Lambs have a good life in fields, don't they?
Short answer: A lamb is a baby. UK lambs are typically slaughtered at around 6–7 months, some as young as 10 weeks. The field is real, but very short.
A sheep can live 10–12 years. A 'spring lamb' is killed in its first few months.
Defra-commissioned survey of English lambs at slaughter; AHDB slaughter data
The objection
“Sheep have the best deal in farming. They’re out in the fields, free, in the fresh air. What’s the harm in lamb?”
The answer
The field is genuinely real, and that’s worth being honest about. Compared with a windowless broiler shed, a hillside is a different world. This site won’t pretend otherwise.
But look at the word on the menu. Lamb means a baby sheep. A Defra-commissioned survey found UK lambs are slaughtered, on average, at six to seven months old, and some as young as 10 weeks (British Texel Sheep Society / Defra). A “spring lamb” is killed before its first summer ends. A sheep’s natural lifespan is 10 to 12 years, so the animal on the plate has lived a few per cent of the life it could have had. The field was lovely. It was also brief beyond recognition.
And the scale is not small. The UK slaughters more than 10 million sheep and lambs every year (AHDB / Defra), over ten million individual animals, the great majority of them young.
The end is the same as for any farmed animal: a lorry, a slaughterhouse, a stun, a knife. A good few months don’t cancel a violent death. They just make it easier not to think about. The kindest life in farming is still a life cut to a fraction and ended for a meal nobody needs. If the field is the argument for eating lamb, the lamb’s age is the rebuttal.