If everyone went vegan what would happen to the animals?
I see this question a lot; “What would happen to the billions of farm animals if everyone went vegan?” This is such a silly question when you think about it. You don’t hear people say “what would happen to cops if all the crime ended tomorrow, would they all lose their jobs?” or “What would happen to all the food at food banks and related charities if world hunger ended tomorrow?” People don’t ask those questions because everyone knows that it’s impossible for those problems to be solved overnight. But for some strange reason, people arguing against veganism conceive of this fantastical scenario where the entire world goes vegan overnight. They then want us to have an answer as to what would happen to the animals when that happens.
The world won’t go vegan overnight. And I think everyone knows that, even those who are asking this ridiculous question. The animal agriculture industry, like all industries, works based on supply and demand. In 2024, roughly 90 billion land animals will be bred into existence just to be killed for food. If demand drops to 50 billion, do you think they’ll still breed 90 billion the following year? Of course not, because if they did, then they’d go bankrupt from unsold dead animal body parts. So, next year they’ll breed less to account for the lower demand. This would continue year after year and the demand would continue to decline until the industry collapses from an all-time record low demand, at which point there would not be billions of animals to find homes for. Animal sanctuaries would hopefully be able to find homes for animals that still existed when the animal agriculture industry collapsed. Or possibly the animal agriculture industry would just stop breeding new animals into existence altogether, the animals that existed in the system would get slaughtered for food as planned, and then there would be no new ones to find homes for. Then the only remaining animals for these species would be the ones that already existed in sanctuaries before the industry collapsed. This is obviously an extremely oversimplified explanation, but it’s using this simplistic case to explain supply and demand and how it affects the number of animals bred into existence every year. And honestly, it’s all speculation because we don’t know what would happen, because it would be such a drastic change and one that would happen over the course of many years. We would have a long time and a panel of experts to figure these things out.
But let’s just pretend for a moment that the world could go vegan overnight. When we entertain this scenario, the follow-up question from the anti-vegans is always something like “who is going to feed and house these animals, or are you ok with letting them die?” They seem to miss the irony of this question. They ask us if we’re ok with these animals dying….. the same animals that were going to die if the world didn’t go vegan overnight. Obviously no vegan wants to see 90 billion animals die, but effectively what that person is asking is “are you ok letting these 90 billion animals die that we were going to kill and eat anyway?” So it was already going to happen anyway…
It’s a preposterous question when you think about it, isn’t it?
