Shifting toward plant-based diets is the most impactful individual action available for reducing farmed animal welfare harm; the science and scale make this a high-priority welfare intervention.
From a purely scale-oriented welfare perspective, dietary change toward fewer animal products is the highest-impact intervention available to individuals. Each meal replaced with plant-based alternatives removes demand for production systems that cause suffering. The leverage is enormous: the approximately 80 billion land animals slaughtered annually and hundreds of billions of farmed fish represent suffering at scales difficult to comprehend. While higher-welfare certification and corporate reform improve conditions per animal, dietary reduction reduces the number of animals in welfare-compromising systems. Effective altruist analysis consistently identifies animal product reduction as among the highest-impact individual welfare interventions available at low or negative personal cost (given the health co-benefits of reduced animal product intake).