The only tangible way forward is to create a political movement to demand and implement the large-scale policy changes that we need in our global food and fashion systems. 

But first, we need to understand that meat consumption and animal clothing are not necessary for human societies to flourish. Despite the globally widespread practice of eating animal flesh and dairy, consuming animal products is not necessary for human health—a fact that has been affirmed by major medical, dietetic, and nutritional organizations worldwide. Well-planned diets without animal products are suitable for every stage of life, are nutritionally complete (with the addition of vitamin B₁₂, whether from fortified foods or a supplement), and can offer health benefits. Plant-based diets are thus entirely viable and beneficial.

On a personal level, giving up animal-based products can feel like a rejection of our past, our traditions, and even our culture. It means letting go of familiar dishes that once brought comfort or that sweater carrying all those memories. For many, this shift can feel like losing a piece of identity. But it’s also an opportunity to redefine what those traditions mean and to create new ones. By embracing plant-based alternatives, we open ourselves to new flavors, textures, and experiences which are just as meaningful. For writer and animal rights proponent Marina Bolotnikova, becoming vegan allowed her to discover “how many plant-based gems already exist” in the cuisine of Russia, her culture of origin. Being vegan, she explains, is not about “subtract[ing] things from our lives.” Instead, it is “a source of abundance, meaning, and connection to our planet and our fellow creatures.”

As a Neapolitan, I find joy in reimagining classic dishes like pasta e patate—a hearty, smoky, and cheesy pasta and potato comfort dish—or the iconic dessert babà, in which I replace chicken’s eggs with aquafaba (bean water). But the real magic happens when I return to Naples and discover artisans crafting plant-based versions of these traditions in eateries across the city. It’s a testament to how food evolves while staying rooted in culture. And it’s not just Naples: whether in the U.K., where I live, or in my travels, I’ve met incredibly creative people who have given up animal products and are redefining their heritage—culinary or otherwise—through innovation. Culture does not have to be static. These creative bridges between tradition and progress exist and are just waiting for more people to discover them.

And while our ancestors might not have had choices other than animal-derived clothing, nowadays, we have other choices. There are many alternatives, like plant-based leathers made from a variety of materials (including discarded pineapple leaves, apple skins, cactus, and mushrooms) and recycled fabrics, including nylon. And with over 100 billion items of clothing made each year, we have enough to clothe everyone multiple times over. Ending the use of animals in fashion is as imperative as ending it for our food. 

Just as food and fashion can evolve to honor tradition while embracing progress, so can our broader relationship with animals. We must shift from exploitation to coexistence and recognize animals as part of our shared moral community. Our survival is intertwined with theirs, and by ending animal farming, we can forge a future that values life in all its unique forms.