Climate's Hidden Enemy: Big Farming's Big Lie

It’s also not bad advice when it comes to other problems facing our society. Intersectionality, an idea first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, is a framework specifically designed to analyze intersecting identities like race, gender, and sexuality. But if we apply it to the animal welfare crisis, we’ll see that the abusive ways factory farms treat animals is not a single issue. It’s part of a larger network of cruelty and damage, one that specifically connects with one of the greatest problems facing us, as people and as a planet: climate disaster.

Factory farms: a common enemy

The most obvious reason why animal welfare and the climate crisis are closely connected? They both share an instigator.

Factory farms are one of the largest contributors to climate change. They generate 60% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Deforestation, one of the other great causes of rising emissions, is also inherently tied to factory farms, because cattle ranches are the number one cause of deforestation. That means that eating a hamburger hasn’t just hurt a single cow: It’s directly linked to the process that is causing havoc, destruction, death and existential threat to our planet.

It’s unsurprising that factory farms are so terrible for the environment; they're driven by a profit-hungry machine eager to exploit lives. And just as horrifying as the impact they wreak upon the environment is the methodology with which they do it—a methodology that runs on animal pain in order to sell their meat.

Chickens, pigs, cows, sheep, and many more animals live and die in horrifying conditions, thanks to factory farms. Unconcerned with suffering in their search for profit, factory farms have baked brutality into everyday life for the animals unlucky enough to be caught in their grip. Babies are separated from their mothers, cramped conditions cause disease and injury, routine mutilations from debeaking to dehorning are common, genetic manipulation or breeding is routine—and this is only the tip of the iceberg. It also only covers factory farms’ deliberate practices; there’s a whole new litany of cruelty when it comes to the unfortunate ‘byproducts’ or accidents of factory farming, from animals dying from heatstroke on the way to slaughterhouses to the mass killings of chickens during disease outbreaks like bird flu.

That means that people seeking to protect animals and people seeking to stop climate change have one clear common target: factory farms.

Our planet: a shared sanctuary

It’s not just humans who need a stable climate and planet to survive—animals do, too. Earth’s ecosystems have a delicate balance, which climate change disrupts with devastating consequences. Rising temperatures, deforestation, extreme weather, and habitat destruction threaten countless species, pushing many toward extinction. In Australia, for example, where climate change often leads to huge and devastating bushfires, scientists estimate that fires have already killed three billion animals.

But unlike us, animals have no voice in the fight against climate change. They can’t protest deforestation or campaign against pollution. They can’t advocate for themselves when their homes are lost to fires, rising seas, or industrial expansion.

That means that if we consider ourselves allies and protectors of animals, it’s our job to represent their interests in the fight against the climate crisis. When we work to combat climate change, we aren’t just protecting our own future; we are also standing up for the countless species that suffer silently due to environmental destruction.

If you care about animal welfare, you should care about the planet we share. Animal welfare is inherently tied to climate action, because a planet that can no longer support life equitably is a planet in crisis for all of its inhabitants.

When practicality meets ethics

Sometimes animal welfare gets largely ignored amongst other environmental concerns like combating the climate crisis. It might be considered a ‘sentimental’ issue, or less pressing compared to the human lives at stake.

Equally, sometimes advocates against climate crisis can be insensitive about animal lives. In the film This Changes Everything, writer Naomi Klein says, “I’ve been to more climate rallies than I can count, but the polar bears? They still don’t do it for me. I wish them well, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that stopping climate change isn’t really about them, it’s about us.” But actually, climate change is about all of us: animals included.

Of course, both movements—against animal cruelty and against climate change—share deeply moral and practical roots. The climate change movement is a practical one, because we can’t live on a dead planet. But it’s also a moral vision of the world we should give our future generations, an embrace of our planet’s beauty, and a sense of responsibility to our vulnerable communities.

And while of course there is deep emotion at the heart of the animal welfare movement, because it’s hard to look at animals suffering so deeply without also feeling pain, there’s also a steely core of practicality that understands our current food systems are broken. Ending animal cruelty isn’t just a nice thing to do for the animals; it’s a practical way to prevent future and current death, pollution, and suffering for humans, too.

The fights against climate change and animal cruelty aren’t separate: we’re in the same battle, and we’re often facing the same enemies. Yet large, change-driving institutions like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (often referred to as COP) too often ignore farmed animals and the ways they are both helpless drivers and victims of climate catastrophe, choosing instead to focus on wild animals (like the polar bears Klein has grown tired of). This is a mistake: the plight of farmed animals and the danger facing our climate are intrinsically linked. The sooner we realize that and work together, the stronger we’ll be.