Does one person going vegan make a difference?
Short answer: One person going vegan does make a difference: the charity research group Animal Charity Evaluators estimated in 2021 that a plant-based person accounts for about 105 fewer vertebrates killed a year.
An estimate from an animal charity research group, covering vertebrates only, so treat it as a guide to scale. Most of the count is fish, which rarely come up in the conversation at all.
Animal Charity Evaluators (2021), global 2018 data, via Faunalytics
Data
| Figure | |
|---|---|
| vertebrates killed for food a year per person who isn't plant-based | 105 |
| fish, wild-caught and farmed | 93 |
| farmed land animals, mostly birds | 12 |
| Source: Animal Charity Evaluators (2021), global 2018 data, via Faunalytics | |
The objection
“The industry kills tens of billions of animals a year. One person changing their diet is a rounding error, and the animals get slaughtered whether or not I buy the product. The problem is systemic, and only systems can solve it.”
The answer
The numbers are vast, and no single diet ends industrial slaughter. The objection uses that to change the question from “is this wrong?” to “will I single-handedly fix it?” Nobody is responsible for ending all harm, but each of us is responsible for whether we take part in it, and if a practice has a victim, declining is your decision whatever anyone else does.
Does one person’s diet change how many animals are farmed?
It changes the demand that farm numbers follow. No single purchase flips a switch, but consistent reductions across many people cut the number of animals bred, and you are one of those people. You, individually, will not move the global totals. Neither does any single vote, vaccination or recycled bottle, yet aggregates are made of nothing else, and we accept that logic for voting and pollution without concluding that any one act is meaningless. Animal Charity Evaluators, an animal charity research group, divided the vertebrates killed for food worldwide in 2018 by the number of people who are not plant-based, which comes to about 105 a person each year: 79 wild-caught fish, 14 farmed fish and 12 farmed land animals, nearly all of them birds (2021) [3]. That is what one person’s switch spares only if production falls in step with demand, and the summary of it advises caution, but it puts a scale on the share [3].
Why does one diet matter more than it seems?
Animals convert feed poorly, so each unit of demand you remove frees far more crops and land than the food itself would suggest. In US data, beef returns only about 3% of the calories and protein fed into it (2016) [1], and meat, farmed fish, eggs and dairy use about 83% of the world’s farmland while supplying 18% of its calories (2018) [2]. One person’s choice is also visible. In a 2017 field experiment, telling café customers that more people were starting to eat less meat doubled meatless orders [4], so hearing that others are changing can shift what people choose.
Sources
Sources checked against what they say on .
- Shepon et al. (2016), Energy and protein feed-to-food conversion efficiencies in the US and potential food security gains from dietary changes, Environ Res Lett (opens in a new tab) doi:10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/105002 (opens in a new tab) (study)
- Poore & Nemecek (2018), Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers, Science (opens in a new tab) doi:10.1126/science.aaq0216 (opens in a new tab) (study)
- Faunalytics (2022), How many animals does a plant-based diet spare?, summarising Animal Charity Evaluators (2021) (opens in a new tab) (campaign)
- Sparkman & Walton (2017), Dynamic norms promote sustainable behavior, even if it is counternormative, Psychol Sci (opens in a new tab) doi:10.1177/0956797617719950 (opens in a new tab) (study)
From https://discussvegan.com/questions/one-person-difference