Updated 23 July 2026: added a section on pork. Also corrected a claim about Rethink Priorities’ welfare ranges, which do not cover cattle, and re-sourced two Australian pig-farming figures that I had originally taken from second-hand summaries and got wrong.

Updated 26 July 2026: rewrote the dairy section. Whey is not environmentally near-free, and the welfare cost of dairy is the lactating cow rather than the bobby calf. The same accounting correction cuts the other way for cheese, whose footprint I had been overstating by about a quarter. The kangaroo asterisk is sharpened on the same reasoning. Rewrote pork too: my reason for singling it out was wrong, the supply claim was wrong, and RSPCA Certified free-range pork is now something I buy. Moved kangaroo, wild venison and labelled pork up into the freely list, where they have belonged for a while.

The short version

  • Rank food by suffering per kilogram rather than by whether it comes from an animal.
  • Out: chicken and duck, eggs, farmed fish, prawns and other decapods, squid and octopus. No welfare label in Australia rescues any of them.
  • In, freely: milk, yoghurt, whey, cheese, oysters and mussels, kangaroo, labelled-wild venison, and RSPCA Certified free-range pork.
  • In, occasionally: grass-fed beef and lamb, rangeland goat, named wild-caught fish. Unlabelled pork in social settings only.
  • Pork belongs on the same scale as everything else, contrary to the first version of this post. A breeding sow’s farrowing crate contributes about 2% of pork’s confinement-days per kilogram; the ordinary indoor life of the pigs eaten contributes most of the rest. Free-range plus RSPCA Certified is enough to move pork into my kitchen, and national availability at Coles matters more than the fact that only 5% of sows are free range.
  • Dairy’s welfare cost is lameness in the milking cow, not the bobby calf. Between 4% and 19% of an Australian dairy cow’s life is spent on a painful foot, and the two big local surveys disagree by a factor of five.
  • Whey is not environmentally free. It now earns about 30% of the revenue from a litre of cheese milk, so it carries about 30% of the footprint.
  • Cheese costs under three times tofu per gram of protein, not four. The standard dataset hands cheese the entire burden of its milk.
  • The passes for kangaroo, beef and lamb are Australia-specific and do not travel.

The vegan/omnivore binary stopped tracking what I care about. I want to know how many days of confinement and pain a kilogram of food buys, and animal foods differ by several orders of magnitude on that measure. Removing the worst categories captures most of the ethical benefit of veganism for a fraction of the effort. The resulting ranking surprised me: dairy stayed, chicken went, and the best-scoring meat in Australia is one most people have never cooked.

Brian Tomasik’s estimates supply the per-kilogram metric. Small animals produce little meat per life, so chicken and eggs embed far more confinement-days in each kilogram than beef. Rethink Priorities’ welfare-range work points in the same direction; using its weights, dairy causes something like 800 times less suffering per kilogram than chicken. I give suffering roughly three quarters of the decision and environmental harm one quarter. That split is my judgement rather than a research finding, and it moves ruminant meat into the occasional category while changing little else. A heavier environmental weight would push beef and lamb lower again.

What I stopped eating

Chicken and duck, including RSPCA Certified. Around 99% of Australian growers use the fast-growing Cobb 500 and Ross 308 breeds. The RSPCA standard regulates stocking density and litter but leaves breed untouched, even though the Welfare Footprint Project attributes about two thirds of a broiler’s disabling pain to breed alone. The label fixes the shed and leaves the bird.

Eggs, even pasture-raised. Cage-free systems roughly halve waking hours in pain compared with cages, which matters, but eggs remain a top-tier harm per kilogram and are plausibly worse than beef per meal. No label fixes the culling of around 12 million male chicks each year in Australia.

Male chick culling is changing and is the main reason I expect to revisit this post. Specialised Breeders Australia installed the first in-ovo sexing machine in the Asia-Pacific at its Victorian hatchery, with sexed chicks available from 1 June 2026 and the first eggs from those birds due in shops around the turn of 2027. Europe is several years ahead, with in-ovo sexing above a quarter of the EU market and culling banned in Germany and France. Rearing the males, as dual-purpose flocks did before laying and meat lines diverged, fares badly on the same metric: layer cockerels take 8.5 to 18 weeks and about six kilograms of feed to produce a 1.3 to 1.5 kilogram bird. Technology is likely to retire the culling objection, while the per-kilogram confinement cost may still be standing in 10 years.

A backyard flock is the exception because the per-kilogram argument mostly dissolves. A hen foraging at low density is closer to the zero-confinement logic that makes kangaroo rank well, leaving provenance as the main question. Point-of-lay pullets from a commercial hatchery carry chick culling upstream, though in-ovo sexed stock is beginning to address that. Rescued ex-commercial hens are the clean case: the marginal egg costs nothing extra and the bird’s life improves. A neighbour’s or market’s “free-range” eggs do not inherit this exception unless the birds are traceable, which they usually are not.

Farmed fish, prawns and other decapods, and cephalopods. Whole-of-life confinement keeps farmed fish high-harm per kilogram even when slaughter is comparatively good; Tasmanian salmon is percussively stunned, which is better than most. Prawns usually die by slow asphyxiation, and about half the prawns consumed in Australia come from regions with worse practices. Squid and octopus have high neural complexity and no welfare standards. On a menu I assume that salmon and unspecified fish are farmed.

What I eat freely

Dairy. Milk, yoghurt and whey sit at the bottom of the suffering table by orders of magnitude, even after charging dairy for the right harm. My first version pointed at more than 300,000 bobby calves slaughtered during their first week each year in Australia and said dairy would cost more if killing carried weight. I do not weight killing itself. My concern is suffering during life, including fear and pain during death, so a genuinely instant death costs close to nothing on this metric. The calves’ first week counts; the fact of slaughter does not.

The larger charge belongs to the lactating cow through lameness. Two large Australian surveys using similar herd numbers and pasture systems disagree by a factor of five, with 3.8% of cows lame at any moment in one and 19.1% in the other. Different scoring scales do not obviously explain the gap. Point prevalence is a share of days, so somewhere between 4% and 19% of an Australian dairy cow’s life is spent on a painful foot. Episodes last for weeks and hoof lesions can take up to 35 days to resolve.

Much of it goes unmanaged. Farmers in those surveys identified only 0.82% and 5% of their cows as lame, and nearly three quarters of Australian dairy farmers keep no lameness records. Clinical mastitis is real but about an order of magnitude smaller, at roughly one painful day per lactation. Dairy still wins by orders of magnitude, though by less than “near-zero” suggested. The honest asterisk belongs to the cow rather than the calves.

I had also treated whey as environmentally near-free because it is a cheese byproduct. That argument depended on price rather than physics, and the price moved: whey protein concentrate roughly doubled in the year to early 2026 as demand for protein from weight-loss drugs rose, while cheese fell. On my arithmetic, whey now earns about 30% of the revenue from a litre of cheese milk. Under the same allocation convention that once made a cheap byproduct “free,” it must carry about 30% of the milk’s footprint. Concentrating that burden into a small mass of powder puts whey above cheese per gram of protein rather than below it.

The correction improves cheese. The dataset behind my old four-times figure lists every co-product allocation its authors performed, yet “whey” appears nowhere in its 76 pages. Cheese was carrying the full footprint of the milk. Allocate 30% to whey and cheese falls from roughly 24 kg of CO2 per kilogram to about 18, leaving it under three times tofu per gram of protein. I still pay that premium because halloumi, paneer and other fresh cheeses are the only dairy proteins I can cook like meat, browning rather than melting. The premium is smaller than I had claimed, and whey was never free.

Bivalves. Oysters and mussels are most likely non-sentient, and Australian longline farming is environmentally net-positive. They are the rare animal foods I treat as plausibly better than nothing.

Kangaroo is the best-scoring meat I can buy here on both axes. The animal lives wild without confinement, transport or an abattoir; each death yields a large carcass, methane is negligible and no land is dedicated to production. Commercial shooters are licensed, and an RSPCA figure puts headshots at about 96%, though the underlying data are from 2002.

Dependent young provide the asterisk. The code requires pouch young of a shot female to be killed by blunt trauma, which costs little on my metric if death is as immediate as intended. Young-at-foot can escape and starve, which counts in full. Male-only product lines largely remove both problems, making the label worth checking. Quota-managed populations are culled regardless, so commercial harvest competes against a worse culling counterfactual rather than against no death.

Wild venison follows the same logic. Deer are a declared invasive pest and are culled regardless. Field shooting operates under a national standard, and removal benefits habitat, so the usual ruminant methane objection collapses. Provenance is the catch: only labelled wild venison counts, since an unlabelled product may be farmed.

Pork, with two labels. I needed two attempts to get this category right. Per kilogram, pork sits near beef and well below chicken because one pig produces a large amount of meat. On the environmental quarter it is the cheapest meat after chicken, at about 12 kg CO2e/kg.

I first argued that these figures missed suffering concentrated in the breeding sow. They do not; sow suffering needs a denominator like anything else. A sow spends four to five weeks in a farrowing crate for each of 2.3 litters a year and produces 2,276 kg of liveweight annually. That is about 0.03 crate-days per kilogram, compared with 1.4 confinement-days per kilogram from the pigs eventually eaten. The crate contributes about 2% of the total, or roughly 10% to 20% if one crate-day is weighted five or 10 times more heavily for severity.

Farrowing crates remain the most severe legal confinement in Australian farming, at as little as 0.5 metres wide and 2 metres long under the national code. They are not what dominates the per-kilogram figure. The ordinary indoor life of the pigs on the shelf does: roughly 90% spend about 160 days inside.

Sentience does not distinguish pork from beef. Rethink Priorities puts pigs at roughly half a human’s welfare range and chickens at about a third, while never assessing cattle; it expects cattle to land near pigs rather than below them. The difference in Australia is the life. Beef animals spend most of it on pasture, while around 90% of pigs do not.

Gestation stalls have largely disappeared and sows are now loose-housed for about 105 days of pregnancy. Investigations nevertheless found stalls in use well after the industry’s 2017 phase-out date. That phase-out remains voluntary almost everywhere, with only the ACT and Tasmania legislating. The ACT banned sow stalls in 2014 but has no intensive piggeries, so the ban costs nothing there. Tasmania’s Animal Welfare (Pigs) Regulations 2025 prohibit sow stalls and cap farrowing-crate confinement at 42 days per gestational cycle. This is the first hard legal ceiling on farrowing crates in Australia.

Pork also has the worst labelling in this guide. “Sow stall free” still allows farrowing crates, and “outdoor bred” means a pig was born outside before being finished in a shed. Yet the RSPCA label works better here than it does on chicken. RSPCA Certified pork prohibits farrowing crates, sow stalls, teeth clipping, tail docking and surgical castration, and audits the abattoir as well as the farm. It reaches the central harms rather than regulating around them.

I assumed availability would be the catch because only about 5% of Australian sows are free range and the certified share is smaller again. Those base rates do not describe what I can buy; I should have checked the shelf rather than the statistic. Coles own-brand fresh pork is both free-range and RSPCA Certified, comes from the Great Southern region of Western Australia, and is the only RSPCA-certified fresh pork stocked nationally by a major Australian supermarket. The RSPCA page says its pigs “are never kept in cages or crates of any kind”. Woolworths own-brand is only sow-stall-free, which leaves farrowing crates untouched.

Pork therefore enters my kitchen only when the label carries both properties. RSPCA Certified removes the crates and mutilations; free-range removes the indoor life that accounts for nearly all the harm in the arithmetic.

Slaughter remains. The RSPCA standard permits electrical and gas stunning, while more than 85% of pigs processed in Australia are stunned with CO2. High-concentration CO2 takes 21 to 60 seconds to induce unconsciousness, and EFSA finds that period painful, frightening and distressing to breathe through. The Western Australian processor is export-accredited, and every export-accredited pig abattoir in Australia uses CO2, so I assume my pork is gas-stunned. I accept about 45 seconds of this against a 160-day life on the same terms as kangaroo joeys, and it remains smaller in expectation than the shot-wounding rate I already accept for kangaroo.

What I eat occasionally

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. Labelled grass-fed is therefore the better purchase. Rangeland goat, which makes up most Australian goat meat, belongs in the same tier: a wild pasture life followed by conventional mustering and transport.

Unlabelled pork stays confined to social settings, where I am not choosing the label. It sits last in this ordering rather than outside it because its per-kilogram harm remains near beef. Treating it like chicken would move away from the metric I am using; the reasoning sits with the labelled pork above.

None of the Australian passes travels. Feedlot norms, harvest codes and labels change overseas, where I use a cruder rule: prefer the largest animals, avoid dishes built from small animals, and treat dairy and plants as safe.

Sources