Would farm animals exist if we stopped eating them?

The objection

“These animals would never have existed if we didn’t farm them. No one breeds pigs for fun; they exist because we want meat, so in a real sense we give them life, and a short life is better than no life at all.”

The answer

Far fewer farm animals would exist if people stopped eating them, because farmers breed animals to match what people buy. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) counts about 86 billion land animals of seven farmed species slaughtered for meat in 2024, not including fish [1]. If people ate less meat, fewer animals would be bred to replace the ones killed, and what would happen to farm animals if everyone went vegan follows that change through. The traditional breeds are a separate worry, taken up in whether farm breeds would go extinct. The objection then takes a further step, from “we gave them life” to “so we may take it”, and that step is where it is weakest.

Is a short life better than no life at all?

Only if the short life is a good one, and philosophers still argue over whether even a good life can be better for the one living it than never existing at all. In David Heyd’s view a life can’t be meaningfully compared with never having existed, so being created can’t leave anyone better or worse off, while others hold that bestowing “the gift of life” can increase the wellbeing of the one who receives it, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sets out (Roberts, 2024) [2]. The case for eating animals on these grounds is known as the logic of the larder, and in 2005 Gaverick Matheny and Kai Chan argued that it fails even on its own terms, because many farm animals probably have lives that are not worth living [3].

Does giving an animal life give us the right to take it?

Having bred an animal is a poor reason to kill it, and even the strongest version of the argument, known as the replaceability argument, covers far fewer animals than the objection needs. Peter Singer has argued in Practical Ethics that if an animal is conscious but not self-conscious, with no desires that reach into its own future, killing it can be morally offset by bringing into existence another that will live a life as pleasant as the first would have had [7][8]. Jeff McMahan (2025) finds Singer’s arguments for this mistaken, though he sees a genuine insight in the idea and defends other arguments for the view that some animals, and some human beings, are replaceable while persons are not [8].

Even on Singer’s own account the argument has limits. In the 2011 edition he wrote that it could not justify eating meat from modern factory farms, where the animals’ lives seem more of a burden than a benefit to them, and that it is hard to say with confidence which animals are conscious but not self-conscious, though reasonable to suppose that some are [7]. Whether pigs are among those animals is an open question, and a 2015 review of pig cognition, emotion and personality by Lori Marino and Christina Colvin, which discusses the evidence on self-awareness among other things, concluded that what little is known suggests pigs are cognitively complex [6]. The review was produced with grant money from the Someone Project of Farm Sanctuary, a US group that rescues farm animals and campaigns for them.

The case the argument has to answer is an animal given a good life and then killed young on purpose, which is the best any farm can offer. Someone who bred dogs, gave each a happy year and then killed it to make room for the next could also say “but I gave them life”, and on the replaceability view that would be acceptable for any dog that lacked a sense of its own future. If that sounds like no defence for the dog breeder, it is no better a defence for the pig farmer. Parents bring children into the world and take on duties towards them as a result, without gaining any say over whether the child gets to keep living.

What life does a farm animal actually get?

Mostly a short one, since more than nine in ten of the land animals slaughtered for meat worldwide in 2024 were chickens [1]. In the EU most meat chickens are reared indoors and slaughtered between 28 and 42 days old, the fast-growing birds normally at around 37 days, the EU’s food safety agency EFSA reported in 2023 [4]. That is well before they mature, since the same report puts sexual maturity in meat breeds at around 11 weeks for males and the start of laying at 18 to 20 weeks for females [4]. For the male chicks of laying breeds the life is shorter still. RSPCA Australia, an animal-welfare charity, puts the number killed by the egg industry at around 6.5 billion a year worldwide, citing a 2026 review, and says the vast majority die on the day they hatch, because they cannot lay eggs and are not suited to meat production [5]. About 1.5 billion pigs were slaughtered in 2024 [1], and at one South Australian slaughterhouse in 2023 hidden cameras recorded pigs being gassed before slaughter.