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Replacing one type of meat with another: is it a good idea?

2025.07.23

It is often assumed that smaller animals, such as chickens, fish, or insects, are less susceptible to suffering than larger animals, such as cows or pigs. People who hold this view and feel compassion for animals may consider eating less meat from larger animals while eating more meat from smaller ones (for example, replacing beef with chicken). However, there are reasons to be wary of such a substitution.

The first problem is that even if smaller animals suffer less (which, in fact, is far from obvious), they yield less meat. As a result, more small animals than large ones will die, on average, to produce the same amount of meat. Thus, the total amount of suffering caused by meat production may turn out to be greater.

Even if you are highly skeptical that they are capable of suffering at all (for example, many people do not believe in the sentience of insects), remember that you should also take the cost of being wrong into account: if you assume that you are mistaken, what would the consequences be? Sometimes the cost of being wrong is so high that even when the probability of being mistaken is low, the risk is still very substantial.

The second problem is that people’s lesser compassion for smaller animals leads to them being treated more harshly. Therefore, the death of a cow in a slaughterhouse may, on average, be more humane than the death of a caught fish or an insect. The same may be true of living conditions on factory farms.

Thus, replacing meat from smaller animals with meat from larger ones (even if you believe that the latter are more susceptible to suffering) may be better than doing the opposite. And if you are unsure which way the numbers point, it may be better to consider reducing your meat consumption in general rather than replacing one type of meat with another. Alternatively, you could switch to cultivated meat or various meat substitutes, if these are available to you.

These considerations also apply to other animal products, such as dairy, eggs, and honey. If switching to chicken is a bad idea, then increasing the number of eggs consumed instead of meat is apparently a bad idea as well; replacing eggs (and perhaps egg-based products such as mayonnaise) with dairy products, on the other hand, may be less problematic.

Brian Tomasik has an interactive table with estimates of how much suffering is caused by the production of different types of meat, eggs, and milk. According to his estimates, milk and beef cause the least suffering per kilogram, eggs and poultry meat are dozens of times worse, and fish (such as farmed salmon and catfish) are hundreds of times worse. Insects are not included in these calculations, but he has written extensively about them in other works. Of course, you may disagree with his estimates.

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