Is eating meat just the circle of life?

The objection

“Life eats life, it always has. The animal lived, it died, something else lives on it. That’s the circle of life, and farming is just our part in it.”

The answer

The phrase pictures a cycle that runs itself, in which animals are born, live out their lives, die and feed something else. Modern animal farming is a line that people plan from the first day to the last. The animal-advocacy research group Sentience Institute estimated in 2019 that about 74% of the world’s farmed land animals live on factory farms, a figure it says carries substantial uncertainty [1]. For the US it put the share at 99% in 2022, Our World in Data reports [2].

How is a farm different from the circle of life in nature?

On a farm, people decide which animals are born, where they live, what they eat and when they die. The typical farmed land animal is a chicken: chickens made up about 91% of the 86 billion cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys and ducks slaughtered for meat worldwide in 2024, on UN Food and Agriculture Organization figures [3]. In the EU, as the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) described it in 2023, a meat chicken usually hatches in a hatchery from an egg laid by a separate breeder flock, is reared indoors at high stocking density and is killed at around 37 days, well before it is old enough to breed [4]. Bred for growth this fast, the birds become obese and develop heart and leg problems if fed freely beyond slaughter age, which is why their parents are kept on severe feed restriction that leaves them hungry [4]. You can see the inside of a meat-chicken farm in footage filmed in South Australia in 2011.

Do farm animals live out a natural lifespan?

Very few do: meat chickens are killed at a few weeks old, and dairy cows rarely reach their life expectancy of around 20 years. Dallago and colleagues (2021), using national slaughter data and milk-recording figures for around 2018 to 2020, estimated the average dairy cow’s life at 3.9 years in Canada and 6.4 in Ireland, with the US, Germany, France and four other big milk-producing countries in between [5]. The review also notes that in Canada, Holsteins that die of natural causes do so at 9.1 years on average, well short of 20 but more than twice the 3.9 years estimated for the average Canadian dairy cow [5]. Falling yields are not the main reason for the cull. The review found that involuntary culling accounts for most removals with a known reason, and in Canada from 2014 to 2019 nearly three-quarters of culled cows went for reasons such as fertility problems, mastitis and foot and leg problems, while about 7% were healthy, fertile cows culled for low milk production and the rest had no recorded reason [5]. The dairy answer follows a cow through those years.

Does “life eats life” justify how farm animals are treated?

It can’t, because an argument that excuses killing animals for food on the grounds that nature kills would excuse every way of doing it. If the phrase settled the matter, nothing done to an animal on its way to the plate could be wrong, from confining it in a crate to killing it slowly. Once you agree that some treatment is cruel, you have conceded that “circle of life” doesn’t decide the question, and what’s left to weigh is everything the phrase was meant to skip: whether the killing is necessary, how the animal lived and how much it suffered.