Going veg rarely sticks

Kenny Torrella quit meat 20 years ago after learning what factory farming looks like. Most people who try don't last. New research points to an easier option that gets you most of the way there.

Eat fewer small animals

That's the whole ask. Not zero meat, just less of the meat that comes from the smallest bodies.

Size changes everything

Cattle are raised in smaller numbers and treated less harshly than farmed fish and chickens. The smaller the animal, the worse the conditions tend to be.

Half a percent of a cow

A family steak dinner uses maybe 0.5 percent of one cow. That same family can polish off an entire rotisserie chicken in one sitting.

Someone finally measured it

Chris Bryant of the University of Bath and the research group Faunalytics ran the numbers on how much suffering is packed into each bite of meat or egg.

A suffering footprint

The climate movement gave people a carbon footprint to reason with. Faunalytics wanted the same tool for animals.

“We felt like there was a gap in terms of thinking about more of a 'suffering footprint'”

How they counted

Using USDA and UN data, they worked out how much edible meat, milk or eggs each animal yields in a lifetime, then converted that into days of farm life and lives slaughtered per pound.

They counted feeder fish too

Some farmed fish are fed other fish. Those lives got folded into the totals, so the number reflects the animals you never see on the plate.

Shrimp dwarf everything

The vast majority of diet-driven suffering traces back to one tiny animal. A bite of shrimp scampi does more harm than an entire burger.

“a single bite of your shrimp scampi is far more harmful than devouring an entire burger”

Skip seafood? Then poultry

Plenty of Americans eat little or no seafood. Strip it out of the data and chicken, turkey and eggs become the biggest lever you have.

Bred to collapse

Meat chickens grow so fast and so large that many struggle to stand or walk. Half of US egg-laying hens spend their whole lives in cages too small to flap a wing.

Eggs count, no killing needed

Hens get their beak tips seared off without pain relief, then are slaughtered at about 1.5 years when laying slows. Buying fewer eggs, and pasture-raised when you do, helps.

Pigs and cattle suffer too

Piglets are castrated and teeth-clipped without pain relief, cattle are branded and dehorned. But their suffering is spread across far more bites of bacon and burgers.

“their suffering is spread out across many more bites”

Numbers you can act on

The report isn't peer-reviewed and one economist calls the figures ballpark, not precise. Still, shrinking the problem down to your own plate beats tuning it out entirely.

“If you can stand to think about it long enough, the problem becomes paralyzing”