Animal Welfare S3F Fact Sheet

Globally, approximately up to 2.5 trillion fish, over 73 billion chickens and over 3.7 billion mammals are killed each year for human consumption. The majority of farmed animals face widespread abuse as they spend their entire lives in restrictive, unnatural conditions. 

We have an ethical obligation to treat the animals we use for food with compassion. But current animal agriculture systems, in which most farmed animals are kept, allow little or none of the above. On the contrary, they cause great suffering:

• Industrial animal agriculture, or factory farming, condemns billions of animals to highly restricted lives in cages or crates or in overcrowded, barren sheds.

• Genetic selection for extremely fast growth rates or high yields of meat, milk or eggs results in painful lameness, bone fractures, heart disease and premature death. The poor conditions lead to stress and hence to compromised immune systems making the animals susceptible to disease.

• Many animals are subjected to painful mutilations such as castration, tail docking, teeth clipping, beak trimming and de-horning. These are almost always carried out without anaesthetic or pain relief.

• Hundreds of millions of farmed fish suffer in underwater factory farms and at slaughter.

Download the fact sheet below to understand how factory farming compromises animal welfare, and what you can do.