Does eating only plants actually result in fewer animal deaths?
This is a clip from a presentation delivered in my private Skool community, in this presentation, I look beyond the animals directly consumed for food and explore the wider consequences of producing our food — including crop deaths, harvesting, pesticides, habitat disruption and livestock production.
The question isn't simply “Did an animal appear on my plate?” but “How many animals died to produce the food on my plate?”
generated summary
Animal welfare and shared goals
- Carnivore eating is connected to caring about animals, personal health, and the environment, with avoidance of caged or indoor-kept animals and active use of grass-fed, regenerative, locally sourced meat.
- The meat comes from a farm about five miles away; foods such as avocados are not, being flown in from the other side of the world.
- Vegans and carnivores have the same three basic motivations: animal welfare, personal health, and the environment. Both are trying to achieve the same things through different approaches.
- Most carnivores seek animals that are not confined to cages and food aligned with nature, ethics, and animal welfare.
- Gratitude toward animals eaten is compatible with caring about their welfare.
- This material was heavily researched and formed part of the presentation that led to a second social-media ban.
Crop farming and hidden animal deaths
- Crop farming also kills animals. A Smithsonian source gives roughly 672 million birds exposed annually to pesticides on U.S. agricultural lands, with about 10%, or 67 million birds, killed. [1]
- Over 50% of gray-tailed voles perish during alfalfa mowing. [2]
- About 52% of field mice die during field activities. [3]
- About 77% of rats perish during field activities. [4]
- Rats, snakes, worms, slugs, mice, insects, and other small animals have just as much right to live as cows, so their deaths should not be valued less.
- Every time a combine harvester goes through a field, animals are caught in machinery and habitat and ecosystems are destroyed.
- These deaths go largely unnoticed because people eating crops are not directly eating the animals, but avoiding meat does not mean avoiding animal deaths.
Soil and ecosystems
- Repeatedly plowing and turning over fields releases carbon, microbes die, and the soil eventually becomes desertified.
- Animals are needed on the land to urinate and defecate, allowing microbes and grass to thrive and supporting insects, birds, and the rest of the ecosystem.
- Once the microbes in the ground are destroyed, worms and other insects disappear, birds lose their food, and the wider ecosystem dies off.
- The evidence is heavily tilted toward the idea that not eating meat means not causing death, but crop farming also causes deaths.
The 23-deaths comparison
- For the hidden cost of crop farming, 1 hectare is 2.47 acres, the given figure is 274 animal deaths per acre, one acre will feed somebody for a year, and the stated total is 23 animal deaths per vegan per year.
- The calculation uses what is regarded as the lowest possible figure through organic and pesticide-free production and does not add animal harm from glyphosate.
- An average vegan therefore indirectly causes 23 animal deaths per year under this calculation.
- Not directly eating an animal does not remove responsibility for a predictable death caused by producing the food.
- Accidentally hitting a deer while driving is an accident; knowing that every drive on the road will kill a deer creates responsibility even without an intention to kill it and while trying to avoid it.
- Once these crop deaths are known, the same principle creates responsibility for those predictable deaths.
One cow per year
- One cow is more than enough to feed one person for an entire year, with the calculation giving about 378 days of food from one cow.
- A beef-based carnivore therefore directly causes about one animal death per person per year.
- Using the figures given here, that is 23 times fewer deaths than the stated 23 animal deaths per vegan per year.
- Eating chicken, lamb, or other animals could raise the carnivore total to several deaths per year, but it remains considerably below the stated vegan total.
Why I am carnivore
- Caring about animals includes not killing even a spider; it is either left in the house or put back outside.
- Animal welfare, personal health, and the environment are the three reasons for carnivore eating, and they are also the three reasons people become vegan.
- The conclusion is: "A true vegan is a carnivore."
References
- [03:43] When it Comes to Pesticides, Birds are Sitting Ducks — Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute
- [04:39] Density-Dependent Responses of Gray-Tailed Voles to Mowing — DOI 10.2307/3808937
- [04:49] The effects of harvest on arable wood mice Apodemus sylvaticus — DOI 10.1016/0006-3207(93)90060-E
- [04:52] Fate of Polynesian Rats in Hawaiian Sugarcane Fields during Harvest — DOI 10.2307/3799612
Zero carb people are not average, they only need a single cow for a family for a year. That is one life. Animals should not be eating human raised crops, that is not optimal and zero carb people try to avoid it if they can afford it.
Where do the inputs of your sterile, isolated environments come from? You can't claim sustainable solutions unless you look at the cost of the entire cycle, not one element in isolation. Those inputs are not free from death. One intentional death a year still wins.
You can buy whole grass fed, grass finished cows today - you can get to know your local rancher, its doable, and practical.
Right back at you buddy.
Most meat in the world is produced by animal farms. Only a privileged few can eat like you describe.
What inputs are you talking about exactly? You just need nutrients, plant parts to clone or seeds or unicellular organisms, air, water, and sunlight. You can have a self sustaining biosphere without animals. We bootstrap such an environment and keep taking a little for humans to eat.
I'm not sure how that changes the ethical statement this post is making; If you want to minimize animal deaths zero carb does it most efficiently.
Fertilizer, nitrogen, top soil (if you use it) comes from somewhere.
Show me, please, I want to see this isolated biosphere - remember "self sustaining" no external inputs.
I dunno if my original post is clear enough. The main argument I was trying to make is to compare within the right categories to make a moral judgement. Otherwise it's a category error.
One category is how things are today for the majority of people. Animal agriculture vs plant agriculture for food.
The 2nd category is what is possible and needs to be scaled. This is where I put your 1 large animal killed per person per year (because most people can't eat this way) and compared it against growing plants without killing animals.
There are regions on earth with only plants or single celled organisms. I can get algae or yeasts from the wild, grow them as food in water and eat them.
You can forage food from the wild and remove insects carefully before eating them.
The majority of people are not zero carb, I reject the basis of your argument. We are already talking about the most niche of niche communities already.
This is just a fancy way of framing your biases. It's not a good faith discussion position.
This is impossible when you take into account the inputs of plant only agriculture. So we are back at effect vs intent, which is what the entire post is about. If you value life, you should look at your effective footprint not your intended footprint.
Great, show me your farming setup to do this with zero inputs and zero deaths please.
Sure - if you live in a forgeable area that always has plant based foods in bloom (so tropics) and you have enough range land where you can walk amongst all the plants without having to farm, reap, sow, harvest or touch the land... it's theoretically possible... but I haven't not seen any human community do this. These areas would be very dense with life, i.e. the rain forest, so just walking around will require huge effort and you will have to fend off animals without killing them. Not that it's scientific at all but all the naked survival shows demonstrate how well that works out.
I will think about it.
I don't have one. I was just alluding to its possibility by pointing to regions of the earth with only plants and single celled organisms.
I need funding to research it and set it up. 😅
yep. You need blooms for a few months of the year. You can dry and preserve plants for the rest of the year.
Interesting thoughts. These issues exist on a cattle ranch too. Cows trample small animals, eat them unintentionally throughout their life. What about all the parasites in the cow's body that you kill when you kill the cow? I've seen cows bully, kill smaller animals and themselves.
Cattle ranchers shoot animals that might threaten their cows. So it seems raising cows for humans to eat isn't just one kill per year as it seems initially.
I think self defense is a separate topic. Sometimes you have to fend off humans too.
If you want to police all animal behaviors the only way to ensure no animals are killed by other animals is a mass extinction event.
You can have one what-about-ism or the other, having both isn't consistent.
I don't want to police animals. I am just saying that you are using cows to kill small animals instead of tractors and pesticides. And that the cow is not just one life. There are thousands of parasites in it.
Can you explain the whataboutism? I think most humans agree that it's allowed to kill to save your family from a murderer but not to eat. The circumstances matter.
I haven't seen the data on how many cows kill on their own, but i'd be surprised if it was more then a rounding error.
This is your bias coming through again - We exist as a species because we kill to eat, otherwise we would have died out millions of times over. Starve or fight results in humans fighting.
I don't have data but we can do a rough estimate. I have lived closely with cows for some years (I was a vegetarian in a rural area). Wild grass is full of insects. Cows eat a lot of insects while grazing. They graze throughout the day on most days. So during a lifetime of 10-15 years a cow accumulates a large kill count.
Yeah. If I had to eat a person to survive I would probably prefer to starve to death. (Or maybe my primitive brain circuits will kick in and make me eat the person who knows)
At least in this state I don't value survival the most.
Anyways it's been a fun discussion. I'm tired. Let's talk another time. :))
If your counting insect deaths in your calculus the harvest numbers become orders of magnitude higher.
You are the result of a long line of humans that would do anything to survive - because if they wouldn't they wouldn't be around to pass on their genes. No family is going to watch their children starve to death while they have animals to eat.