Animals aren’t the only ones affected by the meat and dairy industry. Many people are unaware that the consumption of meat and dairy products  have a significant impact on climate, biodiversity and the environment as a whole. In fact, animal agriculture is responsible for approximately one-sixth of all human-made greenhouse gas emissions¹.

Particularly in wealthier countries, people tend to have the highest per capita meat consumption on the planet even though many rich countries experience a recent decline of meat consumption. On the contrary, many countries in the Global South are steadily increasing their per capita meat consumption and adopting Western diets which becomes an ever-bigger problem due to ecological, ethical and health issues. Our meat consumption is literally eating up our planet. 

However, there is a growing movement amongst consumers to reduce meat consumption in response to the welfare concerns of factory farmed animals and the negative climate and environmental impacts of meat consumption.

More than 85 billion farmed land animals are slaughtered for meat each year worldwide². The immense production of animal-based products, especially red meat and dairy, emits a lot of greenhouse gases, compared to plant-based foods³. Animal agriculture is the biggest contributor to two of the three major sources of anthropogenic GHG emissions: methane and nitrous oxide⁴.

We can’t continue like this. We must put an end to factory farming.

With our multi-award-winning movie Eating the Future FOUR PAWS exposes the horrors of factory farming and the failures of our food system. But FOUR PAWS also wants to spark hope for a better future – a food system which is healthy for our planet, our animals and us.

According to the FAO, farmed cattle (raised for both beef and milk) are the animal species responsible for the most emissions, representing about 62% of animal agriculture’s emissions⁵. This is only because we humans intensively breed them. Therefore, it is not a solution to shift meat consumption to smaller, non-ruminant animals i.e. chicken instead of beef as it might worsen animal welfare by affecting a substantially larger number of animals in worse keeping conditions.

Globally, according to the EAT-Lancet reference diet meat consumption must be reduced by at least 50% to provide the growing world population healthy, sustainable diet within planetary boundaries.