discussvegan.
We say we love animals,
but we pay someone else to have them killed for us.
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You say you love animals.
Or do you just
love your pets?
You don't have to agree with anything here. You only have to keep scrolling, and be honest with yourself about what you see.
This is a dog.
You already know
how to feel about her.
You'd defend her. If someone hurt her for fun, you'd call it cruelty. So would anyone.
Now she is a pig.
Nothing changed
but the word.
Pigs show problem-solving comparable to dogs, and on some tasks to a young child. They have names for each other, they dream, and they play.
1,500,000,000Pigs killed every year, worldwide
Marino & Colvin, “Thinking Pigs,” Int. J. Comparative Psychology (2015). Read more →What happens next is
what your money pays for.
What follows is a reconstruction, and nothing real plays on this page. The real footage is behind the Witness door.
Pigs are herded into a steel cage, a “gondola”, six to eight at a time.
It is lowered into a pit of carbon dioxide. The gas is heavier than air, so it sits at the bottom, at concentrations above 80%.
On contact with eyes, snouts and throats, the gas turns to acid. They thrash, scream, and climb over one another, conscious for up to 30 seconds or more.
Then the gondola comes back up and the next group is loaded, all day long.
The gas chamber
is standard practice.
Around 90% of pigs in England and Wales are killed using high-concentration carbon dioxide, up from roughly half a decade ago. They are lowered, in groups, into a pit of gas.
As the carbon dioxide hits the moisture in their eyes, snouts and throats, it turns to acid. They are burning from the inside while they suffocate, in the panic of air hunger, the feeling of being held underwater and unable to surface. They scream, and claw and climb over one another to get out of a cage they cannot leave.
Europe's own food-safety authority found the gas is “highly aversive” and causes pain, fear and respiratory distress, and that pigs can stay conscious through it for up to 30 seconds or more. Half a minute is a long time, when it is the last thing that ever happens to you.
The UK government's own scientific advisers, the Farm Animal Welfare Council, said in 2003 that it should be banned. More than twenty years later it is still legal, and still the standard method.
Farm Animal Welfare Council (2003); UK Animal Welfare Committee, CO₂ Stunning Opinion (2025); EFSA, Welfare of Pigs at Slaughter (2020). The “humane slaughter” myth → This is stylised. Watch the real thing →“They're not like us. They're not clever.”
It's the thing we tell
ourselves to keep eating them.
Chickens show a rudimentary sense of number and can anticipate the future. Pigs rival dogs on cognitive tests. Fish have pain receptors and respond to pain much as mammals do; a cleaner wrasse even passed a modified version of the mirror self-recognition test.
Rugani et al., Science (2015); Marino, “Thinking Chickens,” Animal Cognition (2017); Sneddon et al., Proc. R. Soc. B (2003); Kohda et al., PLOS Biology (2019/2022).It doesn't stop at the pig.
Every label on the shelf
was an animal that wanted to live.
Keep going, and meet the others you pay for.
Chicken
Killed at six weeks old.
Bred to grow so fast their hearts and legs collapse under their own weight, then slaughtered while they are still cheeping like chicks. More than 70 billion a year, more than every other land animal on Earth combined.
73,000,000,000Chickens killed every year, worldwide
FAO / Our World in Data (2021). More →Dairy cow
Her milk was never yours.
She is forcibly impregnated, and her calf is taken within a day so you can have what was meant for it. She bellows for days. Spent by five, she is killed at a quarter of her natural life, and her son becomes veal.
300,000,000Cattle killed every year, worldwide
Compassion in World Farming; EFSA. More →Lamb
A few months old.
The “spring lamb” on the plate is a baby. A sheep can live twelve years; we almost never let one reach its first birthday.
600,000,000Sheep killed every year, worldwide
Defra slaughter statistics. More →Duck
A pipe down the throat.
For foie gras, ducks are force-fed through a tube rammed into the throat until the liver swells to up to ten times its natural size, a disease, sold as a delicacy.
3,000,000,000Ducks killed every year, worldwide
EU Scientific Committee on Animal Health. More →Fish
They feel all of it.
Fish have pain receptors and respond to pain much as mammals do. We kill more of them than every other animal put together, by the trillion, the vast majority with no stunning at all: crushed, or left to suffocate.
1,000,000,000,000+Fish killed every year, possibly twice that
Sneddon et al.; fishcount.org.uk. More →Since you opened this page,
Land animals slaughtered worldwide
Each speck of ash falling here is one of them, at the real rate.
More than 80 billion land animals are slaughtered every year, over nine in ten of them chickens. Add fish, and the count runs to one to two trillion individuals a year. A number that size stops meaning anything, which is why the counter above shows them one at a time.
FAO / Our World in Data (2021); fishcount.org.uk.Now turn that number on ourselves.
Killed at the same rate,
we would be gone in weeks.
There are about 8.3 billion of us. We kill roughly 80 billion land animals a year. Run that same rate on humans, and the entire species is gone in:
38 daysto wipe out humanity, at the land-animal rate
~36 hoursonce you count fish, over a trillion a year
It is simple division, the human population over the number of animals we kill each year. Counting fish, the range is one day to about two and a half.
FAO / Our World in Data (~80bn land animals); fishcount.org.uk (1 to 2.7tn fish); UN world population (8.3bn, 2026). Check the maths →Even if none of that moved you,
it is eating the planet
you were going to keep.
Livestock takes up around 77% of the world's farmland while providing just 18% of our calories. A kilo of beef carries a water footprint of roughly 15,000 litres. Cattle ranching drives about 80% of Amazon deforestation.
A global shift to plant-based diets could cut food's land use by 76% and its emissions by 49%. The study's authors call avoiding animal products probably the single biggest way one person can reduce their impact on the planet.
Poore & Nemecek, Science (2018); Mekonnen & Hoekstra (2012). The evidence →And it is coming for you, too.
The next pandemic is
being bred on the farm.
More than 73% of the world's antibiotics go to farmed animals, much of it routinely, to keep crowded animals alive, which turns intensive farms into breeding grounds for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
In 2019, drug-resistant infections were directly linked to 1.27 million human deaths. The World Health Organization has urged the industry to stop. It hasn't.
Van Boeckel et al., Science (2017); Murray et al., The Lancet (2022); WHO (2017).And it was never only about food.
Behind the laboratory door.
Cosmetics, cleaning products and chemicals dripped into the eyes and forced down the throats of animals who feel every second of it. An estimated 192 million animals a year are used in research worldwide.
Most of it doesn't even predict what happens in people. More than 90% of drugs that pass animal tests still fail in human trials.
Taylor & Alvarez (2019); clinical attrition data. The evidence →So here is the only question that was ever on the table.
You love one animal
and pay for another to die.
Nobody here thinks you're cruel. Most people are never shown any of this, and now you have been. You decided that animals matter the first time you loved one, so what's left to discuss is what you do tomorrow.
The alternative
None of this is necessary any more. We can have the meat, the cheese, the eggs, made from cells, microbes and plants instead of suffering. See how it's built.
See it for real
The chamber above was a reconstruction. Witness has the real footage, filmed inside farms and slaughterhouses, and if you can't bring yourself to watch it, ask yourself why.
The library
Every objection you have, protein, canine teeth, “personal choice,” the lot, answered with sources.
Make the switch
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