The one thing you can do to help a whole lot of animals, explained in 4 charts 

Many people, when they learn about the horrors of factory farming, become vegetarian or vegan. I’m one of those people, and it stuck — I haven’t eaten meat in 20 years. For most, it doesn’t stick. But new research highlights how ditching meat isn’t the only option to help animals on factory farms. There’s actually one thing that’s almost as effective and probably way easier for most people: eating fewer small animals.

The number of animals who suffer to produce food products — and how much they suffer — varies widely. Bigger animals, like cattle raised for beef, are raised in lower numbers and aren’t treated as terribly as smaller animals, like farmed fish and chickens.

And because fish and chickens are so small, far more of them must be farmed to produce the same amount of meat as large animals. A family sitting down for a steak dinner, for example, will probably consume about half a percent of one cow, while a family eating a rotisserie chicken might eat the whole bird.

Animal advocates call it the “small body problem,” and it’s the subject of a new analysis published by Chris Bryant, an honorary research associate at the University of Bath in the UK, and Faunalytics, an animal welfare research group.

The researchers wanted to answer a simple but consequential question: How much animal suffering is embedded in each bite of meat we eat or egg we consume?

“We are somewhat used to seeing, especially from the climate movement, data and other kinds of tools that help us think about the carbon footprint of the choices that we make, and we think that’s really important,” Allison Troy, Faunalytics’ research director, told me. “But we felt like there was a gap in terms of thinking about more of a ‘suffering footprint’ when it comes to choosing to purchase animal products.”

This gives us a new way to think about how we eat, and how it affects the animals trapped in factory farms. If you don’t want to go fully plant-based, what about cutting back — specifically — on meat from small animals?

Unpacking the small body problem

To quantify the “suffering footprint” of everyday animal products consumers eat, the researchers analyzed data from the US Department of Agriculture, the United Nations, and other sources to determine how much edible meat — or eggs or milk — each type of farmed animal produces throughout a typical lifespan on a farm.

They also incorporated indirect sources of animal suffering in their calculations. For example, some farmed fish species are fed other fish, and these “feeder” fish were factored into the data.

Then the researchers crunched the numbers to figure out two things: how many days of animal suffering are embedded in a pound of various animal products, and how many animal lives are slaughtered per pound for those products.

The analysis found that the vast majority of animal suffering from our diets comes from one tiny animal: shrimp.

That means that a single bite of your shrimp scampi is far more harmful than devouring an entire burger.

But seafood doesn’t account for a large portion of most Americans’ diets, and many of us eat none at all. When seafood is removed from the data, cutting back on poultry products — chicken meat, turkey meat, and eggs — is the most effective way to limit the amount of suffering caused by one’s diet.

This enormous disparity in poultry versus other categories “is driven by the fact that those are smaller-bodied animals — it just takes a larger number of animals to produce consumable products for people,” Troy said. “And I don’t think that that’s often a way that people think about animal products when they’re making these decisions.”

Chickens and turkeys also tend to be treated worse than cattle and pigs. Chickens raised for meat, for example, have been bred to grow so fast, and so big, that many have difficulty standing and walking, while half of hens raised for eggs in the US are confined in small cages for their entire lives.

That doesn’t mean pigs and cattle have it easy — far from it. Pork producers, for example, typically castrate and teeth-clip piglets without pain relief, and the pigs spend their lives indoors. Female breeding pigs, like caged hens, are confined in tiny cages. And beef cattle are branded and dehorned, often without pain relief, and spend their final months in feedlots. But because these animals are so much bigger, each produces a lot more meat than smaller animals.

In other words, their suffering is spread out across many more bites of bacon or burgers.

The report wasn’t peer-reviewed, and I reached out to Trevor Woolley — an assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — for his thoughts. Woolley told me over email that it’s “important to recognize that the numbers that are included in their equation are estimates,” and that “the exact numbers should not be taken as precise, but in the right ballpark.”

“Comparing animal products in terms of lives and (especially) days broadly makes sense,” Woolley added. “‘Days’ is a really nice metric because farm animal species have such drastically different lifespans on the farm.”

There is, however, one major limitation to the research: it doesn’t factor in the severity of suffering that different animals experience.

“We made a choice methodologically to define ‘animal suffering’ as days of life [on a farm],” Troy said. “And I think that that’s a useful, albeit simple, metric. But it is not the only one.”

For example, on a day-to-day basis, dairy cows don’t seem to have it as bad as an egg-laying hen in a cage. But dairy cows tend to be farmed for twice as many years as hens. Does that suffering over many years compound in a way that, if we could fully understand it, would change the calculation? This analysis can’t answer nuanced questions like that, though other animal welfare researchers are working to provide a more comprehensive picture.

“If you can stand to think about it long enough, the problem becomes paralyzing,” my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has written about factory farming. “Tens of billions of land animals are slaughtered every year; hundreds of millions every day; thousands in the time it takes to read this sentence. The number grows by billions more every year, into multiples that feel as abysmal as they are mind-numbing.”

It’s enough to cause a lot of people to tune out and ignore the problem altogether. But shrinking these figures down to the impact our own diets have on animals is much more manageable. We can think smaller and maybe, while we’re at it, eat fewer small animals.