But the adverts show happy cows in green fields.
Short answer: The green-field cow is an advert. Most farmed animals are reared intensively, and even the happiest dairy cow is killed at 5–6 of her ~20 natural years.
Grant the real grass and the genuine care. She is still killed at roughly a quarter of her natural lifespan, the moment her yield stops paying.
The Humane League UK (citing industry/EFSA data)
The objection
“Farming isn’t all factories. The packaging shows cows in green fields, hens roaming the yard. That’s the farming I’m supporting, and there’s nothing cruel about that.”
The answer
The image is doing a lot of work, so start by asking who painted it. The green field on the carton is an advertising decision. The pastoral scene exists precisely because it sells, where the shed, the slatted floor and the slaughter line do not. The gap between the picture and the practice is the product, deliberately built.
The reality at scale: the great majority of the world’s farmed animals are reared in intensive systems, a long way from the idyll on the label. Most chickens never see a field. Even where “outdoor” or “free-range” applies, the labels are looser than buyers assume, and the journey still ends at the same abattoir.
But here is the point that survives even the best farm. Grant the happy cow, the real grass, the genuine care, and she is still killed. A dairy cow’s natural lifespan is around twenty years; in the industry she is slaughtered at about five or six, the moment her milk yield no longer pays. Her male calves, useless to a dairy, are killed young or reared for veal. No amount of green field changes the ledger: a life cut to a quarter of its length, and her offspring taken, so the milk keeps flowing.
So the advert answers a question nobody’s really asking. The objection to farming was never only “are the animals comfortable until we kill them?” It is “is it right to breed and kill them at all, for things we don’t need?” A happier cow has a better life. She does not have a spared one.