If everyone went vegan, what would happen to all the farm animals?

The objection

“If the whole world went vegan, what would become of the billions of cows, pigs and chickens? You can’t release them into the wild, they’d starve. We’d be overrun, or forced to abandon them. The vegan vision ends in its own welfare catastrophe.”

The answer

This usually comes from real compassion, so it deserves a real answer. The first thing to notice is that it rests on a scenario no one is proposing: the overnight switch, where the planet wakes up vegan tomorrow with full barns and no plan. That isn’t how markets or social change work.

Diets shift gradually, over years and decades. As demand softens, producers breed fewer animals to match it, which is exactly the mechanism that does the work here. Farm animals are not a fixed wild population we’d have to rehome. They exist in their tens of billions only because we deliberately create them, generation after generation, to kill them: more than 80 billion land animals are slaughtered each year, and roughly the same number are bred to replace them [1]. Falling demand simply means conceiving fewer of them in the first place, not releasing today’s animals into the wild. The population tapers smoothly downward, with sanctuary entirely possible for the dwindling numbers that remain.

There’s even an environmental dividend, because the land no longer has to grow feed for inefficient conversion. Animals return only a fraction of the calories and protein fed into them [2], so as their numbers fall, vast areas are freed for human food or rewilding.

The question quietly answers itself. To ask “what about all the animals?” is to recognise how staggeringly many there are, and they are that numerous only because we make them so. The kind response is to stop creating them for a fate they never needed to meet, not to keep breeding them into this system so there’s always someone left to feel sorry for.