this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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Questions for those who can answer them:
1.) What is the difference between "Milk" and "dairy herd" with regards to pollution and land use? Honest question.
2.) I've always wondered, but didn't want to get flamed for asking: What if you have pet chickens? I don't eat them, they live a great chicken life, but I end up with a ton of eggs that I give to people I know. Obviously those eggs are eaten. Does this count as some kind of horrible animal cruelty?
Just going to pitch in real quick. Growing your eggs on site is way better for the environment, since they don't have to be shipped to your grocery store from miles away.
Your chickens, even if you are a pos that doesn't take care of them at all, will still have a better life than in an egg laying factory.
I highly suggest it. I had some for a while. It's surprising how many eggs you end up with as well, you don't need that many and it's easy to give them a nice life.
Hard to say without context. While taking chickens' eggs does sound (and inherently is cruel), not even animal rights types care too much. It's just so ingrained in society.
The difference is when we talk about factory egg farms. Y'know, when they put chckena into their cage so they can't turn around in it, their head poking out into the feed box, and they can only lay their eggs into a hatch - no collection required.
Then the eggs get inspected, worse sent for birthing new chickens, and better ones being sold.
Then those for breeding chicken get inspected when the gender of the baby can be known, and 99.9% of male eggs get thrown into a fucking shredder (because you only need 1 rooster per 12-ish breeding hens).
This is what most concerned people have an issue with.
Why is it cruel if they're unfertilized eggs? I mean you could leave them, but then you'll just have a bunch of rotten eggs everywhere.
Chickens are wonderful pets. They eat bugs and poop fertilizer. As a farmer I can tell you your land can sustain chickens, just like it can sustain hundreds of other native birds.
I’m guessing these stats are focusing on a cow farm that cut down a forest versus a cow farm that exists on a prairie. But like the carbon cycle on most land can handle a certain amount of cows.
I just really hate how these all demonize small scale farmers. Having a couple dozen chickens is much different than having 500,000 chickens. Agricultures byproducts and environmental impacts range widely.
If I buy half a cow from my neighbor, it doesn’t travel, it gets processed locally. The ecological foot print is different than me getting a cow from Brazil.
Eh, it depends on how you look at it. Chickens are just domesticated Red Junglefowl, and we've bred them over the last few thousand years to be bigger, (probably tastier), and lay a lot more eggs.
IMO, egg layers and other common breeds are probably perfectly happy and comfortable birds without any 'real' cruelty. The way we've bred them certainly has made them more susceptible to certain health problems and shortened their max lifespan some (compared to their wild ancestors), but my experience with my birds has been that as long as they're healthy, they seem to be perfectly happy with life.
I think of it the same as how we've bred Border Collies into existence. They're very different from their pre-domestication ancestors, but they're also not so severely altered that they have inherent health issues or other severe issues.
Broilers (meat chickens), however are definitely on the crueler side. Those poor things are only meant to convert feed to meat, and the whole living part is probably considered undesirable. Most only need to live somewhere between a month and a year before slaughter, and I imagine if you let them go any longer they'll drop dead from health issues.
The dairy herd seems to be about beef from a dairy herd. So still meat, but offset by the fact that milk is produced as well. Not sure how they calculate it, nor have I ever seen beef labelled as that (...granted I also haven't bought any in years), but it makes sense.
This just seems like a pet with a byproduct to me but maybe someone knows more about the effects of breeding for egg laying on chicken quality of life
I hadn't considered that they would sell the meat from dairy cows, so thanks for that answer. My neighbor has cows but that's the extent of my knowledge on them.
A few of my chickens are basically "mutts", which haven't been bred for anything specific. (we got them from a local who sells chickens, she turned out to know even less than I do about them, though. They're not as healthy as the others and I suspect they are inbred) The rest of them were picked up from a farm supply store and seem to be specific "breeds", I have some easter eggers, some Australorps, a welsummer, a black star, and some rhode island reds. I may not be doing everything right BUT my chickens have a half acre to run around on instead of being locked in a tiny box their entire lives, and the meanest thing any of them have endured is me catching them by the tail feathers before putting them back over the fence.
Dairy is the farm, milk is the product. As to pollution and land use factory farms will always cause pollution because they squeeze too many animals into an area smaller then they can live in healthily for profitability. (Cows for example need 2 acres per cow in lush lands or 50 acres per cow arid lands).
As for chickens. In my opinion as long as you have at least two chickens (they are social animals), maintain them properly, protect them from predation, keep up with vet visits/vaccinations, and let your chickens out to forage, they are a wonderful addition to a neighborhood. But make sure you read up on egg safety, especially if you plan to share your eggs.
But milk has it's own "farm" section too, so that doesn't make sense. It would make more sense to get rid of milk and cheese sections and combine them with dairy herd, but then that stat doesn't make sense because it seems it would be way higher than the beef herd.
See how they specified "beef" dairy herd. They are talking only about the livestock. The animals. The veal. The cattle they breed. The animals they cull and sell. They aren't talking about the lactating products.
Then you have milk. The product. Lactating dairy cows have a productive phase when they are kept specifically and separately to produce milk. I know it comes off as cruel but in agriculture animals are livestock and thought of in terms of lineitems when listed out.
I hope that helps. It's a bad graph, the creater carved out specific data points for their own personal politics which makes it hard to read. (Hence the cute notes littered around the chart). I too would have wrapped dairy cows and milk production into one line.