‍Blog written by Claire Hamlett, a freelance journalist and contributor

Animals who are farmed suffer in all sorts of ways, including through frustration of their natural behaviours, being physically mutilated (e.g. tail docking), and being transported for hours to slaughterhouses in overcrowded trucks. Our undercover investigations have repeatedly exposed abuses and neglect of these vulnerable animals. But unfortunately they are not the only ones who are harmed at the hands of the meat and dairy industries, which are responsible for persecuting and harming many free-living animals too.

1. Habitat destruction

Agricultural expansion is the leading cause of habitat loss globally. Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture–taking up more space than forests and wild grasslands–with 77 percent of that used for grazing animals and growing feed crops. Alarmingly, scientists estimate that a further 2 to 10 million square kilometres of land will be cleared for agriculture by 2050 to feed the growing human population if global food production continues on its current trajectory. 

In the UK, 71 percent of land (17.3 million hectares) is used for agriculture, with 85 percent

of that taken up by grazing pasture and growing animal feed. As a country we also have some of the lowest levels of biodiversity in the world, due to a combination of agricultural expansion and industrialisation.

2. Pollution

Animal farming can be highly polluting to natural environments, killing other animals as a result. There were 300 incidents of rivers in the UK being polluted in 2021, with 20 of those being “serious”. The dairy industry is linked to half of all farm pollution in the UK because of the huge volumes of manure produced by the cows leaching into waterways from where it is stored or after being spread on fields as fertiliser. This kind of river pollution kills fish and is dangerous to other free-living animals such as otters by degrading the habitats that they depend on for survival.

An excess of ammonia, a nitrogen compound, from livestock manure and urine running into waterways can also encourage algal blooms that starve the water of oxygen and further imperil the animals living there. This is what has been happening in the Netherlands, where the Dutch government has proposed a 30 percent cut in farmed animal numbers to deal with the problem, and in the River Wye in England and Wales, where the number of intensive chicken farms has exploded in recent years and caused significant ammonia pollution.

3. Competition for resources

Animal agriculture destroys wild habitat for grazing because the grazing animals are essentially put into competition for resources–land, water, and food–with free-living animals. One very stark example of this comes from the US, where cattle ranching is allowed on some public lands, usually to the detriment of the free-living animals that were there first. At Point Reyes in California, the National Park Service has allowed ranching to expand and even to fence out tule elk from their native range. As a result, 25 percent of the herd died from starvation and thirst in the summer of 2021. 

4. Disease spread

Farming animals can cause diseases to spread to free-living animals. The outbreaks of avian flu that have resulted in millions of farmed poultry being killed on farms has also decimated populations of some free-living bird species and a number of mammals, with the highly pathogenic strain H5N1 having emerged on a goose farm in China in the 1990s.

5. Persecution

British farmers often kill animals like moles because they believe they are a threat to the animals they farm. Moles are perceived to be a risk to animals like sheep by contaminating silage (cut grass and other fodder) or hay with soil when they burrow; soil in animal feed can give the farmed animals listeria, a potentially deadly bacteria. But there are other ways to stop this from happening that doesn’t involve killing moles.

Badgers are another heavily persecuted species in the UK. More than 210,000 badgers have been killed since 2013 in England as part of attempts to control the spread of bovine Tuberculosis (bTB), an infectious respiratory disease which affects cattle. The Badger Trust calls the cull “misguided and fundamentally flawed.” 

Elsewhere in the world, free-living animals are also killed to protect farming interests, such as wolves in Scandinavia and the US, even though this can lead to an increase in livestock killings by wolves. Fish farmers in Scotland can get licenses to shoot seals who can break into open water fish pens. Costa Rican farmers have killed pumas and jaguars to protect livestock.

Animals who are farmed account for 62 percent of mammal biomass (weight) on the planet, compared to just 4 percent for free-living mammals, while farmed bird biomass is more than double that of free-living birds. This makes these assaults on our free living kin even more alarming.

As always,

For the animals.