7. Why Should We Care About
Farmed Animals?

As human populations grow and demand for animal products rises, animals are being farmed in increasingly large numbers.

Non-human animals are farmed and killed in their billions each year to provide humans with meat, milk and eggs.

This has resulted in farming systems becoming more intensified (we can use the term “industrialised animal agriculture” to describe such systems), with the desire to produce as much product as possible, as quickly as possible, at the lowest cost possible.

Efficiency is generally given priority over the welfare of the animals.

Whilst smallholder farms — where animals are raised in traditional ways — still exist, the majority of land animals being raised on farms today are kept in intensive systems. According to World Animal Protection (WAP), over 70% of the 80 billion land animals farmed globally are raised and slaughtered within industrialised farming systems each year.

It’s not only land animals that are being farmed in such intensive ways. Aquaculture — the farming of aquatic animals (and plants) for food — is rapidly increasing, to keep up with growing demand for seafood. This huge growth of the aquaculture industry is largely in response to growing concerns about overexploitation of wild populations and the fact that wild-caught supplies simply cannot keep up with the demand for seafood. In 2020, around half of the world's supply of fish, crustaceans and molluscs was farmed rather than caught.

With the recognition of the sentience of farmed animals (and the related environmental and public health issues that arise from intensive animal farming), it is important for us to take the issue of farmed animals’ welfare more seriously than we have been before.