Animal farming of any kind, from big factory farms to small traditionally run “high welfare” and “organic” farms, is fundamentally wrong and should be abolished
Size should not matter.
When something is wrong, it should not matter how big or small that something is. If an activity is unethical and causes victims, the fact that there is only one victim or there are thousands should not play a role in whether the activity should be stopped. We tend to believe that if it affects many more victims, the punishment for the moral or legal crime of victimising them should be severe, but that is not supported by ethics or law. More often than not, murderers will be given the same sentence if they kill just one person or 1000. The scale of the crime may qualify the outrage, but it should not determine the punishment because something that is wrong will always be wrong, regardless of the numbers involved.
Animal farming falls into this category. Although most people — beyond vegans — will quickly condemn factory farming as something wrong, they should not do it based on how many animals are exploited on these industrial operations, but on what happens to the individuals.
Unfortunately, carnist human societies have a widespread acceptance of using other animals for human purposes, and this belief is so deeply embedded that it rarely gets questioned at its roots. People may debate how animals are treated — whether “free-range” is better than caged, or whether small family farms are kinder than industrial facilities — but the foundational assumption that animal farming itself is morally permissible remains untouched by most people (even by some utilitarian “vegans” with a poor understanding of the philosophy of veganism).
If we accept that other sentient beings are not objects but individuals with their own interests, then we must evaluate all forms of animal farming — not only the most visibly cruel — against fundamental moral principles. If we do that, we will discover that the same rights violations occur whether you look in a vast industrial operation, a picturesque smallholding, a subsistence village, or a backyard coop. We will realise that the only logical position to take in campaigning against industrialised factory farming is if this is just part of a campaign to abolish all forms of animal farming, not one that just aims to change sizes and practices.
Below are five reasons that reveal why all forms of animal farming are inherently wrong, and none should be tolerated — let alone promoted.
1. Unethical Genetic Manipulation
All animal farming depends on animals who would not exist in their current form without deliberate human interference. These animals are not simply “used”, they have been “designed” by people.
Through generations of artificial selection — a form of genetic manipulation and therefore genetic engineering — humans have reshaped entire species to serve specific purposes. They have transformed wild animals into domestic animals. Chickens have been engineered to lay hundreds of eggs per year, far beyond their natural reproductive cycles; cows have been altered to produce unnaturally large quantities of milk; sheeps have been bred to grow excessive wool. Even animals raised in small backyard settings carry these inherited traits selected by the animal agriculture industry that created all the breeds of domestic farm animals alive today (pigs, cows, chickens, goats, sheeps, geese, ducks, turkeys, rabbits, llamas, alpacas, etc.).
This is not a neutral process because it creates deformed, unnatural bodies that make the animals who have them suffer all sorts of ailments and problems. Egg-laying birds often suffer from reproductive exhaustion, osteoporosis, and organ failure; dairy cows experience chronic metabolic stress, mastitis, and early physical deterioration; fast-growing broiler chickens can struggle to support their own weight, leading to lameness and pain; sheeps bred for excessive wool risk overheating, parasitism, and mobility issues. These conditions are not accidents, but they are built into the animals themselves to produce the flesh, fibres, or secretions that animal farming wants to extract from them. The suffering is not only in how they are treated, but in what they have been made into even before birth.
Even the most so-called “high-welfare” small-scale farmer cannot undo this inherited burden. A backyard hen is still a product of genetic manipulation and will continue to lay too many eggs, and a traditionally raised cow is still carrying painfully large udders. If we were to genetically modify humans to overproduce bodily substances or grow unnaturally fast for exploitation, we would immediately recognise this as a serious violation of their rights, but when it comes to other animals, this systemic unnatural and immoral “redesign” is normalised. Animal farming begins, therefore, with the fundamental harm of using sentient beings whose very abused biology predisposes them to suffering for the farmer’s sake.
2. The Systematic Denial of Life
Every individual exploited in animal farming shares with us the desire to continue living, but no form of animal farming, even the apparently most “benign” and less industrialised, allows animals to live out their natural lifespan.
Animals raised for flesh are killed as juveniles or young adults; egg-laying birds are killed when their productivity declines; dairy cows are slaughtered once their milk yield drops; even animals in small farms or backyard settings are typically killed when they are no longer “useful”, as it may cost money to keep feeding them and keeping them alive. The economic and practical logic of animal farming depends on premature death to keep costs down and to “extract” the “goods” the animals were bred for.
A cow can live around 20 years, but in dairy systems, she is often killed after 4–6 years; chickens can live over a decade, but those raised for flesh are killed within weeks, and egg-layers within a couple of years. Even those small traditional farms that allow them to live a bit longer will eventually send them to slaughter (often to the same slaughterhouses as their factory-farmed counterparts).
All this killing represents a clear violation of the moral right to life that all animals already have (even if such a right has not been translated into a legal right in most cases yet, as it has happened with the human animal). All sentient beings have an interest in continuing to exist, so killing them is a violation of their right to live — unless done in compassionate grounds for the animals’ interests.
In modern societies, we do not need to consume animal products to survive or thrive, so the killing inherent in animal farming is not a matter of necessity, but of choice. Therefore, it is not a “necessary evil”, but an unavoidable practice, unequivocally wrong.
3. The Suppression of Liberty
Animals in farms, whether in industrial units or idyllic-looking fields, do not control their own lives. Their movements, relationships, and behaviours are all “regulated” by interfering humans.
Either they are confined (sometimes in tight enclosures, sometimes within fenced land), their reproduction is controlled (often through forced breeding or selective pairing), their offspring are taken from them (particularly in dairy farms), or their daily routines — such as feeding, movement, rest — are dictated by the farmers. Even in the most “traditional” or small-scale settings, these elements persist because, without such human control, it could not be called farming. A backyard hen cannot choose where to roam beyond the limits imposed by the yard owner. A sheep in a smallholding does not choose her breeding partner. A cow in a family-run dairy still cannot give all her milk to her calf. The scale may change, but the structure of control does not.
This systematic restriction of autonomy violates the moral right to liberty, one of the most important animal rights. If we recognise that all animals are individuals with preferences, desires, and the capacity to experience frustration and distress, then denying them control over their own lives is a serious harm.
For many domesticated animals, we may still need to help them to navigate human environments that may be too dangerous for them otherwise, but we should not have placed them in such environments in the first place. Even animal sanctuaries are not a paradise for the animals, but rather “refugee” camps where they can have the best possible life, but it will always fall short of what it should have been if they had been wild animals in the wild before domestication.
Some argue that farmed animals are “well cared for” in certain “human-high-welfare-free-range-organic farms” but the animals will still not have the freedom they deserve, so those settings would still be unethical.
4. The Exploitation of Bodies
Animal farming is built on the use of animal bodies and their biological functions as resources. This includes their flesh for consumption, their skin for clothing or materials, their milk and eggs for food, their secretions such as honey for cosmetics or medicines, and even their labour for all sorts of human work (from transport to ploughing fields). In every case, the animals’ bodies are treated as if they are either machines or they can be dismantled into pieces that do not belong to them anymore. Even when no immediate killing is involved, as in egg or milk production, the farming of cows and hens remains exploitation.
Animal exploitation is any use of any animal for profit, social gain, ritual, leisure, work or subsistence in which the animal is not a willing participant, or has been physically or psychologically coerced to participate. It is any human action on nonhuman animals which violates their body autonomy (the right to govern what happens to their body) and their informed consent (permission given after understanding the implications of the action) if the animals are still capable of making positive choices about their lives. Exploitation carries an inherent element of unfairness, as it can also be defined as the action or fact of treating someone unfairly to benefit from their work or existence.
Animal exploitation in farming is far more than just an issue of who benefits or who owns what. This is an issue of harm by either death or direct suffering (in the form of pain, distress, or stress). For instance, dairy production requires repeated forced impregnation and separation from calves, egg production pushes birds’ reproductive systems beyond natural limits, wool production relies on breeding sheeps who cannot naturally regulate their fleece and to violently remove their excess hair (often injuring their backsides on purpose to prevent parasitic infections), and honey production involves stressing bees and forcing them to work extra hard to replenish the stolen food reserves.
Backyard and small-scale systems are not exempt from the concept of exploitation. Taking eggs from a hen or milk from a cow still involves appropriating what their bodies produce, often something that is biologically intended for their own offspring or reproduction. In all these cases, the animals’ rights of bodily autonomy have been violated. If animals cannot consent — and there is no meaningful way to obtain such consent — then using their bodies for our purposes becomes a violation, not an excusable neutral act.
5. The Reduction to Property
At the core of animal farming lies a legal and cultural reality that farmed animals are treated as property; are treated as business stock; are treated as commercial stock that moves, so it must be pinned down to be able to cash for its value; are treated as “livestock”. They are owned, bought, sold, bred, and disposed of as assets. Their value is determined by their productivity, not their individuality. Their individual moral worth as sentient beings is completely ignored, and the only thing that counts for the farmer is their economic worth in a system where products of agriculture are considered commodities.
This applies universally in industrial systems (individual animals are treated as units of production), in small farms (they are still part of the farmer’s assets), in subsistence contexts (they are treated as consumable resources for survival), and in backyard settings (they are sometimes seen as “pets with a human purpose”).
To treat a sentient being as property is to deny their personhood, one of the most important animal rights there is, and this is perhaps the most fundamental ethical violation that animal farming at any scale commits. If we accept that animals are not things, but are beings, subjects of their own lives, then the entire structure of ownership collapses, and their exploitation becomes unethical. One cannot own someone in the morally relevant sense, regardless of the species. Animal farming, in all its forms, depends on the sense of human ownership without which the system cannot function.
Animal farming is a universal human cultural “institution” that started about 10,000 years ago, and it has evolved into many forms and scales, but at its core, it remains the same activity. It was wrong then, and it continues to be wrong now, but it is not wrong because of how it is done, but because of what it is.
All animal farming should be abolished.
