How Factory Farming Ends

What if we told you that there is a simple way for humanity to slash climate-warming emissions, help prevent the next pandemic, and simultaneously eradicate one of the most significant moral atrocities of our time — one that nearly all of us bear some responsibility for?

We’re talking, of course, about factory farming. In 2024, it’s hardly a secret that the billions of animals raised for food are treated abysmally. They are, to name just a few standard industry practices, caged, mutilated without pain relief, and intensively bred to the point that they live in chronic pain and even struggle to stand up, before being slaughtered, often painfully.

The sheer scale of this system defies comprehension. Every year, humans kill 80 billion land animals — 10 times more than there are people on Earth — and an even larger, poorly tracked number of fish.

If the cost to animals wasn’t bad enough, industrial animal agriculture also spells peril for us: It fuels antibiotic resistance and zoonotic disease threats that keep scientists up at night. It’s a massive environmental liability, emitting what researchers estimate is between 14 percent and 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and devouring more than one-third of the planet’s habitable land.

Yet factory farming is only expanding its reach around the globe, despite decades of animal advocacy striving to stop it, because it’s the most efficient way to produce lots of meat for a world of 8 billion people.

We think there’s a better way. This week, Future Perfect is publishing How Factory Farming Ends, a package of stories on the past and future of the movement against factory farming; its struggle to change our culture, politics, and palates; and how it might yet make real progress. This series is supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from Builders Initiative.

Some stories delve into the animal rights movement’s fraught relationship with the climate and public health communities, and the prospects for building meaningful coalitions. Others scrutinize the animal rights movement from its 19th-century glory days, when vegetarianism was popular among utopian social reformers, to its present-day alienation from other progressive causes, to the messy, often maddening but essential legacy of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

Our hope is that these stories will challenge policy leaders and the broader public to imagine a kinder, saner, truly sustainable food system.

—Marina Bolotnikova, deputy editor, Future Perfect

The long, maddening, glorious, vital fight against factory farming.

By: Marina Bolotnikova

Organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund are laundering Big Meat’s propaganda. At what cost?

By: Kenny Torrella

Animal rights must become a core issue for progressives.

By: Astra Taylor and Sunaura Taylor

The neglected environmental and health benefits of fighting Big Meat — for humans.

By: Jonathan Safran Foer and Aaron Gross

The nonprofit is a punchline. It’s also forced the world to face factory farming, animal cruelty, and our own hypocrisy.

By: Jan Dutkiewicz

Society is at war with animals. Vegans are the dissenters.

By: Jishnu Guha-Majumdar

People of color are more likely to be vegan. But the animal rights movement still has a white face.

By: Noella Williams

The plant-based protein movement goes to Washington.

By: Kenny Torrella

The meat industry took away your food options and made activists the enemy. It doesn’t have to be that way.

By: Crystal Heath

A short history of effective animal advocacy.

By: Kelsey Piper