Myth Busting: Does being vegan actually cause more animal deaths?
Have you ever heard the myth that vegans cause more animal deaths, for example animals involved in tractor deaths during harvesting vegetables? Here, we’ll examine whether this is true or false. The short answer: the number of animals killed by tractors during the harvesting of vegetables is far smaller than the number of animals intentionally bred and killed to make animal products.
Are you concerned that, despite choosing to live a vegan life to reduce suffering, we could still be causing animal deaths?
The truth is that there is a lot of misinformation on this topic, driven both by the need to justify consumption habits and by the interests of a livestock industry with great economic and political influence.
Big agriculture and animal farming has a lot of power and influence. It dominates the global market and puts significant pressure on governments to make decisions in its favour. It promotes animal agriculture through campaigns that reinforce the most common justifications for eating animals, funding biased studies to portray meat as healthy, and launching media strategies that present a vegan lifestyle as radical or detached from tradition. But we know that this is not the case. We can thrive on a nourishing plant-based diet, traditional communities around the world have built cultures around plant-based foods, and choosing respect for other animals is a wonderful way to live.
But do I actually cause more animals to die?
There is a myth that plant-based agriculture kills more small animals (such as rodents, insects, and birds) than traditional animal farming. This claim is based, in part, on a study by Steven Davis (2003), who argued that an omnivorous diet based on eating large herbivorous animals could theoretically cause fewer deaths than a vegan diet. However, that data was reviewed and proven wrong in a study by Matheny (2003).
More recent analysis concluded the following data estimating the animal deaths required in various diets:
- Vegan diet: 0.3 animals killed per 20 kg protein
- Vegetarian diet: 0.39 animals killed per 20 kg protein
- Omnivorous diet: 1.5 animals killed per 20 kg protein
These figures also do not take into account the suffering inherent in meat, egg, and dairy production before those animals are killed.
Animal agriculture in numbers
202 million chickens,
between 211 million and 339 million farmed fish,
between 3 and 6 billion wild fish,
12 million ducks,
3.8 million pigs,
1.7 million sheep,
1.4 million goats,
900,000 cows,
and even more animals that are not counted here including rabbits, horses, turkeys, geese, buffaloes, pigeons and other birds.
Ready to make a change and protect all animals? Try our free vegan Challenge today. Together we can make a difference.