The Livestock Question: Animal Agriculture, Climate, and the Socialist Left
by Diana O’Dwyer
What the Fields Taught Me
When I was a child growing up in Tipperary, I thought all the fields of grass and cows and sheep were just how nature looked. We went on holidays to the Ring of Kerry, and I thought the treeless, barren landscape was natural too. It was only much later that I realised that both were the result of animal agriculture fundamentally altering the environment to the point that Ireland has the least forest of any country in Europe. Back in the 1990s, animal agriculture was way less intense than it is now. There were proper hedgerows and mushrooms and wildflowers in the fields. Now a lot of hedgerows have been removed to make the fields bigger. Trees have been chopped down to minimise shade so the grass grows faster. Fields have been artificially reseeded to maximise milk yield. It’s rare to see a hedgehog. We don’t know how many are left because we’re counting them for the first time this year. I only remember one or two hot summers as a kid. Now it’s nearly every year. It was 30 degrees in May a few weeks ago.
We farmed suckler cows for beef first, then sheep as well, then back to sucklers. I remember the cows crying for their calves when they were separated, sometimes for days. A horrible lamenting sound of grief that was very different to calves’ cries of pain when we burned their horns off. I liked farming the sheep the best because of the lambs. Every year, some ewes would reject their lambs or not have enough milk, and we would bottle-feed them. We gave them names and called them our pet lambs but they still got sent off to be slaughtered. The one I remember best was called Brownie. My older brother and I were very sad when he was taken away. Around the same time, we got a whole lamb delivered from the butcher. My parents told us it was a different lamb and Brownie had gone somewhere else. But then one day, me and my brother had a big fight, and he told me our parents were lying and that we had been eating our pet for weeks. I don’t remember having any pet lambs after that.
If you are an animal farmer, you have to desensitise yourself to their suffering. That spills over into wider animal cruelty as well. My granduncle kept his dog in a barrel. Our cat got poisoned. We found a litter of mostly dead kittens in a cardboard box at the side of the road. People would come across the fields hunting for hares to use for coursing. At school, we’d be let out to the gate to watch the foxhunt go past. If you don’t live in a rural area, you don’t personally see the cruelty of animal agriculture. It’s easier to never become aware of it or to become aware and then forget about it. To think that milk comes out of a carton and not a continually artificially re-impregnated cow whose calf is taken off her and killed so humans can drink her milk. To think that you love animals because you have a pet dog, or a cat that is out every day decimating the local bird population.
Animal Agriculture and Human Health
Socialists have generally been more concerned about feeding the world and protecting the environment for future generations than with animal welfare or animal rights. Prior to the environmental movement in the 1970s, it was reasonable to think that industrialising animal agriculture could improve people’s diets, including by enabling everyone to eat more meat. But rather than improving human health, increased consumption of animal protein has had the opposite effect with spiralling rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Chicken and pork are available on a mass scale unthinkable to previous generations and have become the major source of zoonotic diseases, with new variants of bird and swine flu a recurring threat. Processed meats are a recognised carcinogen, and red meat is classed as probably carcinogenic[1]. Health experts broadly agree that people should be eating less protein from animals and more protein from plants. It’s estimated that between 8 and 11 million lives a year - a fifth to a quarter of all adult deaths worldwide - could be saved if people ate a plant-based diet.
That’s before even touching on the greatest threat animal agriculture poses to human health: its dominant role in the environmental crisis. Even for socialists indifferent to animal suffering, avoiding ecological collapse and catastrophic climate change with the potential to wipe out billions of people and much of the global working class should be of concern. Animal agriculture is responsible for 60% of global biodiversity loss and about a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions globally[2] - around the same amount as transport. Unlike with transport, where emissions come from fossil fuels and carbon dioxide, animal agriculture emissions stem largely from methane and account for 44% of methane emissions globally[3]. Two-thirds of Irish agricultural emissions[4] - a quarter of Irish emissions overall - come from methane. Tackling methane emissions has the potential to be an especially impactful form of climate action in the short term because, unlike CO2 - which stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years, methane disappears in just twelve years[5]. Given that methane makes up almost a fifth of manmade GHG emissions[6] globally and is responsible for 20-30% of actual warming to date[7], a rational approach to climate action that prioritises actions to bring down temperatures rapidly would have a big emphasis on methane. Which means a big emphasis on plant-based diets.
Beyond direct emissions from animal agriculture is the ecological opportunity cost of devoting so much land to it. Feeding an animal with plants and then eating it is a grossly inefficient way of producing food for human consumption. Animal farming, including land used to grow animal feed, accounts for 77% of agricultural land globally and 97% in Ireland. Yet it produces only 18% of the world’s calories[8]. In 2017, Ireland fed enough calories to feed 127 million people to farm animals, who then produced enough calories to feed only 20.6 million people. James O’Donovan’s Transition to an Irish Vegan Agricultural System outlines how current agricultural land could be reduced by 62% and still produce enough plant-based calories to feed 70 million people. Irish emissions could then be reduced by more than half through a combination of lower agricultural emissions and land use change towards nature restoration. Globally, reverting 41% of current grasslands and pasturelands to native forests, which would be possible with a plant-based diet, would sequester all the carbon added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. In other words, global veganism could hypothetically “fully reverse climate change”[9] all by itself.
The point is not that we all need to become fully vegan - many other actions can be taken to reverse emissions, not least phasing out fossil fuels and switching to 100% renewable energy - but that the impact of transitioning to a mainly plant-based diet is so huge that it would make everything else a lot easier. Of course, there are arguably even more barriers to that happening than there are to phasing out fossil fuels.
Obstacles: Industry and Ideology
Opposition from animal farmers, including small farmers and peasants, whose support socialists need is obviously an important obstacle but not an insurmountable one. Ideas for a just transition where small farmers are paid to provide ecosystem services rather than subsidised to uneconomically farm animals as happens at the moment, have been shown to be possible even within existing resources[10]. They could be far more generously funded by redistribution from large to small farmers, who will need to be convinced that their class interests are opposed to those of big farmers and the agrifood industry.
Even if people are sentimentally attached to their cars, they don’t love the taste of petrol. Longheld tastes for meat, dairy and eggs - and force of habit - are a powerful block on dietary change, even if people understood the full extent of its destruction of the environment and their health. But at the moment they really don’t. Research on Irish attitudes to climate change has found that only 30% of people correctly identified agriculture as the largest source of Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions[11]. Even fewer would link those emissions specifically to animal agriculture. Three-quarters of people in a 2023 US poll believed that eating less meat has little to no effect on climate[12].
Just like with smoking, though, there is a lot more behind this than just people naturally not knowing these things and naturally liking the taste of animal products. Animal agriculture and the animal agrifood industry are massive components of the global capitalist economy, and decades of disinformation from the meat and dairy industry and promotion of meat and dairy by governments has convinced people they need it to thrive. In Ireland, schoolchildren are given cow’s milk for free every day in little cartons. There was uproar and outright censorship in 2023[13] when the Environmental Protection Agency was forced to delete a tweet advising people to eat less red meat. The Trump administration has gone one further and turned the food pyramid on its head to portray red meat and saturated animal fats as healthy.
Men in particular are targeted by this capitalist ideology of meat. McDonald's ran an advert in China with the tagline “100% manly man. 100% pure beef”. “Soy boy” is a favourite far right insult. Men in general eat more red meat (even accounting for gender size differences) and are less likely to be vegetarian. A US study of college students found that the increase in vegetarianism between 2008 and 2023 was entirely down to women, with the percentage of male vegetarians actually falling[14]. Veganism is woke, just like feminism, trans rights, anti-racism, environmentalism and of course socialism. By now, most socialists agree these other causes are important for the left to fight for and shouldn’t be sacrificed in the name of populism. Yet somehow an exception is made when it comes to eating less meat. Not wanting to alienate ordinary people is the stock excuse for not advocating plant-based diets, but it would not be accepted in those other contexts. To quote Gramsci, “To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is to achieve a communist and revolutionary act.”[15]
Individual and Collective Action
Despite the obvious role of capitalist conglomerates and right wing governments in promoting the consumption of animal products, many on the left insist on portraying meat consumption as a purely individual choice, with the implication that eating a plant-based diet is moralism with no real consequences. The same attitude has long existed in relation to environmentalism in general. It would be hard to find a socialist who would defend dumping their rubbish in a nature reserve, yet many on the left defend eating meat as an individual choice, even though it poses an exponentially greater threat to biodiversity. Sneering at veganism as individualistic lifestyle activism does sound superficially like it might have a defensible theoretical basis. What’s the point in doing anything as an atomised individual when mass collective, class-based action is the fundamental lesson of Marxism?
It’s worth questioning the assumption that eating a plant-based diet is really so individualistic when three per cent of the Irish population are already vegan or plant-based, and seven per cent are vegetarian, and levels vary so dramatically according to age and gender[16]. Dietary change, like any other social change, is already a social process, not an individual one. Even more so, as shifting to a plant-based diet is essentially a boycott of animal products and the industry that produces them. If socialists promote boycotts - like we did with non-payment of water charges - they become less individualistic and more social. And can perhaps get us out of the cognitive-cop-out-loop of saying we won’t collectively advocate for eating more plants and transitioning towards a plant-based diet because that’s an individual lifestyle choice we turn our noses up at.
None of this is to suggest anyone should be forced to stop eating meat. But if we are serious about stopping climate catastrophe and irreversible mass extinction of species, we need to be honest about the causes. It’s not just fossil capitalism that’s the problem - the global animal agrifood industry also needs to be dismantled. To do that, people need to know how important it is. If socialists aren’t talking about it then we cede the space to right wing liberals who will advocate for purely individual solutions rather than structural ones. The horrors of animal agriculture and the damage it does to human health and the environment are so extreme that they should be central to any ecosocialist argument for ending capitalism.
Notes
World Health Organisation, 'Cancer: Carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat and processed meat', October 2015, https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/cancer-carcinogenicity-of-the-consumption-of-red-meat-and-processed-meat
Oliver Milman, 'Meat accounts for nearly 60% of all greenhouse gases from food production, study finds', Guardian, 13 September 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/13/meat-greenhouses-gases-food-production-study
FAIRR Initiative, 'Greenhouse Gases', Knowledge Hub, https://www.fairr.org/resources/knowledge-hub/greenhouse-gases
Teagasc, 'Understanding greenhouse gas emissions on farms', Signpost Programme, https://teagasc.ie/environment/climate-change-air-quality/signpost-programme/articles/understanding-greenhouse-gas-emissions-on-farms/
US Environmental Protection Agency, 'Methane Emissions', Greenhouse Gas Emissions, https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/methane-emissions
Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, 'International Emissions', https://www.c2es.org/content/international-emissions/
NASA, 'Methane', Earth Indicators, https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/methane/
and 37% of its protein. Vegan Society, 'Research Briefing: Transition to an Irish Vegan Agricultural System', https://www.vegansociety.com/about-us/research/research-news/research-briefing-transition-irish-vegan-agricultural-system
James O'Donovan, Transition to an Irish Vegan Agricultural System
Ibid.
Environmental Protection Agency Ireland, Climate Change in the Irish Mind: Wave 2 (2021), https://www.epa.ie/publications/monitoring--assessment/climate-change/Climate-Change-in-the-Irish-Mind-Wave-2-Report-1.pdf
Joe Fassler, 'Meat is a leading emissions source – but few outlets report on it, analysis finds', Guardian, 27 September 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/27/meat-gas-emissions-reporting
'EPA deletes "eat less meat" tweet following IFA protest', RTÉ News, 28 August 2023, https://www.rte.ie/news/2023/0828/1402133-ifa-row/
Cara Rosenbloom, 'Why do more women than men choose to become vegetarians?', Psychology Today, November 2024, https://www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/animals-and-us/202411/why-do-more-women-than-men-choose-to-become-vegetarians
Antonio Gramsci, 'Workers' Democracy', L'Ordine Nuovo, 21 June 1919, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1919/06/workers-democracy.htm
Vegan Society of Ireland, Countrywide Survey (2025), https://vegansociety.ie/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Survey-countrywide-2025.pdf