Do vegans kill animals too?

Written By Adam Snow

This is a long article, so I’ll give you the quick answer up front - vegans are well aware that animals are killed by the non-vegan farmers who grow and harvest our food. This isn’t news to us. But the average meat eater’s diet results in up to 100 times more animal deaths than a vegan’s diet. That’s because vegans eat the same food as meat eaters, except meat, dairy, eggs, and honey, which means substantially fewer animals are killed for our diet.

A meat eater’s diet is responsible for:

  1. The animals that die directly from the animal-based foods that they eat (meat, eggs, dairy, and honey).

  2. The animals that die from growing and harvesting the food that those animals eat (various animal feeds such as soy, corn, grain, hay, etc.)

  3. The animals that die from growing and harvesting the non-animal foods in the meat eater's diet (fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, etc.)

As vegans, only #3 applies to us.

And that’s just the diet, when you factor in that vegans don’t wear leather, don’t use health and beauty supplies that contain animal products, don’t use products tested on animals, etc. that number is even higher.

Keep reading on for the long answer…

Probably the most common statement I see from non-vegans is that “vegans kill animals too” or “what about crop deaths?” This also ties into “if everyone went vegan we’d have to grow more crops and we don’t have the land for that.” These sentiments are related and seem to always come up together, so I thought I’d address this as one cohesive article.

I’d like to state that none of the data in this article is my own. It’s all curated and collected from reputable published scientific papers, prestigious research institutions such as Oxford University and Cornell University, industry leaders such as the American Soybean Association (ASA), and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). I say this upfront to dispel any myth that this is “vegan propaganda” as if it’s something I’ve made up. I have just taken their data and findings and presented them in a way that is hopefully easy to absorb and understand.

You can read the article in its entirety, or skip directly to a specific section:

Does veganism mean no animal deaths?

The Vegan Society's definition of veganism states: “Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude - as far as is possible and practicable - all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals." The key phrase being “possible and practicable”.

Vegans don't ever claim that our lives cause zero harm or death to animals. The aim of veganism is to reduce harm and death as much as is "possible and practicable.” Just because some harm and death occur incidentally and accidentally, doesn’t mean it’s right to deliberately cause harm and suffering when we don’t need to. We don’t stop doing moral things just because we cannot eliminate the immoral thing entirely. As a species, we will never stop murder as a whole, but we don’t say “well since we can’t stop murder I guess I’ll go kill people.” Same situation with child abuse, rape, etc. Just because we can’t stop all of it doesn’t mean we don’t try our hardest to prevent it.

Here are two analogies that illustrate this:

  • A school is on fire and there are 100 kids inside. But due to obstacles or timing, you can only save 90. Do you save the 90 even though you can’t save them all, or do you say “well I can’t save them all so why bother?” Obviously, any rational person would choose to save the 90. Even though we can’t save all 100 children, we saved as many as possible.

  • Every time you drive your car you risk getting into an accident and hurting or killing someone. There’s no way to reduce that risk to 0. So does that mean we should not take any precautions at all? Should we chug 10 beers and then go drive a car? Of course not. As responsible human beings, we do everything possible and practicable to prevent unnecessary harm and death, even if it means we can never stop 100% of them.

Then there's the matter of intent, accidental/incidental versus intentional/direct. If I’m driving down the road and a kid jumps out in front of me and I can’t stop in time, and I end up inadvertently running over and killing him, that’s called an accident, and I likely won’t go to prison. If instead I see a kid in the road, speed up and aim for him and kill him, that’s intentional and I’ll go to prison for murder. Intent matters.

I’m often told that I’m a hypocrite because I eat plants that cause animal deaths from pesticides or harvesting, or because I drove my car and may have killed a bug. But this is such an irrational thing to say because we don’t apply it to anything else in life. There’s even a name for it, the Nirvana Fallacy

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that we’re all against child slave labor. Yet for most if not all of us, a sad reality is that our everyday lives benefit in unseen ways from child slave labor. One example is that some of the rare earth minerals in the device you’re reading this on were most likely mined by child slave laborers. If not this device then definitely other items in your household. You benefited directly from the child exploitation that you presumably are morally opposed to. Now that doesn’t make you a hypocrite or a supporter of child exploitation any more than it makes a vegan a hypocrite because a farmer killed some animals during the planting or harvesting of our vegetables. It just means that we don’t live in a vegan world, just like we don’t live in a world free from child exploitation. We live in a highly complex and corrupt world where it is impossible to avoid all forms of exploitation. So we do our best to avoid it as much as possible and practicable.

Lastly, keep in mind that the moral failings of the farmers are not the responsibility of the consumer. Crops can be grown without killing animals, so if a farmer chooses to kill animals to grow crops, that’s on them, not vegans. When you buy meat, you’re specifically paying for an animal to be killed, so that blood is on the hands of the consumer, because you’re demanding that dead animal. But when you buy fruits and vegetables, you’re not asking a farmer to kill animals for you. They’re doing so out of apathy, laziness, or greed (because it’s cheaper for them to mass kill animals than to do veganic farming). The blood is on the farmer’s hands, not the consumer’s. Just like we aren’t responsible for the fact that cell phone parts suppliers employ child slave labor to mine certain materials, we aren’t responsible for farmers if they decide to kill animals while growing crops. Everyone is responsible for their own actions when they take or exploit a life.

“There is no ethical consumption under capitalism”, as they say. So we do the best we can. Non-vegans and vegans alike do their best to avoid child slave labor, and vegans do their best to avoid animal exploitation. But just because it cannot be avoided 100%, doesn’t make us hypocrites.

Just remember - “Possible and practicable”

Crop deaths

Let’s get this out of the way first, we know that animals die from commercial crop farming. Far too often I see meat eaters saying “vegans say their diets don’t kill any animals.” That is disingenuous and a straw man argument. The person making that claim is either lying or just repeating something they heard another meat eater say, because vegans don’t claim that. So my admitting this isn’t a “gotcha”, as this is something every vegan is fully aware of and readily admits.

So that aside, the next thing to keep in mind is that crop deaths are drastically overstated. Anti-vegans make it sound like it’s a literal bloodbath when crops are planted and harvested. But that’s simply not the case. When you plow a field, most animals hear the noise and commotion and run away. Very few animals sit there quietly waiting to be killed. You’ve seen animals in nature, right? What happens when you try to approach them? That’s right, they most often run away. Watch this video to see a combine passing over a man without even touching him. Additionally, most field animals are tiny and wouldn’t even be as high off the ground as him.

Now, of course, not every animal gets away. Some are accidentally killed. But the person running the plow isn’t deliberately seeking out the animals to harm and kill them (at least we hope not, as we don’t believe they’re psychopaths). But the animal agriculture industry IS intentionally harming and killing animals. Another thing to remember is that vegans don’t own nor control these commercial farming businesses that plant and harvest our crops. If you have an issue with crop deaths, you need to take it up with them, since they are the ones causing these deaths. When you buy an animal product, you are directly saying “kill that animal for me so I can eat it.” Whereas with plant-based foods, if animals die in the process, it’s not because you directly requested for them to be killed so you can eat them, it just happened incidentally.

Now that being said, we know that the animals that suffered and died don’t care if it was intentional or accidental, because they’re dead either way. Vegans aren’t content with just saying “well some animals are going to die for growing crops and that’s just life.” We would like to see crop deaths reduced as much as possible and practicable, and even eliminated entirely if it can be done. People and industries are working hard on new farming methods to reduce or possibly one day eliminate animal suffering and death from crop farming. Methods such as indoor and vertical crop farming (like the Dutch have mastered) are two methods being pursued. Change doesn’t happen overnight, and as mentioned before vegans don’t control the commercial crop farming industry, so we can’t force them to make these changes quickly or even at all.

One thing most people aren’t aware of is that most crops are grown for livestock consumption, not for people to eat. In the US, feed crops (which are crops that only animals eat) take up roughly 75% of farmland:

“Feed crops take up roughly 75% of US cropland, and when fed to livestock represent an inefficient source of edible calories”

In the EU, 71% of agricultural land (63% of arable land when excluding grasslands and only taking account of land used for growing crops) is used to feed livestock:

“Data shows that over 71 % of all the EU agricultural land (land used to grow crops – arable land – as well as grassland for grazing or fodder production) is dedicated to feeding livestock. When excluding grasslands, and only taking into account land used for growing crops, we see that over 63 % of arable land is used to produce animal feed instead of food for people.”

This means that 75% of the crop deaths in the US and 71% in the EU are attributed to the animals that they raise for food. So if you want to drastically reduce crop deaths; stop buying meat, dairy, and eggs.

And lastly, I shouldn’t even have to say this, but it keeps coming up so I guess I have to: non-vegans eat crops too (fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, etc.) When animals die because of crops grown for humans, those crops are feeding vegans and non-vegans alike. So the whole “animals died for your vegan diet” is a misnomer, because animals are dying from growing crops that both vegans and non-vegans eat.

See the chart below. Up to 100 times more animals (depending on which crop and animal you’re comparing) die for a meat eater’s diet compared to a vegan’s diet.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The “one cow” fallacy

Often when discussing this topic, I’ll inevitably have a person who makes a claim like “Every year I could buy a cow, and it could graze in my yard and eat only grass. I would kill one cow a year, that’s it. But you would be responsible for all the animals that die from planting and harvesting your vegetables and grains. Therefore I would kill fewer animals than you, so I would be more vegan.” Or sometimes they just simply say “grass fed beef kills fewer animals than a plant-based diet.” This is such a ridiculous argument with many issues, but let’s break it down anyway.

The quick and easy way to shut this down would be for a vegan to make the same sort of ridiculous argument, and claim that we could grow our own food on our land in a backyard indoor organic pesticide-free garden and cause zero deaths. So right there our scenario already causes fewer deaths than theirs. But let’s just humor this scenario anyway.

Let’s first start with the fact that this notion is preposterous, because nobody eats only cow and no other food. I know there are people on the “carnivore” diet who only eat meat, but nobody is doing that long-term, and especially not for their entire life. (Side note: one of the major proponents of the carnivore diet gave it up because it was harming his health. Imagine that?) Even those on the carnivore diet will eat other animals such as chicken and pig which are not grass-fed. So “carnivores” aside, these people would also eat other animals like chicken and pig (that are not grass-fed, which means those animals ate a diet of soy, corn, and grain - all which resulted in animal deaths), dairy, eggs, AND the same foods that vegans eat (fruits, vegetables, grains, and legumes). So they’d be eating the same food as vegans do PLUS animals, and because raising animals for food is a highly inefficient process that requires lots of crops and therefore lots of animal deaths (I cover that in the next section), their death count for their diet will always be higher.

But let’s pretend that they only eat cows, and only one a year. This will never happen but let’s humor it anyway. Let’s look at all the ways that the one cow scenario causes more than just the death of the cow:

  • Typically grass-fed cows aren’t 100% grass-fed their entire lives. Most of them only eat a grass-based diet for part of their lives, and then are finished with commercial animal feed consisting of soy, corn, and grains. Planting and harvesting the crops to make that feed resulted in animal and insect deaths

  • For those that are 100% grass-fed and grass finished, that includes hay, especially in winter, which is harvested via machines just like other crops. That harvesting results in animal deaths.

  • The grazing cows will inadvertently step on little bugs and small animals while they’re grazing, and will incidentally ingest some bugs in the grass.

  • Predators are killed to protect the cows that are grazing.

  • Wildlife is killed to protect cattle from disease.

  • Livestock are given dewormers that act as pesticides killing any insects that try to make use of their feces.

  • Grazing cattle destroys river bank environments.

  • Grazing cattle take up more land and release more greenhouse gas emissions than grain-fed cattle, which means more climate change, more natural habitat destruction, and more wildlife destruction.

So as you can see, one cow doesn’t mean one death. It means a LOT of deaths. To the best of my knowledge, we don’t have any data on how many deaths a scenario like this causes, so we can’t even speculate. All these variables make it essentially impossible (short of a properly controlled scientific study) to determine if a grass-fed cow results in more or fewer deaths than someone buying organic crops from their local farmers market. Without the data, the claims from the “one cow” people are just baseless claims.

And lastly, there simply isn’t enough land on earth for their fantasy scenario to scale to support humanity’s demand for meat. Each individual person on earth isn’t going to be able to own a couple of acres for a cow to graze. People live in cities, many people can’t afford to own a couple of acres of land, and there just isn’t enough land on earth even if everyone could afford it and cities didn’t exist. Even if they just relied on commercially raised grass fed cow instead of raising their own, there still isn’t anywhere near enough land to raise animals that way and provide the amount of meat that humanity demands. You would need many more earths just to have enough pasture land to do so. Factory farming exists because it’s impossible to do the scenario they’re describing at scale for all of humanity. So no matter how you look at it, this “one cow” argument is just a silly fallacy.

Do we have enough land to feed everyone a vegan diet?

So let’s say you’ve reviewed the data here and watched the videos and now you realize that yes, a meat eater’s diet does in fact cause substantially more animal deaths than a vegan’s diet. The next thing you may ask is, “So if everyone were to go vegan, would we even be able to grow enough food? Do we have enough land to do so?” As I mentioned earlier in this article, most crops grown today are for livestock (in the US feed crops take up roughly 75% of farmland, and in the EU it’s 71%). So the answer is not only “yes”, but the data shows that we could feed the entire human population a vegan diet using just 25% of the land we currently use for agriculture. So if the world went vegan, we could grow enough food using just 25% of the land we use now for agriculture, then we could take the remaining 75% of the land and reforest it, which would have amazing benefits for local wildlife and the environment. And to bring this back to crop deaths, less farmland also means fewer crop deaths, so the best way to reduce crop deaths is to go vegan.

 
 
 
 

So how is it that we could feed the entire world a vegan diet using less land than we use now? The article I linked above explains it in detail, but it really is quite simple; not only does it take a lot of land to raise animals for food, but it’s also a highly inefficient process, as shown in the chart below. Let’s look at beef for example, which has the lowest efficiency. Beef is 1.9% efficient, which means that when you feed a cow 1000 calories of crops, the end result of that is 19 calories of meat that can be sold to a consumer. So because of this, it takes a lot of crops to raise farm animals for meat. A lot of crops means a lot of farmland, which as I said before also means a lot of crop deaths as well.

 
 

83% of our farmland is used for animal agriculture. While it is true that livestock eat waste products from crops unfit for human consumption, that’s not all they eat. They eat crops grown specifically for them, and they eat a lot of them, and those crops are often grown on land that could be used to grow food for people. One of the main crops we produce for livestock is soy, and 70% of what is grown in the US is grown directly for livestock feed, and worldwide, it’s 77%. This demand to produce more soy for livestock feed is also one of the largest driving forces of deforestation in the Amazon. And since this article is about animal deaths from growing crops, I want to again remind you that any animal deaths that happen from the 70% of soy in the US/77% of soy globally are because of the animal agriculture industry. The majority of crop deaths are due to animal agriculture, not growing food for humans, and certainly not because of vegans.

 
 

One of the common anti-vegan responses to the information above is to claim that most soy is not actually grown for animal feed, and that the percentages are high because it includes the non-human edible soy byproduct that animals eat. Animals do indeed eat the byproducts, but that doesn’t account for why the percentages are so high. If you don’t believe me, let’s see what the American Soybean Association has to say:

“Animal agriculture is the soybean industry’s largest customer, and more than 90% of U.S. soybeans produced are used as a high-quality protein source for animal feed. About 70% of the soybean’s value comes from the meal, and 97% of U.S. soybean meal goes to feed livestock and poultry.”

If you’re unfamiliar with them, the American Soybean Association (ASA) is an association of 21,000 American soybean producers. They are THE leading source of soybean producers in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Soybean_Association

Now, maybe they’ll relent on that and instead argue that the parts of the soybean we use for animal feed aren’t good for anything else, but that’s also not true. As the North Carolina Soybean Producers Association says:

“Because soy is rich in quality protein and digestible energy, most of the soymeal is turned into animal feed, by baking the protein-rich fiber that remains after the oil is removed. The remainder of soymeal is used to make some soyfoods like tofu and soy milk.”

That’s right, animal feed is made using the same parts of soybeans that are used to make tofu and soy milk. So why is most (70% in the US and 77% worldwide) soy grown for animal feed instead of food for humans? Because we have 90 billion livestock animals to feed every year, the demand for animal feed far exceeds the demand for tofu and soy milk for humans.

I wrote a longer article explaining more about soy and how it’s mostly grown for animal feed, which you can read here.

And it’s more than just soy, that’s just the most prominent example. Looking at just the US, 40% of corn is used for animal feed, whereas about 10% is grown for humans (the remaining 50% is turned into alcohol for fuel use).

 
 

We are growing enough crops to provide a substantial portion of the diet of 90 billion animals a year. The human population is 8.1 billion as of this writing, and we are already growing a lot of crops right now for people. Most people get 70-80% of their calories from non-animal sources (grains, legumes, fruits, vegetables, etc.) So let’s say we were to get rid of animal agriculture and we would need to grow additional plant-based foods to replace those missing 20-30% of people’s calories. To do so, we could take a fraction of the land that we currently use to feed those 90 billion animals, and grow the additional crops for people there.

More food for everyone. Less land usage required. More rewilding. Ending the slaughter of 90 billion land animals a year. Reduction in crop deaths by 75%. Please, go vegan.

Adam Snow https://VeganAd.am
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