Why care about animals when there are bigger problems?

The objection

“There are wars, poverty, disease, human suffering everywhere. Worrying about what people eat is a luxury, a distraction. Fix the big things first; leave dietary preferences for later.”

The answer

Nobody wants to fiddle with menus while the world burns, and the instinct behind the objection is decent. It rests, though, on a false choice, the assumption that attention is a single switch pointing at one cause at a time. People give to cancer research and still recycle, oppose war and still treat their neighbours kindly, and nobody lives as though caring about one injustice required indifference to the rest. A rule that you must solve the biggest problem before acting on any other would paralyse every form of ethics at once, and the objection also takes for granted that what we eat is a small problem, which the numbers don’t bear out.

Is eating animals really a big problem?

Counted in lives, it is among the largest problems there are: in 2024 the world slaughtered about 86 billion chickens, ducks, pigs, sheep, goats, turkeys and cattle for meat, according to UN Food and Agriculture Organization figures (FAO, 2025), more than nine in ten of them chickens [1]. Fish are recorded by weight, so their numbers have to be estimated. Researchers at fishcount.org.uk and the campaign group Compassion in World Farming put the wild catch at 1.1 to 2.2 trillion fish a year on average from 2000 to 2019, and at 980 billion to 1.9 trillion in 2019, when less Peruvian anchovy was landed (Mood & Brooke, 2024) [2]. Fish farms killed another 78 to 171 billion for food that year (Mood et al., 2023) [3]. Both estimates were peer reviewed, and both leave out some deaths, such as fish discarded at sea and those that die on farms before slaughter [2][3].

Does animal farming harm people too?

It does, through the climate and through disease: livestock farming, with parts of its supply chain, produced around 12% of all human-made greenhouse gas emissions in 2015, the FAO estimated in 2023 [4]. In a 2022 review in Science Advances, Hayek describes rising demand for meat as a trap: new diseases from animals have emerged where forest is cleared for farming, while farming more intensively on less land often confines animals and their waste in ways that also foster disease [5]. Hayek allows that some intensive methods avoid confinement and improve animal health, but argues that they cannot meet rising demand on their own, particularly for chicken and pork [5]. Intensive pig and poultry farming confines more animals and uses more antibiotics than beef production, so swapping beef for chicken, a common way to cut emissions, neglects the disease risk [5]. Preventing these diseases, the review concludes, requires among other things reducing the high demand for animal foods [5]. The outbreaks that have already passed from farmed animals to people are covered in the answer on pandemic risk.

Does caring about animals mean caring less about people?

It needn’t, since eating differently stops no one from giving time or money to any other cause. In richer countries it can even leave more money to give: in a modelling study covering 150 countries, Springmann and colleagues (2021) found that healthy vegetarian and vegan diets cost 17 to 34% less than current diets in high-income and upper-middle-income countries [6]. In low-income and lower-middle-income countries, the healthy diets they modelled cost more than what people eat now [6].