Death tally per annum
Carnivore (pasture based) 🐮🐮
Vegetarian/ high plant content 🐭🐰🦊🐸🦉🦇🐝🐛🦋🐌🐞🐜🦟🦗🕷🐍🦎🦝🦡🐁🐀🐿🦔 x 10,000
The paradox is the less meat you put on your plate, the more indirect deaths are caused to mammals, birds, amphibians, insects and all the other components of a healthy ecosystem. Monocropping agriculture for crops like wheat, corn and soya is the most ecocidal activity we do. It requires vast inputs of fossil fuel fertilisers, so the CO2 emissions are astronomical. They run off into waterways, causing sudden algal blooms, then dead zones of millions of fish as the oxygen is depleted. Pesticides, insecticides, rodenticides etc are needed as well, the intentional poisoning of trillions of creatures inconvenient to agriculture.
Or you could semi wild the land, having mixed meadow and woodland landscapes, put ruminants on there which co exist and co support thriving wildlife and biodiverse ecosystems. They’re actually net carbon negative as the soils sequester more carbon than the cows emit (as long as they only eat grass and silage). Isabella Tree’s Knepp estate is a great example of this depicted in her book Wilding.
Obviously industrial farming is an abomination, but a wheat field is far more cataclysmic to animals than a battery chicken shed in terms of gross number of deaths caused. Grass fed ruminants are the most ethical, ecological and efficient diet you can eat, alongside local orchards and veg gardening.
The ethical dividing line isn’t plant vs animal. It’s regenerative farming that builds healthy carbon & nutrient rich deep soils in a self sustaining way vs industrial agriculture that depletes soil, emits tons of carbon in its tillage and requires vast chemical and fossil inputs.