The vegan/omnivore binary is a bad unit of analysis. If the thing you care about is animal suffering, the correct question is how many days of confinement and pain a kilogram of each food buys, and on that metric animal foods span several orders of magnitude. A diet that cuts the worst few categories captures most of the benefit of full veganism at a fraction of the cost, and the ranking that falls out is genuinely counterintuitive: dairy stays, chicken goes, and the best meat available to an Australian is one most people have never cooked.

The core metric comes from Brian Tomasik’s per-kilogram suffering estimates: small animals produce little meat per life, so the confinement-days embedded in a kilogram of chicken or eggs dwarf those in a kilogram of beef. Rethink Priorities’ welfare-range work points the same direction; on their weights, dairy causes something like 800 times less suffering per kilogram than chicken. I weight suffering at roughly three quarters of the decision and environmental impact at one quarter, which demotes ruminant meat to occasional but changes little else.

What goes

Chicken and duck, including RSPCA Approved. Around 99% of Australian growers use the fast-growing Cobb 500 and Ross 308 breeds; the RSPCA standard regulates stocking density and litter but not breed, and the Welfare Footprint Project attributes about two thirds of broiler disabling pain to breed alone. The label fixes the shed and leaves the bird.

Eggs, even pasture-raised. Cage-free roughly halves waking hours in pain versus caged, which is worth having, but eggs remain a top-tier harm per kilogram, plausibly worse than beef per meal. No label fixes male chick culling, around 12 million per year in Australia, though in-ovo sexed supply began appearing in mid-2026 and is worth watching.

Farmed fish, prawns and other decapods, and cephalopods. Long whole-of-life confinement per kilogram keeps farmed fish high-harm even where slaughter is good (Tasmanian salmon is percussively stunned, better than most). Prawn slaughter is typically slow asphyxiation, and about half of Australian-consumed prawns are imported from regions where practice is worse. Squid and octopus carry high neural complexity and no welfare standards at all. On menus, assume salmon and unspecified fish are farmed.

What stays freely

Dairy. Milk, yoghurt and whey sit at the bottom of the suffering table by orders of magnitude, and whey is a cheese byproduct that is environmentally near-free. The honest asterisk is bobby calves, over 300,000 slaughtered in their first week each year in Australia; a killing-weighted ethic prices dairy higher than a suffering-weighted one does. Cheese is the one dairy product where the environmental quarter registers (its footprint per kilogram is comparable to meat), so it works better as a condiment than a default protein.

Bivalves. Oysters and mussels are most likely non-sentient, and Australian longline farming is environmentally net-positive; they are the rare animal food that is plausibly better than nothing.

What stays occasionally

Kangaroo is the best-scoring meat on both axes: a wild life with zero confinement, no transport or abattoir, a large animal per death, negligible methane and no dedicated land use. Commercial shooters are licenced and around 96% of kills are instant headshots. The honest asterisk is pouch young, killed by blunt trauma under the code when a female is shot; the industry has shifted heavily male-biassed partly for this reason. Quota-managed populations are culled either way, so the commercial harvest competes with a worse counterfactual, not with no death.

Wild venison runs on the same logic. Deer are a declared invasive pest culled regardless, harvest is field-shot under a national standard, and removal is habitat-positive, so the ruminant methane objection collapses. The catch is provenance: only labelled wild counts, since unlabelled venison may be farmed.

Beef and lamb are the lowest-suffering farmed meats. Only about 4% of the Australian herd is in a feedlot at any moment, though roughly 45% of slaughter is grain-finished for the last ~105 days, so labelled grass-fed is the better buy. Rangeland goat, most of Australia’s goat meat, lands at the same tier: a wild pasture life but a conventional mustering-and-transport end. Pork sits last; farrowing crates remain standard here.

None of the Australian passes travel. Overseas, feedlot norms, harvest codes and labelling all change, and the portable heuristic is simply to prefer the largest animals, avoid small-animal dishes, and treat dairy and plants as safe everywhere.

Sources