Meat Reduction Hurts Animals

Short Flashback to Follow-Up

As a follow-up to Passion and Outrage Aren’t Enough: The numbers show it is very, very hard to *actually* help animals, this post from 2022 is still sadly relevant today:

Friend and great reporter Kenny Torrella has an article up at Vox:

How Germany is kicking its meat habit

In the article, we learn how the focus on reducing meat consumption actually impacts animals:

“Germans are eating about the same amount of beef as they were in 2011, but far less pork. But because pigs are large — pigs yield about 124 pounds of edible meat on average in Germany — the steep decline in pork only resulted in a reduction of about one-sixth of a pig per person. However, the 12.5 percent increase in poultry consumption, which looks modest on the chart below, has resulted in almost one extra chicken farmed for each of Germany’s 83 million residents [every year].”

This is not a victory, of course. It is not something to be celebrated or used as a model. There are now more individuals experiencing serious suffering.

If we take suffering seriously and want fewer animals to be factory farmed, we need to actually advocate for them. There is no easy shortcut.

(One example: animal-focused harm-reduction advocacy.)