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The best and most impactful way that a person can make a difference for animals is through their food choices. While there is so much animal suffering that is out of our control, for the majority of us, our food choices are very much within our control.
Farm animals comprise 99% of the animals raised and killed any given year in the United States (those numbers are just about the same globally). Almost every one of those farm animals is raised in factory-like conditions where they face an awful blend of brutality and apathy.
While, over the course of our lives, we may save a handful of cats, dogs, or other companion animals, we can have that same level of impact over the course of months or even just weeks by focusing on what we choose to eat. Fortunately, it’s not very complicated.
Eating vegan is as simple as choosing one thing off a shelf instead of another. One item off a menu instead of another. It doesn’t require adopting some new, radical worldview. It’s simply aligning your behavior with ethics that you already have.
If farm animals lived happy lives with one bad day, we might be having a different conversation. Given the mind-boggling scale of the problem and the fact that farm animals live lives of misery, essentially from birth to death, in order to be as effective as possible, we each can make the biggest impact by focusing on farm animals. Both with our food choices by choosing vegan when possible, and with our advocacy by focusing our efforts proportionally and therefore dedicating a large number of the resources at our disposal to them.