Numbers and footage, no scripture.
The case, for anyone.
The numbers, the footage, and the reasoning, each linked to where it came from so you can check it. The rest of this site makes the same case from the Torah.
Why do we love dogs and eat chickens?
Habit. We know our dogs, and we never meet the hens.
- Normal“Everyone does it.”It feels normal because it happens out of sight. The footage below shows what is done.
- Natural“Animals eat animals, and we’re built for it.”Being natural has never told anyone whether something is right. And the cage and the crate were built by people.
- Necessary“I need it.”If you have a real need, the suffering isn’t needless. If you don’t, all that’s left is taste.
This page has photographs or video of what is done to animals, which may include slaughter. They stay hidden until you say you're 18 or over.
The site can't check your answer, and it's saved only in this browser.
The case, in order
Where it starts
A hen feels her chicks' distress.
When her chicks are distressed, her heart rate climbs and she calls to them more. The researchers read it as one of the building blocks of empathy.
A laying hen outdoors, mid-stride, entirely at ease. The same bird, by every measure that matters, as the hens in the battery cages.GalgenTX · CC BY 2.0 · source When their chicks were exposed to a mildly aversive puff of air, mother hens showed the physiological and behavioural marks of empathy: heart rate up, eye temperature down, alertness heightened, and more calling to the chicks, responding to the young's distress as a stressor of their own.
Edgar et al., Proc. R. Soc. B, 2011 About this source
A controlled study. The finding is a matched physiological-and-behavioural response to another's distress, which the authors frame as one of the building blocks of empathy, not a claim of full human-style empathy.The harm
The EU's own scientists say the cages stop hens doing what they are driven to do.
The same panel says beak-cutting harms the birds and should be phased out. That is a government report, not a campaign.
The EU's own scientific panel on beak trimming: it causes negative welfare consequences, it is done to manage injurious pecking, and it "should not be necessary if good management practices are implemented", the Panel recommends phasing it out. On cages, it finds the space and the barren environment prevent hens from performing the behaviours they are motivated to perform.
EFSA, laying hens, 2023 About this source
A regulator's scientific opinion, not a campaign document, which is why it is here. Note what it does and does not say: it describes harm and recommends phasing the practice out; it does not call the industry cruel. That word is this page's, and it is argued for rather than borrowed.Was it ever necessary?
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics says a planned vegan diet can be adequate for adults.
Vitamin B12 was only isolated in 1948. Before that, nobody on earth could have eaten this way safely for long, which is how new the choice is.
A vegetable stall at Borough Market, London. For every generation before this one, living without animal foods carried real risk, until vitamin B12 was isolated in 1948.Jack Gavigan · CC BY-SA 3.0 · source The Academy's current position, in effect to 31 December 2032: in adults, appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan dietary patterns can be nutritionally adequate. Vegan dietary patterns, it says, exclude all foods of animal origin.
Academy of Nutrition & Dietetics, 2025 About this source
The replacement is narrower than its predecessor: it addresses adults, and drops the 2016 paper's explicit endorsement for pregnancy, infancy, and childhood, not because those were retracted, but because the review's scope was set to adults. The site states the narrower claim; its argument only needs that a healthy animal-free diet is available to the person reading it.Also cited · B12 isolated, 1948
Within living memory, meaning ours is the first generation for which a complete, reliably healthy animal-free diet has ever been practically possible.
B12 isolated, 1948 About this source
Two teams, simultaneously: Rickes, Brink, Koniuszy, Wood and Folkers at Merck ("Crystalline Vitamin B12," Science 107:396–7, the linked paper) and E. Lester Smith at Glaxo ("Purification of Anti-pernicious Anæmia Factors from Liver," Nature 161:638–9, doi 10.1038/161638a0). The site's claim that ours is the first generation able to live this way turns on this date, so it rests on the primary papers, not a retelling.Where the wanting comes from
The taste was sold to us.
Twenty-two producer-funded programs overseen by the USDA, including the ones behind 'Got Milk?' and 'Beef. It's What's for Dinner', took in over $885 million in one year, a government audit found.
See it
Jersey dairy cows crowded in a yard on their way to the milking parlor, each tagged and numbered: 649, 687. Each has a number because someone had to tell them apart.Lance Cheung / USDA · Public domain — work of the U.S. federal government · source The USDA oversees 22 producer-funded "checkoff" marketing programs, the ones behind "Got Milk?" and "Beef. It's What's for Dinner". In 2016 their assessments totalled over $885 million, ranging from $0.6 million for popcorn to $332.1 million for dairy.
US GAO, GAO-18-54, 2017 About this source
A neutral government-auditor source, not an advocacy one. Checkoff assessments are federally mandated marketing orders; the figures are the GAO's, for 2016. Private advertising by processors and restaurant chains is separate, and far larger.The starting point
Almost everyone already believes an animal's suffering counts for something.
You flinch when an animal is hurt in front of you. This argument needs nothing more than that.
A dog named Tomahawk, resting on a porch in California.Joe Parks · CC BY 2.0 · source What changed
The farm in the picture book is gone.
What replaced it breeds turkeys so heavy that the whole industry runs on insemination by hand. No earlier century ever saw a bird like her.
Commercial turkeys are bred by artificial insemination, week after week. Selection for a heavier, broader breast left the toms unable to transfer semen reliably at copulation. There is effectively no natural mating left in the industry.
Bakst & Dymond, poultry AI About this source
The common line that these birds are physically incapable of mating is stronger than the literature supports: they can mate, but not reliably enough for commercial production, so the whole industry runs on insemination by hand. The bird was bred into a body that can no longer reliably breed unless a person does it by hand.The test
Name the difference between the dog you would defend and the hen on the farm.
You would stop a man beating a dog, and standing up for the dog costs you nothing. Standing up for the hen costs you something you like. That is a real difference, but it is in what you get, not in what she feels.
Three ways out
There are three ways out of this argument, and each one has a price.
Say the hen's suffering does not count, though you did not believe that when it was a dog.
Or name your necessity; a real one excuses you, and this argument agrees.
Or name a difference other than taste.
A steak, as a restaurant serves it. The question is what was on the other side of it: need, or taste.Alex Munsell · CC0 · source Need or taste
For almost everyone in a supermarket, the only thing on the other side of the scale is taste.
People matter more than animals, and this argument agrees. A person's need would outweigh an animal's suffering. A person's taste does not.
Name the necessity
Only a real need can justify suffering as severe as the shed's.
A real need still counts: illness, a body that cannot absorb what it needs, poverty with no other food. A household that isn't ready limits the shared table, not what you buy and eat yourself.
That is rarely true of what you buy.
More
A real need covers exactly what it covers, and no more.
Also cited · Academy of Nutrition & Dietetics (2025)
The Academy's current position, in effect to 31 December 2032: in adults, appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan dietary patterns can be nutritionally adequate. Vegan dietary patterns, it says, exclude all foods of animal origin.
Academy of Nutrition & Dietetics, 2025 About this source
The replacement is narrower than its predecessor: it addresses adults, and drops the 2016 paper's explicit endorsement for pregnancy, infancy, and childhood, not because those were retracted, but because the review's scope was set to adults. The site states the narrower claim; its argument only needs that a healthy animal-free diet is available to the person reading it.Legal, or right
Legal was never the same as right.
Everything on this screen is legal. Killing male chicks on their first day was legal in Germany too, until 2022, and nothing changed that year except the law.
A chick a week or two old, sitting in someone's hand. Look at the size of him. Had he hatched in a laying hatchery and turned out male, he would not have lived this long: the males are killed on their first morning, billions of them a year.Tushar Hossain · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source Male chicks of laying breeds cannot lay and do not fatten well, so the egg industry kills them the day they hatch, by maceration or gassing, on the order of billions a year worldwide. The practice was judged indefensible enough that Germany banned it from 1 January 2022, and France from 2023.
Krautwald-Junghanns et al., 2018 About this source
A peer-reviewed review, cited for the practice and its rationale rather than a precise tally (global estimates cluster around 6–7 billion a year). Germany's ban took effect 1 January 2022; France's decree followed, with white-egg layer lines, over a tenth of French male chicks, carved out because they are harder to sex in the egg. In-ovo sexing is now the alternative, and it does nothing at all for the hens themselves.Not a side issue
Nothing else you decide every day is this big.
Animal foods use 83% of the world's farmland to give back 18% of its calories.
The Amazon in Rondônia, from orbit. The dark green is the forest that is left; the pale grid is land cleared for pasture and crops, opened along the 'fishbone' of roads.Coordenação-Geral de Observação da Terra / INPE · CC BY-SA 2.0 · source Meat, aquaculture, eggs and dairy use ~83% of the world's farmland and return 18% of humanity's calories, and 37% of its protein. 38,700 farms across 119 countries.
Poore & Nemecek, Science, 2018 About this source
Two sentences of its abstract matter for how every figure drawn from it should be read. First, the caveat: "Impact can vary 50-fold among producers of the same product", so an average says very little about any one farm. Second, what the authors concluded once they had accounted for that: "Most strikingly, impacts of the lowest-impact animal products typically exceed those of vegetable substitutes, providing new evidence for the importance of dietary change."Where it ends
Most of us no longer need any of it.
Every generation has ended something its parents called normal, and that never made the parents wicked. All this asks of you is to stop paying for it.
Hummus in Israel, where it is the meal and not the side dish.Orenrosenfeld · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source Also cited · Academy of Nutrition & Dietetics (2025)
The Academy's current position, in effect to 31 December 2032: in adults, appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan dietary patterns can be nutritionally adequate. Vegan dietary patterns, it says, exclude all foods of animal origin.
Academy of Nutrition & Dietetics, 2025 About this source
The replacement is narrower than its predecessor: it addresses adults, and drops the 2016 paper's explicit endorsement for pregnancy, infancy, and childhood, not because those were retracted, but because the review's scope was set to adults. The site states the narrower claim; its argument only needs that a healthy animal-free diet is available to the person reading it.Also cited · B12 isolated, 1948
Within living memory, meaning ours is the first generation for which a complete, reliably healthy animal-free diet has ever been practically possible.
B12 isolated, 1948 About this source
Two teams, simultaneously: Rickes, Brink, Koniuszy, Wood and Folkers at Merck ("Crystalline Vitamin B12," Science 107:396–7, the linked paper) and E. Lester Smith at Glaxo ("Purification of Anti-pernicious Anæmia Factors from Liver," Nature 161:638–9, doi 10.1038/161638a0). The site's claim that ours is the first generation able to live this way turns on this date, so it rests on the primary papers, not a retelling.
The numbers
2,600 a second
That is how many land animals are killed for food every second. 83 billion a year, and 75 billion of them are chickens.
The floor of an ordinary broiler shed, looking down on young meat chickens crowded together on the litter.
83+ billion land animals slaughtered per year, roughly 2,600 every second.
UN FAO, FAOSTAT, 2022 About this source
Chickens alone are about 75 of the 83 billion, 75.4 billion slaughtered in 2022 in the same FAOSTAT series, which is why step four starts from one hen. Fish are counted separately.10 land animals a year for each of us, on the world average
Eighty-three billion killed in one year, divided among eight billion people, comes to about ten each. Someone who stops buying stops paying for their share, every year, for the rest of their life.
See it
A cattle feedlot in New Mexico: hundreds of animals on bare dirt, with no pasture in the frame.Quintin Soloviev (2024) · CC BY 4.0 · source Also cited · UN FAO, FAOSTAT (2022)
83+ billion land animals slaughtered per year, roughly 2,600 every second.
UN FAO, FAOSTAT, 2022 About this source
Chickens alone are about 75 of the 83 billion, 75.4 billion slaughtered in 2022 in the same FAOSTAT series, which is why step four starts from one hen. Fish are counted separately.of the world's farmland
Used for animal foods, to return 18% of humanity's calories.
Also cited · Poore & Nemecek, Science (2018)
Meat, aquaculture, eggs and dairy use ~83% of the world's farmland and return 18% of humanity's calories, and 37% of its protein. 38,700 farms across 119 countries.
Poore & Nemecek, Science, 2018 About this source
Two sentences of its abstract matter for how every figure drawn from it should be read. First, the caveat: "Impact can vary 50-fold among producers of the same product", so an average says very little about any one farm. Second, what the authors concluded once they had accounted for that: "Most strikingly, impacts of the lowest-impact animal products typically exceed those of vegetable substitutes, providing new evidence for the importance of dietary change."Day one is the last day for most male chicks
Male chicks cannot lay eggs, so the egg industry kills them on the day they hatch, billions a year. Germany banned the practice in 2022.
Also cited · Krautwald-Junghanns et al. (2018)
Male chicks of laying breeds cannot lay and do not fatten well, so the egg industry kills them the day they hatch, by maceration or gassing, on the order of billions a year worldwide. The practice was judged indefensible enough that Germany banned it from 1 January 2022, and France from 2023.
Krautwald-Junghanns et al., 2018 About this source
A peer-reviewed review, cited for the practice and its rationale rather than a precise tally (global estimates cluster around 6–7 billion a year). Germany's ban took effect 1 January 2022; France's decree followed, with white-egg layer lines, over a tenth of French male chicks, carved out because they are harder to sex in the egg. In-ovo sexing is now the alternative, and it does nothing at all for the hens themselves.5 minutes with her calf is enough to bond
When the calf was taken, every cow in the study showed distress. Twelve hours later she could still pick him out.
More
If it were you, you would still be listening for him.
Five minutes with her calf after birth is enough to form a strong bond specific to that calf. Separated, every cow in the study showed distress — walking, urinating, butting, vocalising continually from one end of the paddock. She could still recognise her own calf twelve hours later. By twenty-four hours she was still distressed, and could no longer tell which calf was hers.
Hudson & Mullord, 1977 About this source
A 1977 husbandry study, not an advocacy paper — which is why this page leans on it. Note what it does not say: it did not measure whether she suffers more or less than a human mother would, and it is one study from one herd.$885 million a year of US government-mandated marketing
Twenty-two producer-funded programs overseen by the USDA, 'Got Milk?' and 'Beef. It's What's for Dinner' among them, raised it in one year, a government audit found.
Dairy alone was $332 million, and the industry's own advertising is on top.
Also cited · US GAO, GAO-18-54 (2017)
The USDA oversees 22 producer-funded "checkoff" marketing programs, the ones behind "Got Milk?" and "Beef. It's What's for Dinner". In 2016 their assessments totalled over $885 million, ranging from $0.6 million for popcorn to $332.1 million for dairy.
US GAO, GAO-18-54, 2017 About this source
A neutral government-auditor source, not an advocacy one. Checkoff assessments are federally mandated marketing orders; the figures are the GAO's, for 2016. Private advertising by processors and restaurant chains is separate, and far larger.
What it looks like
Eggs
These cages are too small and too bare for what a hen wants to do. The eggs roll out through the bars, and the birds never leave.
Layer hens in battery cages, Bastos, Brazil. The eggs roll out on the belt below them.
See the rest of the footage (5)
Chicken
A free-range shed, with doors to the outside. This is the humane end of the industry, and it still looks like this.
Inside a free-range broiler shed, packed end to end with birds.
Milk
She is following the calves' trailer. Dairy calves are taken within a day of birth so the milk can be sold.
Newborn dairy calves being taken away, with a cow walking after them, on film. The captions in it address the viewer directly and are its publisher's, not this page's.
Veal and dairy
This is where a dairy calf goes once she is taken from her mother. Each box holds one calf, alone.
Calf hutches: the standard housing for a dairy calf once she is taken off her mother. An edited campaign clip — the captions and the inset belong to its publisher, and the underlying footage carries no attribution of its own.
Milk
A dairy barn. Each cow is chained to her place by the neck, and the calf behind her is chained too.
A tethered dairy barn in Poland, 2014. Each cow is chained to her place by the neck. The one looking at you is a mother, kept in milk, whose calves are taken.
Turkey
She has been bred heavier than her legs are built to carry, and the males of her breed can no longer mate reliably, so the industry breeds them by hand.
A young turkey in a commercial shed.
What people say
Heard every day
“We’re at the top of the food chain.”Being able to do something has never been a reason to do it.
The top of the food chain is the one place where eating an animal is a choice. A lion has to; we get to decide.
“It’s natural.”Nothing about a cage or a crate is natural.
Disease is natural too, and so was dying at forty. We fought both without asking whether it was natural.
More
We are not lions, and we are not starving.
“So a chicken is worth the same as a person?”No. People matter more, and nothing here depends on pretending otherwise.
You would not let anyone hurt a dog for the fun of it, and a dog matters less than a child. Nothing more than that is being asked about the hen.
“People have always eaten meat.”No generation before yours could safely live without animal foods, and yours can.
Nothing about the animal has changed. What changed is what we can do without, and it changed in living memory.
The Academy's current position, in effect to 31 December 2032: in adults, appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan dietary patterns can be nutritionally adequate. Vegan dietary patterns, it says, exclude all foods of animal origin.
About this source
The replacement is narrower than its predecessor: it addresses adults, and drops the 2016 paper's explicit endorsement for pregnancy, infancy, and childhood, not because those were retracted, but because the review's scope was set to adults. The site states the narrower claim; its argument only needs that a healthy animal-free diet is available to the person reading it.“They'd die anyway.”Everyone dies. Nobody calls that a reason to make a life short and caged.
Being born into a shed is not a favour done to the animal, and a death that was coming anyway was never a reason to bring it forward.
The moral ones
“It’s quick.”The knife takes seconds. The shed takes months.
A quick death does nothing about the cage, the crate, the truck, or the months before the knife.
More
EU scientists describe what those months do to a dairy calf: taken from her mother, the horn buds burned out, pain their report calls severe.
Calves are routinely disbudded, the horn bud destroyed with a hot iron or caustic paste, and the Panel states plainly that both procedures cause severe pain. It also addresses castration, and the separation of the calf from its mother, which it identifies as a welfare consequence in its own right: "The great majority of dairy farms separate dam and calf immediately after birth." The Panel recommends keeping them together for at least 24 hours.
About this source
Anaesthesia is compulsory for disbudding in some member states and not in others, which is the point: the pain is not disputed, only whether anyone is required to prevent it.“I only buy humane.”A humane label still pays for the hatchery and the calf pen.
You cared enough to look for a better farm, so look all the way: a laying breed's brothers are killed the day they hatch however kindly she is kept, and a cow gives milk only because she has had a calf.
More
The only purchase that pays for none of it is not buying.
A grass-fed steak still answers a craving, not a need, and the Torah allows an animal pain only for a real need.
“It’s a personal choice.”It is your choice. It is also a purchase, and an animal is on the other end of it.
Buying pays for the next animal, and it is still your money when other hands do the work.
More
If one person's choices made no difference, that would be true of every purchase from every industry, and nobody believes that.
“If it were that bad, it would be illegal.”The law has not caught up with the EU's own scientists.
Their public report describes what the cages do to hens. The cages are still legal. Both of those are true at once.
The EU's own scientific panel on beak trimming: it causes negative welfare consequences, it is done to manage injurious pecking, and it "should not be necessary if good management practices are implemented", the Panel recommends phasing it out. On cages, it finds the space and the barren environment prevent hens from performing the behaviours they are motivated to perform.
About this source
A regulator's scientific opinion, not a campaign document, which is why it is here. Note what it does and does not say: it describes harm and recommends phasing the practice out; it does not call the industry cruel. That word is this page's, and it is argued for rather than borrowed.The half-measures
“I’ll cut out meat.”The line falls at vegan. Eggs pay for the hatchery, and milk for the calf taken from his mother.
Most male chicks the egg industry hatches are killed on the day they hatch.
More
What counts is what your money pays for, not whether you eat the meat.
Male chicks of laying breeds cannot lay and do not fatten well, so the egg industry kills them the day they hatch, by maceration or gassing, on the order of billions a year worldwide. The practice was judged indefensible enough that Germany banned it from 1 January 2022, and France from 2023.
About this source
A peer-reviewed review, cited for the practice and its rationale rather than a precise tally (global estimates cluster around 6–7 billion a year). Germany's ban took effect 1 January 2022; France's decree followed, with white-egg layer lines, over a tenth of French male chicks, carved out because they are harder to sex in the egg. In-ovo sexing is now the alternative, and it does nothing at all for the hens themselves.“I’ll keep only fish.”Fish most likely feel pain.
A fish injected with an irritant rubs the spot, rocks, and stops eating: pain behaviour, not reflex.
Fish have nociceptors in the lip, fin and skin; injected with an irritant they rub the spot, rock, and stop eating: pain behaviour, not reflex. The review concludes that fish likely feel pain.
“I’ve cut back.”Cutting back answers how much. The question was whether.
Half as much needless suffering is still needless. Each time you still buy it, you pay for the next animal.
More
An animal you still buy is not helped by the ones you skipped. Finish what you started, from your next meal.
The practical ones
“I need the protein, and it’s expensive.”Well-planned vegan eating can give adults enough of every nutrient.
That is the current position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. You will need one supplement, B12.
More
If money truly leaves you no other food, that is a real need. If not, cost is a preference.
The Academy's current position, in effect to 31 December 2032: in adults, appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan dietary patterns can be nutritionally adequate. Vegan dietary patterns, it says, exclude all foods of animal origin.
About this source
The replacement is narrower than its predecessor: it addresses adults, and drops the 2016 paper's explicit endorsement for pregnancy, infancy, and childhood, not because those were retracted, but because the review's scope was set to adults. The site states the narrower claim; its argument only needs that a healthy animal-free diet is available to the person reading it.“Plants feel pain.”If plants count, eating animals costs more of them.
Feeding crops to an animal and then eating the animal takes more crops, more land and more deaths than eating the crops.
More
A hundred grams of protein from beef takes about 164 square meters of land. From tofu, about two.
Meat, aquaculture, eggs and dairy use ~83% of the world's farmland and return 18% of humanity's calories, and 37% of its protein. 38,700 farms across 119 countries.
About this source
Two sentences of its abstract matter for how every figure drawn from it should be read. First, the caveat: "Impact can vary 50-fold among producers of the same product", so an average says very little about any one farm. Second, what the authors concluded once they had accounted for that: "Most strikingly, impacts of the lowest-impact animal products typically exceed those of vegetable substitutes, providing new evidence for the importance of dietary change."“My family would never go along with it.”A household that isn't ready limits the shared table, not your own plate.
Start with your own food and change nothing else. Leave everyone else's alone unless they ask.
More
You may miss some of the food, and that is a real loss, but the people and the noise of those dinners stay.
Where that leaves you
Almost none of us chose this.
We were born into it and raised on it, and most of us lived that way for years. Nobody here is accusing you.
You cannot unknow this.
From here on the same purchase is a different act, because now you know what is behind it.
More
There is no neutral chair now: leaving it undecided is a decision too, and that is what knowing costs.
You would not pay a man to kick a dog and call yourself a bystander.
Every purchase is an order for the next animal, placed by whoever pays for it.
More
Meat, milk and eggs come from the same industry and the same suffering. Stop paying for them.
If any of this has stayed with you, act on it while it is fresh.
Nobody changes how they live until something has reached them, and something has.
'Permitted' answers 'may I'. It never answered 'should I'.
Both questions are real, and only the second one is about the kind of person you want to be.
Every glass of milk has a mother like her behind it.
In that study, each cow still knew her own calf twelve hours after he was taken.
See it
Also cited · Hudson & Mullord (1977)
Five minutes with her calf after birth is enough to form a strong bond specific to that calf. Separated, every cow in the study showed distress — walking, urinating, butting, vocalising continually from one end of the paddock. She could still recognise her own calf twelve hours later. By twenty-four hours she was still distressed, and could no longer tell which calf was hers.
About this source
A 1977 husbandry study, not an advocacy paper — which is why this page leans on it. Note what it does not say: it did not measure whether she suffers more or less than a human mother would, and it is one study from one herd.You can choose now.
Most people before you never had this choice. You do.
It is in your hands now.
Nobody told you before. Today you know it.
Start now
Your next meal.
Decide now what it will be, the dish by name, not 'something vegan'. Then do the same at every meal after it, with no end date.
More
Start taking B12 this week. It is the supplement every vegan needs.
Every source on this site, linked to the original wherever a link exists.
If you are Jewish, the same case from the Torah starts at step one, the law. This page is also in Hebrew.