What the world could look like — for animals, ecosystems, and humans — if we ended animal agriculture
Animal advocacy often focuses, necessarily, on the horrors of the present: billions of animals in suffering, ecosystems destroyed, workers harmed, and a planet destabilized. But to sustain a movement and inspire transformative change, we also need a compelling positive vision of what we're working toward — what a world that has moved beyond animal exploitation could look like.
A vegan world is not a perfect world. Wild animal suffering would persist; human conflict and inequality would not vanish. But it would represent a moral transformation of enormous magnitude — the ending of one of the largest and most systematically ignored sources of suffering in history.
The systematic suffering of billions of farm animals — crowded, mutilated, denied natural behaviors, and killed at fractions of their natural lifespan — would end. This is the largest single reduction in suffering imaginable given current human practices.
With the end of industrial fishing, ocean ecosystems could begin recovering. Fish populations decimated by overfishing would rebuild. The chronic suffering of trillions of fish killed annually in ways that may involve pain would cease. Marine biodiversity would have a genuine recovery opportunity.
The rewilding of land freed from animal agriculture would restore habitat for wild animals. Deforestation for soy and cattle — which drives catastrophic loss of biodiversity — would slow dramatically. More habitat means more wild animals living natural lives.
Most emerging infectious diseases originate in animal-human interfaces — particularly intensive livestock production. A world with far less factory farming would have dramatically lower pandemic risk, protecting both human and animal lives.
Animal agriculture contributes approximately 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions (FAO estimate). More recent analyses including land use change and other indirect effects suggest the true figure may be significantly higher. A transition to plant-based food systems would be one of the most impactful climate actions available. Research published in Science (Poore and Nemecek, 2018) found that eliminating animal agriculture would reduce food system emissions by up to 70%.
77% of agricultural land is currently used for animal agriculture (pasture and feed crops), yet it produces only 18% of global calories. A plant-based food system would require dramatically less land, enabling rewilding, reforestation, and restoration of ecosystem services that benefit both humans and wildlife.
Animal agriculture is a massive consumer of freshwater — producing 1 kg of beef requires approximately 15,000 liters of water. A transition to plant-based diets would substantially reduce agricultural water consumption, reducing pressure on freshwater ecosystems and the species that depend on them.
The leading driver of species extinction is habitat loss, primarily for agriculture. A reduced agricultural footprint combined with active rewilding would enable genuine biodiversity recovery — giving more species the space to survive and flourish.
Well-planned plant-based diets are associated with lower rates of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, and obesity. A world that has shifted to predominantly plant-based diets would likely see significant improvements in population health and reduced healthcare costs.
Converting land from inefficient animal protein production to direct human food production would dramatically increase the food supply available per person. The grain currently fed to livestock could feed billions of additional people. A vegan food system is significantly more efficient at feeding the world's growing population.
Slaughterhouse and factory farm workers face extraordinarily dangerous working conditions, high rates of PTSD and trauma, and significant economic vulnerability. Ending these industries would also end these specific occupational harms.
Humans would benefit from dramatically reduced zoonotic disease risk — protecting billions of lives from the kind of catastrophic pandemics that animal agriculture helps generate.
A just transition requires genuine support for farmers who currently depend on animal agriculture. Transition support programs, retraining, alternative enterprise development, and economic safety nets are essential components of any equitable transformation pathway.
Food is identity, tradition, and community. The cultural dimensions of transition matter — change must respect diverse food cultures and find pathways that work with, not against, cultural meaning-making around food.
For many people in the world, animal products represent essential nutrition and economic survival. A just transition must ensure that plant-based alternatives are affordable, accessible, and nutritionally adequate in all markets — not just wealthy Western ones.
Even a fully vegan world leaves the immense suffering of wild animals largely unaddressed. Wild animal welfare — suffering from predation, disease, starvation, parasites, and harsh weather — requires its own advocacy and intervention framework. A vegan world is not the end of the animal welfare project.
The pathway to a vegan world runs through multiple strategies operating simultaneously:
None of these alone will get us to a vegan world. All of them together — sustained over decades — can. The direction of travel matters as much as the destination: every step reduces suffering, every animal saved represents moral progress.