The same kind of mind
A question few people ask: what, exactly, is the difference?
Your dog
Solves problems, reads your gestures, feels joy and fear. Protected by law almost everywhere.
A pig
Understands what a mirror shows and uses it to find hidden food. Learns and remembers complex tasks. Cognitive traits similar, though not identical, to dogs and chimpanzees. Raised and killed for food in most of the world.
Dairy calves are usually taken from their mother within the first day. Both call for each other afterwards. With a dog, we wouldn't accept it.
“Humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, 2012
Land animals killed for food since you opened this page
About 2,600 every second. 83 billion a year. Fish not included.
FAO data for 2022, via Our World in Data
Fish are not counted: an estimated 0.8 to 2.3 trillion are caught from the wild every year. Male chicks of laying breeds are killed on the day they hatch: they can't lay eggs and aren't bred for meat.
The usual objections, tested against the data
You're not wrong to believe these things. Nobody showed you the data. Here it is.
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“Vegans destroy forests with soy.”
Three quarters of the world's soy is fed to animals, mostly chickens and pigs. About 7% becomes tofu, tempeh or soy milk. The soy that clears forests feeds livestock, not vegans.
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“You can't get enough protein without meat.”
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the largest body of nutrition professionals in the world, in its 2025 position paper: “in adults, appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan dietary patterns can be nutritionally adequate”. Appropriately planned means legumes, whole grains, nuts and seeds, and vitamin B12 from a supplement or fortified food.
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“One person can't make a difference.”
Food is 26% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In high-consumption countries like the United States, a diet without animal products cuts a person's food emissions by 61 to 73%. You don't have to flip the whole system. One meal moves the number.
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“They're bred for this. It's natural.”
Nothing about intensive farming is natural. Pregnant sows spend weeks in crates too narrow to turn around: EU law allows it for the first four weeks of each pregnancy and around farrowing. Calves are taken from their mother within a day. “Bred for it” describes a system we built. We also bred dogs for fighting. We decided that was wrong.
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“It's too expensive. It's too hard.”
Rice, beans, lentils, potatoes, pasta and seasonal vegetables are among the cheapest foods on Earth, and the everyday diet of billions of people. Nobody is asking you to change everything. Pasta e fagioli already exists.
The climate goes through the plate
Animal foods produce 57% of food's emissions while providing 18% of its calories and 37% of its protein.
Kilograms of CO₂ equivalent per 100 grams of protein
Poore and Nemecek, 2018, Science. 38,700 farms in 119 countries.
15,415 litres for one kilo of beef
Per gram of protein, beef needs about six times the water of legumes.
Litres of water per kilogram
Mekonnen and Hoekstra, 2012, Ecosystems. Counts all water, including rain on fields and pasture.
In a world without animal products, freshwater withdrawals for food would fall by 19%.
Three quarters of farmland, freed
Meat, dairy, eggs and farmed fish use 83% of the world's farmland and give 18% of its calories. Without them, farmland would fall from 4.1 to 1 billion hectares: 3.1 billion hectares back to forests and grasslands, four times the area of Australia.
Farmland, in billions of hectares
“A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth.”Joseph Poore, University of Oxford, The Guardian, 2018
You don't have to go vegan tomorrow.
One meal without meat this week. Just one. Pasta with tomato sauce, pasta e fagioli, minestrone, pasta e ceci: a good part of Italian cooking already is. If you liked it, make it two next week.
Sources
- Poore and Nemecek, 2018 Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Science
- Xu et al., 2021 Global greenhouse gas emissions from animal-based foods. Nature Food
- FAO, 2023 Pathways towards lower emissions. fao.org
- Mekonnen and Hoekstra, 2012 A global assessment of the water footprint of farm animal products. Ecosystems
- Broom, Sena and Moynihan, 2009 Pigs learn what a mirror image represents and use it to obtain information. Animal Behaviour
- Gieling, Nordquist and van der Staay, 2011 Assessing learning and memory in pigs. Animal Cognition
- Marino and Colvin, 2015 Thinking pigs: a comparative review. International Journal of Comparative Psychology
- Weary and Chua, 2000 Effects of early separation on the dairy cow and calf. Applied Animal Behaviour Science
- Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, 2012 fcmconference.org
- Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 2025 Vegetarian dietary patterns for adults: a position paper. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
- Krautwald-Junghanns et al., 2018 Current approaches to avoid the culling of day-old male chicks. Poultry Science
- Council Directive 2008/120/EC Minimum standards for the protection of pigs. EUR-Lex
- Our World in Data Soy , food emissions , land use , food prices , animals slaughtered
- Fishcount, Mood and Brooke Estimate of wild fish caught each year. fishcount.org.uk