By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Maine News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

From decapitating whales with chainsaws to shooting puppies to false claims of immigrants eating cats, this election has featured an unusual amount of animal-related news. The public's reaction to most of these cases has been outrage, and rightly so. However, these reactions also reveal a moment in our culture: inconsistencies in our moral values as they pertain to animal life and unsustainable food systems are more visible than ever, and perhaps, more conflicted.

It is, of course, entirely reasonable to be horrified at the prospect of people kidnapping and eating family pets (which didn't actually happen), or someone shooting a puppy dead in a gravel pit (which did actually happen). And yet every day, billions of animals in factory farms suffer and die at the hands of humans, and there's nary a peep of outrage from the general public. Cows, pigs, chickens, fish and other livestock are every bit as capable of feeling pain as dogs or cats, but as this election has shown, only the latter tug on most Americans' heartstrings.

The collective cognitive dissonance that allows this to be true appears to be becoming more fraught - but why?

Why Are There So Many Animal Stories Right Now?

The fact that this election cycle has featured so much animal news is largely just a coincidence. But it's not entirely coincidental.

Plant-based meat, cultivated meat and other alternative proteins have grown in prominence and visibility over the last several years. While this is a very promising trend from an environmental standpoint, it's also created a notable backlash among some meat-eaters.

Several Republican governors have signed laws banning the sale of cultivated meat in their states, even though cultivated meat isn't being sold in the U.S. mass market yet. One of them, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, warned that cultivated meat is part of a plan by "elites" to end animal agriculture, and surrounded himself with cattle farmers while signing his state's bill.

Furthermore, there have been a lot of headlines in recent years claiming that veganism is on the rise. It's unclear whether this is actually true, as polling on the subject is murky, but nevertheless, these claims have made meat-eating's environmental impact and animal cruelty more prominent topics in the overall cultural zeitgeist, and this may also have played a role in the flurry of animal-related news in this election.

Speciesism, Defined

Recently, Moo-Deng the baby hippo has taken the world by storm as an adorable meme and respite from political news. Her presence is also a perfect encapsulation of the cognitive dissonance at the root of speciesism. Moo-Deng lives at a zoo in Thailand, and looks a lot like a small pig - her name even means "bouncy pork." She encapsulates the different standards we have for different animals: in her case as a baby hippo, being kept in captivity is okay - but being slaughtered like the baby pigs she so resembles would be an outrage.

The double standard regarding different animals is what's known as speciesism. David Rosengard, Managing Attorney at the Animal Legal Defense Fund, defines speciesism as "treating two animals differently based solely on their species."

"Not their size, or their intelligence, or their socialization, or whether they're wild or domestic," Rosengard says, "but simply based on their biological species."

This is different from treating two species differently because one has more advanced cognitive abilities than the other, or one is more similar to humans than the other, or any number of other criteria. Speciesism ignores all other relevant criteria, and pegs all of a creature's moral worth to their species.

Speciesism is deeply embedded in Western attitudes towards animals, and this was illustrated perfectly when, early in the 2024 election cycle, a potential vice presidential nominee revealed to America that she once shot and killed a puppy.

Vice Presidential Prospects Shooting Animals

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem was rumored to be on Donald Trump's shortlist of potential vice presidential nominees. A rising star in the Republican Party who once gifted Trump a model of Mount Rushmore with his face on it, Noem wrote and published a memoir in May - a common rite-of-passage for aspiring presidents and vice presidents.

In her memoir, Noem made the curious decision to boast about the time she shot and killed the family puppy, Cricket. As Noem tells it, Cricket had "ruined" a hunting trip by scaring away all the birds that Noem and her associates were planning on shooting. Although Cricket was "having the time of her life," Noem was "livid" at the 14-month-old dog for spoiling the hunt.

Shortly thereafter, Noem writes, Cricket got into a neighbor's yard and killed one of their chickens. This was the last straw, she says; Cricket was now behaving "like a trained assassin," and needed to be dealt with. So, Noem took the puppy to a nearby gravel pit and shot her dead.

"I hated that dog," Noem writes. She says that after killing the dog, she realized that one of the family's billy goats needed to be offed as well, as he'd been acting "nasty and mean," and so she "dragged him out to the gravel pit" and shot him as well.

It's worth unpacking the many layers of animal slaughter in Noem's story. Noem was initially upset that her puppy prevented her from killing birds; she then became angry at her puppy for killing chickens, and decided to kill the puppy in response. This, in turn, inspired her to kill a goat.

Noem's chances of becoming vice president evaporated overnight once these passages leaked. She drew near-universal condemnation for the dog-killing incident, and did herself no favors by doubling down after the fact, telling an interviewer that perhaps President Biden's dog should be put down as well.

The outrage was unsurprising, because although it sometimes feels like nothing is off-limits for politicians these days, bragging about killing puppies is still something of a taboo. And yet the response to Noem's ill-advised tale also revealed the inconsistencies embedded in the general public's attitude toward animal-killing.

For instance, there was no uproar over the fact that Noem was hunting birds in the first place. There was also much less focus on the goat's death than the dog's - and the chicken who died at the hands of Cricket elicited no sympathy at all. Noem's story is full of dead animals, but only the dog's death made people upset.

This double standard can also be seen in reactions to the other party's vice presidential nominee being a hunter. Kamala Harris's decision to tap Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate was broadly celebrated, and Walz has emerged as an unusually well-liked politician, with a staggering +37 favorability rating.

Walz, like Noem, is a proud hunter. He says that he used to keep a shotgun in his truck so he could hunt pheasants after football practice, and as Governor, he presides over his state's annual deer and fish openings - celebrations to mark the beginnings of the hunting seasons for those respective animals.

Needless to say, Walz's hunting bona fides have elicited no shock, anger or outrage among the general public. In fact, the fact that he's a hunter has been characterized by some as a political strength, as it ostensibly makes him more appealing to rural and moderate voters.

The Fake Story of Pet-Eating Immigrants

Trump ultimately tapped Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate, and this led to another perfect encapsulation of speciesist attitudes among American voters.

In September, Vance falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were kidnapping and eating people's dogs and cats. This was a complete lie - Vance admitted to creating stories "so that the American media actually pays attention." But that didn't stop Trump from parroting it during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

"In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in," Trump warned. "They're eating the cats. They're eating - they're eating the pets of the people that live there."

The story was thoroughly and immediately debunked by Springfield officials and the media at large.

Nevertheless, Republicans expressed outrage at immigrants for eating pets (even though no pets were eaten), and Democrats slammed Republicans for falsely accusing immigrants of eating pets. The only point of agreement between the two sides was that killing cats and dogs for human consumption is an especially immoral thing to do.

"Culturally, Americans see dogs and cats as special," Rosengard says. "There is a history of eating all kinds of animals in the United States, but in the modern American experience, dogs and cats have largely been thought of as companion animals, not as animals you eat."

The False Claim Harris Wants to Ban Red Meat

During his time on the campaign trail, Vance also claimed, again falsely, that Harris wants to ban red meat.

"She even wants to take away your ability to eat red meat," Vance said in August. "That's how out there she is. That's real. The fake news will fact-check it. They will fact-check it true. She actually said that."

They did not "fact-check it true," however, because it wasn't true. What Harris actually said is that she supports changing the Dietary Guidelines For Americans to recommend Americans eat less red meat; this would not "take away your ability to eat red meat," however, as nobody is required to follow the federal government's dietary guidelines in the first place.

Nevertheless, the fact that Vance fear-mongered about this in the first place illustrates just how deeply Americans value carnivorism. He perceived, correctly, that voters would be aghast if they lost the right to slaughter and eat the animals they think of as food.

The most ironic part of his claims, however, is the fact that according to his wife, Vance "has adapted to" her vegetarian diet at home.

The Many Animal-Related Foibles of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

No analysis of the role of animals in the 2024 election would be complete without touching on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who became embroiled in a number of animal-related mini-scandals over the course of his now-suspended presidential campaign.

During his time as a candidate, several reports came out revealing that Kennedy had, at various points in his life:

• Cut a dead whale's head off with a chainsaw and taken it home with him;


• Placed the carcass of a dead bear in Central Park to make it look as if it had been killed by a bicyclist;


• Posed for a photo chomping into the carcass of an animal that looked like a dog but was actually, according to Kennedy, a goat

These incidents generally elicited more bewilderment and mockery than outrage, yet even some of those reactions had a speciesist bent to them.


The dead bear incident attracted considerable media attention, but what drew less attention was what Kennedy was doing when he found the dead bear: he was "falconing," or using a trained bird to hunt wild animals - usually squirrels, rabbits and other small mammals and birds - in their natural habitats.


The fact that Kennedy staged a bizarre scene involving a dead bear drew a lot of attention and criticism. The fact that he was killing woodland creatures for sport earlier in the day drew none.


The dog/goat incident, meanwhile, again illustrated the double standards that we apply to dogs versus other animals. The idea of Kennedy eating a dog was initially appalling; the revelation that he was "merely" eating a goat diffused the situation entirely, and the outrage disappeared immediately.


How Speciesism Is Reflected in the Law


In theory, animal cruelty is illegal in the United States. But anti-cruelty laws, both on the federal and state level, contain many exceptions, caveats and carve-outs that place significant limits on what, exactly, constitutes an "animal."


For instance, the Humane Slaughter Act is a federal law that requires livestock producers to render animals unconscious before killing them, in order to minimize their pain. And yet, in addition to being poorly enforced, the law does not apply to poultry or fish, even though birds and fish most definitely feel pain.


The same is true of the Twenty-Eight Hour law, which places limits on how long livestock animals can be transported without stopping for rest, air and food. While the law's intent is commendable, it also contains many exemptions, one being that, as with the Humane Slaughter Act, it doesn't extend any of its protections to poultry.


And then there's the Animal Welfare Act. This law is primarily aimed at improving the wellbeing of animals who are experimented on in medical labs, as well as cracking down on illegal animal fighting. But the law provides no protections whatsoever to farm animals, millions of whom suffer just as much in their environments as the animals in laboratories or cockfighting rings.


Many states have enacted laws that extend additional protections to animals. The strength of these laws varies wildly from state to state, however, in large part because some have a very restrictive definition of what an "animal" is.


"Some states will say that 'animal' is limited to vertebrate, non-human living creatures," Rosengard explains. " Other states will say that an animal is every mammal, bird or fish, except commercial poultry. That's got to be rough for birds in farms, because suddenly they don't count as animals, so none of the animal cruelty law applies to them."


The Bottom Line


This election cycle reminds us that speciesism runs deep in American political culture. The double standard and cognitive dissonance around animals is mirrored in our laws, which offer protections to some animals but not others, regardless of their capacity for pain or suffering, and often on a completely arbitrary basis.




Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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Animal rights organizers are regrouping after mixed results at the ballot box in November.

A measure targeting factory farms passed in Berkeley but failed in Sonoma County. Measure J, to ban concentrated animal-feeding operations, only got 15% of the vote and Ordinance 309 to ban slaughterhouses failed in Denver.

Cassie King, an organizer with the Coalition to End Factory Farming, helped raise $280,000 to promote the ban in Sonoma County, even as opponents raised $2.2 million.

"We learned that money and the ability to lie during political campaigns is a very powerful combination of factors to be up against," King asserted. "I was shocked by the amount of misinformation that came out from the No on J campaign, just statistics that had no basis in reality."

Measure DD in Berkeley passed but is mostly symbolic since the only existing concentrated animal feeding operation, a horse racing operation called Golden Gate Fields, closed last June.

King stressed win or lose, the measures went a long way toward raising public awareness of the pollution and animal welfare issues at large factory farms.

"It's a test case, and whether it wins or loses, it's generating tens of thousands of conversations in the county and many more beyond," King contended. "And making the end of factory farming visible for a lot of people who haven't realized that it's something we can achieve in our lifetimes."

The "No on J" campaign and opponents of the Denver slaughterhouse ordinance argued the bans would have hurt jobs and tax revenue.

This story is based on original reporting by Seth Millstein for Sentient.


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Advocates said a lack of animal welfare laws is leading to pain and suffering on American factory farms.

Close to 99% of livestock is now raised in industrial-type facilities, where animal welfare groups said efficiency and profitability take precedence over animals' well-being.

Delcianna Winders, associate professor of law and director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, said while more than a dozen states have banned what are deemed torture-like confinement for animals, there is no federal law protecting them from abuse.

"If most people were aware that the animal they're sitting down to eat couldn't move throughout their entire life, just to give one example, I don't think they would want to support that," Winders contended.

Winders pointed out the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act requires animals be knocked unconscious before they are killed but corporations running factory farms are lobbying for the law to be weakened in order to speed up meat production.

So-called "ag-gag" laws in several states criminally penalize those who seek to expose animal suffering on farms, in slaughterhouses and at animal auctions. Winders added she is concerned a second Trump Administration could allow factory farm owners to further erode any remaining health and safety standards.

"They've been able to carve themselves out from complying with the laws that everybody else has to comply with," Winders asserted. "That certainly includes cruelty-to-animals laws. It also includes pollution laws, worker-safety laws, the whole gamut."

Winders advised people concerned with animal welfare to try more plant-based alternatives to meat and learn more about how their food is raised. She stressed as consumers increasingly turn to "organic" and "free-range" meat options, corporations are working to lower the standards for what those labels mean and the conditions under which those animals can be raised.

This story is based on original reporting by Seth Millstein for Sentient.


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By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for West Virginia News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Every year, humans around the world eat 360 million metric tons of meat. That’s a lot of animals — or more precisely, a lot of dead animals. At any given point, there are 23 billion animals in factory farms, and countless more being farmed or caught in the sea. As a result, the number of animals killed for food every day is almost too large of a number to comprehend.

Animal Agriculture, by the Numbers

Before getting into the death toll, it’s worth remembering that animals suffer immensely in factory farms, and on the way to slaughterhouses, and in slaughterhouses. Around 99 percent of livestock are raised in factory farms, and factory farms prioritize efficiency and profitability over animal welfare. There are few laws protecting livestock from abuse and mistreatment on farms, and violators of those laws are rarely prosecuted.

The result is a significant amount of pain and misery for farmed animals, and that suffering is an important thing to keep in mind as we dive into the numbers behind these animals’ deaths.

How Many Animals Are Killed for Food Every Day?

Quantifying animal slaughter is relatively straightforward — except when it comes to fish and other aquatic life. There are two reasons for this.

First, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which tracks global livestock statistics, measures fish production in weight, not number of animals. Second, the FAO’s numbers only include farmed fish, not those caught in the wild.

To overcome the first challenge, researchers attempt to convert the total pounds of fish caught into the total number of fish themselves. Obviously, this is an inexact science that requires quite a bit of guesswork, and as such, estimates of fish slaughter tend to vary significantly, and are generally expressed in relatively wide ranges.

As for the second challenge, researchers Alison Mood and Phil Brooke have attempted to quantify the number of wild fish caught every year, first by pulling data from multiple sources and then by converting the total weight of wild fish to an estimated number of animals.

The following numbers are based on 2022 data from the FAO, except for the fish tallies: for farmed fish, the low end of the range draws on research by the Sentience Institute, while the high end is based on an analysis by Mood and Brooke. For wild-caught fish, the low end and high ends of the estimate are both based on a range provided by Mood and Brooke.

With that being said, here are the best estimates of how many animals are killed every day on a per-species basis.

• Chickens: 206 million/day


• Farmed Fish: Between 211 million and 339 million


• Wild Fish: Between 3 billion and 6 billion


• Ducks: 9 million


• Pigs: 4 million


• Geese: 2 million


• Sheep: 1.7 million


• Rabbits: 1.5 million


• Turkeys: 1.4 million


• Goats: 1.4 million


• Cows: 846,000


• Pigeons & other birds: 134,000


• Buffalo: 77,000


• Horses: 13,000


• Other animals: 13,000

In total, this means that every 24 hours, between 3.4 and 6.5 billion animals are killed for food. That comes to a lower-end estimate of 1.2 trillion animals killed every year. That’s a positively staggering number. For contrast, anthropologists estimate that the total number of human beings who’ve ever existed is just 117 billion.


A couple of things stand out about this data.


For one, if we exclude fish, the overwhelming majority of animals slaughtered for food are chickens. This isn’t a surprise, given that poultry consumption has skyrocketed over the last 60 years: between 1961 and 2022, the average person went from eating 2.86 kg of chicken every year to 16.96 kg — an increase of almost 600 percent.


The consumption of other meats didn’t rise nearly as much over that period. There was a modest increase in per-capita pork consumption, from 7.97 kg to 13.89 kg; for every other meat, consumption has remained relatively stagnant over the last 60 years.


Also notable is the relatively high death tolls of animals that many Americans might not think of as meat sources for humans. Slaughtering horses for meat is illegal in the U.S., but that doesn’t stop people around the world from killing 13,000 of them every day. Rabbit meat isn’t a common dish in America, but it’s wildly popular in China and the European Union.


Animals Slaughtered Who Are Never Eaten


One thing that’s particularly frustrating about all of this, from both an efficiency standpoint and an animal welfare standpoint, is that a sizable share of the animals killed for food are never even eaten.


A 2023 study published in Sustainable Production and Consumption found that 24 percent of livestock animals die prematurely at some point in the supply chain: they either die on the farm before they’re slaughtered, die in transit on their way to the slaughterhouse, die at a slaughterhouse but aren’t processed for food, or are thrown away by grocers, restaurants and consumers.


This wasted food adds up to about 18 billion animals a year. The meat from these animals never reaches the lips of any human, making their deaths — which, it should be stressed, are often excruciatingly painful and bloody — essentially pointless. What’s more, this tally doesn’t even include seafood; if it did, the amount of wasted meat would be many orders of magnitude higher.


In the U.S., around a quarter of animals in this category die on the farm from disease, injury or other causes. Another seven percent die in transit, and 13 percent are thrown away by grocers after being processed into meat.


Some of these “wasted deaths” are part and parcel of factory farm operations. Every year, around six billion male chicks are intentionally killed, or “culled,” on factory farms due to the fact that they can’t lay eggs. In the seafood industry, billions of aquatic animals are caught by accident every year — a phenomenon called bycatch — and are either killed or injured as a result.


It’s worth noting that these numbers vary significantly from country to country. The global average for wasted meat is around 2.4 animals per person per year, but in the U.S., it’s 7.1 animals per person — almost three times higher. On the other end of the spectrum is India, where only 0.4 animals per person are wasted every year.


The Hidden Death Tolls of the Environmental Destruction of the Meat Industry


The above death tolls only count animals who are farmed or caught with the goal of being eaten by humans. But the meat industry claims many other animal lives in more indirect ways.


For instance, cattle farming is the number one driver of deforestation around the world, and deforestation inadvertently kills a whole lot of animals that were never intended to be food in the first place. In the Amazon alone, 2,300 animals are at risk of extinction due to deforestation, as the clearing of trees wipes out their natural habitats and deprives them of the resources they need to survive. 


Another example is water pollution. The manure from livestock farms often leaks into nearby waterways, and this can have a ripple effect that results in many more animal deaths: Manure contains phosphorus and nitrogen, both of which promote the growth of algae; this eventually leads to harmful algal blooms, which deplete the oxygen in the water and clog the gills of fish, killing them.


All of this is a long way of saying that killing one animal for food often results in many other animals dying.


The Bottom Line


The astonishing number of animals killed for food every day, both directly and indirectly, is a sobering reminder of the impact our appetite for meat has on the world around us. From the animals slaughtered on farms to the creatures killed by agriculture-driven deforestation and farm pollution, the death toll that a meat-based diet demands is much higher and more far-reaching than many people realize.




Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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