If everyone went vegan, farm breeds would go extinct.

The objection

“A vegan world would wipe out cows, sheep, pigs and chickens as we know them. By refusing to eat them, you’d actually cause the extinction of the very animals you claim to care about.”

The answer

It’s a genuinely interesting one, so take it seriously rather than waving it away. Start with the practical reality. A shift to plant-based diets would happen over decades, not overnight, and it would mean breeding far fewer of these animals rather than exterminating them. Their numbers would fall as demand fell. A declining population is a long way from a species being killed off.

The genetics would also be conserved, because people already do exactly this. Rare-breeds organisations like the Rare Breeds Survival Trust exist to preserve native livestock breeds precisely when commercial farming abandons them, through conservation herds, gene banks and conservation grazing, where hardy traditional breeds maintain habitats like heathland and grassland. We can and do keep heritage breeds alive in modest, well-kept numbers without industrially farming them. A vegan world has every reason to fund this and none to end it.

Then there’s the part of the argument that quietly defeats itself. It treats “continuing to exist as a farmed animal” as a benefit to the animal, when that existence is a short life ending in a slaughterhouse. You can’t coherently say you’re doing a cow a favour by ensuring billions more are born only to be killed at a fraction of their lifespan. A being suffers no harm by not being brought into existence. It suffers real harm by being bred for slaughter.

So the real choice was never “these animals or no animals.” It is billions bred to be killed, set against far fewer living out real lives under genuine care. Preserving a breed never required a kill line, and “we must keep them so we can keep eating them” is simply the demand for meat wearing a conservationist’s coat.