New research suggests this tactic can backfire. When animals used by the meat industry are presented with human-like expressions, voices or behaviour, some consumers feel psychologically closer to them and become less willing to buy or eat their flesh. The smiling pig may have been created to sell sausages. Instead, he reminds people there was a pig.

Keeping Animals At A Distance

Researchers Ling Jiang, Yuan Feng, Wenkai Zhou, Zhilin Yang and Xiaolei Su examined how anthropomorphic images of animals influence intentions to consume and purchase meat.

Anthropomorphism means attributing human characteristics to someone or something considered not human. In advertising, this may involve giving an animal a smiling face, human clothing, speech or gestures.

Across four online experiments involving more than 1,200 people in China who ate animals, participants were shown adverts or packaging featuring pigs, cows or chickens. Some images showed realistic animals. Others showed cartoon versions who smiled, stood upright, wore aprons, spoke in the first person or gave a thumbs-up. The researchers found that anthropomorphic images reduced what they called social psychological distance. Participants felt closer to the animals and reported lower intentions to eat or purchase their flesh. This distance is central to what researchers often call the meat paradox: many people claim to care about animals while continuing to pay for them to be bred, imprisoned and killed. Maintaining emotional and psychological distance helps suppress the conflict. People do not have to confront a frightened pig inside a slaughterhouse. They encounter bacon sealed in plastic. They do not see a cow resisting death. They see a burger in a photograph. They do not meet the chicken whose life was taken. They see nuggets in a box.

Distance makes consumption easier because the product has been separated from the individual. Bring the animal back into view and the illusion begins to weaken.

When The Pig Becomes Someone

In the first experiment, 290 participants saw a restaurant advert promoting pig flesh.

One version featured a smiling cartoon pig standing upright and speaking in the first person. The other used a realistic image of a pig. Participants shown the cartoon pig reported feeling around 25% closer to him. Their intention to eat pig flesh fell by roughly 15.5%. The researchers found that the reduced intention was connected to psychological closeness. The pig appeared less like a product and more like an individual. Of course, the cartoon did not actually make the pig more of an individual. He already was one. The image merely made that fact harder to ignore.

The second study produced similar results using advertisements for cow flesh. Among 308 participants, a smiling cartoon cow wearing an apron increased psychological closeness by approximately 27% and reduced willingness to eat cow flesh by around 11%.

The third study involved packaging for chicken flesh. A smiling cartoon chicken wearing an apron and giving a thumbs-up increased psychological closeness by about 30.5%. Purchase intentions fell by roughly 17%.

In the final study, 305 participants viewed an online shopping page featuring packages of cow flesh. The anthropomorphic cow increased psychological closeness by around 36% and reduced purchase intentions by approximately 19%.

Across different animals, products and shopping environments, the pattern remained consistent. When people felt closer to the animal, they became less comfortable buying the animal’s body.

Not Everyone Responded Equally

The images did not have the same effect on everyone.

People who were already more likely to attribute thoughts and emotions to animals showed a stronger response. Those who were less inclined to recognise animals as feeling individuals often showed little or no meaningful change.

Moral self-efficacy also influenced the results. This refers to whether people believe they are capable of behaving according to their moral values.

Participants with higher moral self-efficacy were more likely to reduce their intentions to purchase animal flesh after feeling psychologically closer to the animal. Those with lower moral self-efficacy showed less change.

Feeling uncomfortable is not the same as changing your behaviour. Someone may recognise that a cow is an individual and still tell themselves that avoiding cow flesh is too difficult. They may appeal to habit, health, convenience or social expectations. They may acknowledge the moral conflict while insisting they are unable to resolve it. The research suggests that closeness creates an opportunity for change, but people must also believe they can act on what they recognise.

Animals Are Not Human Cartoons

There is an uncomfortable problem with describing this process as making animals more human-like. Pigs, cows and chickens do not need human clothing, human speech or human expressions to have lives that belong to them.

A pig does not need to stand upright and introduce himself before his interest in remaining alive deserves consideration.

A cow does not need to wear an apron before humans should recognise her fear, relationships or desire to avoid pain.

A chicken does not need to smile before her body stops being ours to buy.

Anthropomorphic imagery may reduce psychological distance, but animals should not have to resemble humans to receive moral consideration. Their differences do not make them inferior. They make them themselves. The deeper problem is not that people fail to see enough humanity in animals. It is that human society treats humanity as the entry requirement for basic rights.

Animals are expected to demonstrate intelligence, emotion, self-awareness or social behaviour in forms humans recognise. Each discovery is treated as another reason to harm them slightly less. But their right not to be exploited should not depend on passing a human-designed test.

The Meat Industry Depends On Dissociation

The study supports what the meat industry’s language and presentation already reveal.

Selling animal flesh depends on disconnection. Animals are kept away from consumers. Slaughterhouses are hidden. Bodies are cut, cleaned, packaged and renamed. The words used for the products often obscure the species entirely. This is not accidental.

The research paper notes that even anticipating eating animals can lead people to deny their mental capacities. People may reduce their beliefs about an animal’s ability to feel pain or understand what is happening because recognising those abilities would make their own behaviour harder to defend.

First comes the desire to eat the animal. Then comes the convenient belief that the animal did not experience enough for their death to count.

Anthropomorphic advertising interrupts this process because it creates psychological contact. A face looks back. A character speaks. The distance narrows.

The marketing strategy tries to turn the animal’s death into a joke. For some consumers, it accidentally restores the victim.

A Tool, Not A Solution

The researchers measured intentions, not what participants actually purchased or ate. Price, habit, convenience and social pressure may all affect whether changed intentions lead to changed behaviour.

All four experiments were also conducted in China, meaning the results may not apply identically across cultures. The reductions were meaningful but modest, ranging from around 11 to 19%. Anthropomorphic imagery also had little effect on people who were less inclined to recognise animals as sentient or who did not believe they could act according to their moral values.

A smiling cartoon animal is therefore not a universal solution.

Nor should animal advocates rely on the idea that animals must be made cute, familiar or human-like before people will care about them. But the findings expose something valuable.

Many people continue eating animals by maintaining distance from them. Reduce that distance and the moral conflict becomes harder to suppress. The task for animal advocacy is not to invent personalities for pigs, cows and chickens. It is to reveal the personalities, relationships and experiences they already have.

Behind every packet is someone who wanted to live. They did not consent because a cartoon version of their species was drawn smiling on the label.

They were not ingredients.

They were animals whose individuality had to be erased before their bodies could be sold.

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It is part of a draft public-private investment roadmap worth $2.3 trillion, covering 17 sectors and 62 products and technologies by 2040. Four of those sectors relate to food technology and are expected to receive around $60 billion. The government has allocated approximately $6.2 billion specifically to what it calls “new foods”: functional, nutritious and non-animal-derived products, including alternative proteins. Food without animals.

It should not be a radical idea.

Japan’s Food Industry Is Changing

The proposed investment forms part of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s “crisis management and growth investment” agenda.

Japan has a long history of fermentation and food manufacturing. The roadmap highlights fermented foods, seasonings, rice flour and other established areas of Japanese food production. It also reflects a changing market. A 2025 report found that urban flexitarians were driving increased demand for plant-based tuna in Japan. Concerns about ethics, pressure on fish supply chains and changing attitudes towards nutrition were all contributing to this shift. Japanese food technology companies are also working on cultivated animal products, although cultivated meat is not included in the current investment roadmap. In May, Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency published draft guidance for companies seeking to sell cultivated meat and fish products. The direction is clear. Animal agriculture is no longer the only food system governments can imagine funding. Alternatives exist. The research exists. The ingredients exist. What has often been missing is the scale of investment needed to make plant-based foods cheaper, better and more widely available. Japan appears prepared to provide some of it.

Plants Are Not In Short Supply

We grow huge quantities of plants already. We then feed many of them to animals, use land and energy keeping those animals alive, and recover only a fraction of the original nutrition through their bodies, milk or eggs. Researchers are now demonstrating how many overlooked plant ingredients could be used more directly.

Sunflower meal is one example.

Sunflower meal is left behind during sunflower oil production. From 100 kilograms of sunflower seeds, researchers estimate that around 40 kilograms of oil and 40 kilograms of meal can be produced after the husks are removed. Approximately 21.63 million metric tonnes of sunflower oil were produced worldwide between 2023 and 2024. That means an enormous quantity of sunflower meal is available. Much of it is currently fed to animals imprisoned on farms. Instead of feeding useful protein to animals and later eating the animals, researchers are investigating how sunflower meal could feed humans directly.

A study involving researchers in Brazil and Germany used sunflower ingredients to produce plant-based patties. Textured sunflower protein performed particularly well, providing protein, monounsaturated fats, magnesium, manganese, zinc and iron. It also had a neutral taste and aroma. In other words, an ingredient currently treated largely as animal feed could become nutritious human food.

No slaughter required.

Even Discarded Flowers Can Become Food

Marigolds provide another example. Researchers from the University of Georgia investigated whether proteins could be extracted from marigold flowers. Around 40% of marigold production is reportedly discarded. The researchers ground the flowers into powder and separated several protein extracts. Some contained high levels of glutamic acid and aspartic acid, which could provide an umami taste.

The proteins also remained stable at temperatures of up to 105°C, making them more heat-resistant than some pea and chickpea proteins. Two extracts demonstrated strong emulsifying properties, suggesting potential uses in dressings, mayonnaise alternatives and dairy-free products. Researchers now plan to develop prototypes and carry out taste testing.

Marigolds will not replace the entire animal agriculture industry. Neither will sunflower meal. That is not the point. The point is that potential ingredients are everywhere once governments, universities and companies stop treating cows, pigs, chickens, fishes and other animals as the compulsory middlemen between plants and humans.

We do not need to find one magical crop that replaces every animal-derived product. We need continued research, investment and manufacturing across a wide range of plant ingredients.

Japan’s proposed investment could help create precisely this kind of food system.

Insects Are Not Plant-Based Protein

Whenever governments use broad terms such as “alternative protein” someone pops up to talk about bugs. Insect farming is frequently promoted as a sustainable replacement for conventional animal agriculture. Supporters claim insects convert feed efficiently, require fewer resources and can consume food waste. But insects are animals.

Replacing one group of exploited animals with another is not progress for the animals being bred and killed. The claimed environmental and economic case may also be far weaker than industry marketing suggests.

A review of insect farming research identified three recurring problems: reliance on outdated environmental studies, unrealistic assumptions about feeding insects food waste, and cost projections that fail to reflect commercial conditions.

Some influential studies were based on small-scale facilities, human-grade feed and production systems that no longer resemble modern insect farms. Energy-intensive processing was sometimes excluded.

The popular idea that insects will consume vast quantities of otherwise unusable food waste also appears detached from commercial reality. Large insect farms often avoid food waste because it is inconsistent, expensive to collect, vulnerable to contamination and difficult to use safely. Grain-based feeds provide more predictable growth.

So insects may be fed crops that could have been used elsewhere, only to be killed and turned into animal feed or snack ingredients. We already know how inefficient that logic becomes when applied to cows, pigs and chickens.

Changing the species does not repair the argument.

Westerners Do Not Want To Eat Insects

Insect farming also faces a rather obvious commercial problem. Most people in Western countries do not want to eat insects.

Research published in 2025 found that only 24 to 26% of people in the UK would consider trying insect-based foods. Among those who were unwilling, 67% said nothing could persuade them.

Around two billion people worldwide already eat insects, often as part of established local food cultures. That does not mean industrial insect farming is a realistic way to reduce animal product consumption in the UK, Europe or the United States.

Plant-based foods have considerably greater public acceptance. They also avoid the ethical problem entirely.

Research increasingly shows how insects experience pain. But the insect farming industry proposes breeding and killing them in numbers that would make existing animal agriculture statistics look small. Why build another system of mass confinement and killing when plants are available? Why divert public investment into persuading people to eat animals they already reject? Why not spend that money making plant-based foods affordable, nutritious, convenient and enjoyable?

Investment Is A Choice

Governments decide what to subsidise. They decide which research receives public money. They decide which industries receive infrastructure, favourable regulation and political support.

For decades, animals have been bred and killed within a food economy built around public investment and government protection. A different food system will also require investment. Japan’s $6.2 billion proposal recognises that animal-free food is not merely a consumer trend. It is an industrial, economic and strategic opportunity. Plant ingredients such as sunflower meal and marigold protein show how much potential remains underused. These foods could reduce waste, provide nutrition and replace ingredients taken from animals.

The distinction must remain clear.

Plant-based protein ends the need to use animals. Insect protein merely selects new victims. Governments should invest accordingly.

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The intention is to separate the vertebrae at the top of her spine, damage her spinal cord and disrupt the blood supply to her brain. When performed correctly, cervical dislocation is supposed to cause rapid unconsciousness and death. The problem is that British laboratories do not appear to agree on how to perform it correctly.

A study of 317 people working with mice and rats across UK research institutions found widespread differences in the techniques, physical actions and tools used to kill them. There is no standardised method, no scientifically validated tool designed specifically for the procedure and little agreement about what a successful dislocation even requires.

Cervical dislocation is reportedly the preferred killing method of 57.5% of UK laboratory personnel.

No Standard Method

Mice and rats account for around 70% of all experimental procedures involving mammals in the UK. When experiments end, when animals are no longer wanted for breeding, or when they have been produced in excess, they are killed.

UK law permits several methods, including anaesthetic overdose, carbon dioxide exposure, concussion and cervical dislocation. The law describes these methods as acceptable. That does not mean they are painless, reliable or ethically defensible.

For mice, 69.4% of survey respondents reported that cervical dislocation was usually performed manually, without equipment. Around a quarter used a mechanical aid. For rats, the pattern was reversed. More than two thirds used some form of tool, while only 15% relied primarily on their hands.

What tools? Metal rods. Closed scissors. Pens. Cage scrapers. Rulers. Broom handles. Spanners.

Ordinary objects that were never designed, tested or validated for killing animals. The researchers warned that pens may break, scissors may slip and blunt objects may crush the neck rather than separate the vertebrae. An inaccurate or incomplete dislocation could delay unconsciousness, cause asphyxiation or prolong the animal’s death. This is what can hide behind the word “euthanasia.” A mouse pinned beneath a pen. A rat killed with a cage scraper.

Laboratories Do Not Even Agree On The Actions

For cervical dislocation to cause rapid unconsciousness, the separation should occur as close to the skull as possible. But survey respondents did not agree on which actions were necessary to achieve this. Some emphasised pushing down. Others pushed forwards. Some pulled the tail horizontally or upwards. Some stretched the neck. Others twisted or rolled the animal’s body. Evidence from research involving chickens suggests that a rapid stretch and twist together cause more complete separation. Applying only one part of the movement can result in less damage to the spinal cord, a slower loss of consciousness and greater suffering. More than half of those using mechanical methods on mice and rats instead emphasised a forceful downward push. The study’s authors warned that this may be closer to crushing the neck, potentially causing a slower death through asphyxiation.

Even the rules within individual institutions were unclear. More than one in five respondents working with mice did not know whether their laboratory had a formal procedure. For rats, 27.5% said no standard operating procedure existed at all. The researchers concluded that practice appeared to be driven by local processes and personal preferences rather than empirical evidence. Despite this, most respondents still described the method as “humane.”

That confidence is revealing.

When a killing method is familiar, legal and performed inside a laboratory, the label often becomes more important than what happens to the animal.

The Animals Who Never Reach An Experiment

The violence of animal research does not begin with an injection or end when an experiment is completed. Many animals are bred for research and killed without ever being included in a study.

In Switzerland, around 1.2 million animals are bred for scientific purposes each year, but only roughly half are used directly in experiments. The remaining 600,000 may have the wrong sex, age or genetic characteristics, or simply exceed the number researchers require.

They are classified as surplus.

That word erases an entire life.

These animals are confined under laboratory conditions and killed because the system has no further use for them. Their deaths may not appear in official figures for animals “used” in experiments, even though they were deliberately brought into existence by the research industry.

Their confinement causes harm too. Mice and rats have strong drives to burrow, forage, explore and form complex social relationships. Standard laboratory cages restrict these behaviours. Research has associated such environments with boredom, frustration, anxiety, stress and depression, as well as increased rates of some physical illnesses and premature death. But many legal systems focus narrowly on what happens during an authorised experimental procedure. Confinement, killing and the loss of an animal’s future may be excluded from the formal calculation entirely.

Better Science Already Exists

Defenders of animal experimentation often present the choice as simple: harm animals or abandon medical progress. That choice is false.

Researchers are already developing methods that are faster, cheaper and more relevant to human biology.

In Switzerland, scientist Jimeng Wu has created an AI-powered “virtual mouse” for nanomedicine research. The model draws on data from 18 existing studies to predict how nanoparticles will behave inside the body, allowing researchers to screen potential interventions before manufacturing them or testing them on living animals.

Researchers in Germany have developed genESOM, a generative AI system trained on small experimental datasets. It produces synthetic data designed to reflect genuine laboratory results and could reduce animal use in some preclinical research by between 30% and 50%.

Other methods include human cell cultures, organoids, organs-on-chips, computer modelling and 3D bioprinted human tissues.

These are not speculative technologies waiting for some distant scientific breakthrough.

An analysis of biomedical and toxicology papers published between 2003 and 2022 found that research using only non-animal methods had outnumbered animal-based research throughout the entire period. By 2022, 73% of the papers studied used non-animal methods alone. Another 24% combined animal and non-animal methods. Just 3% relied solely on animals. In the UK, researchers published more than four non-animal-only papers for every animal-based paper.

Animal experimentation is not the uncontested foundation of modern science. In several major fields, researchers are already moving beyond it.

Tradition Disguised As Necessity

So why does animal experimentation continue?

Part of the answer lies in scientific culture.

A survey of researchers in India found that 56% had been asked by peer reviewers to add animal experiments to studies that originally contained none. These demands contributed to rejected papers, withdrawn submissions, publication in lower-impact journals and reduced funding opportunities. Around one in five respondents admitted conducting animal experiments purely because they expected reviewers to demand them later.

Animals were not necessarily used because the research required them. They were used because the publishing system expected their bodies to appear in the evidence.

Scientific authority can also weaken moral resistance.

In one experiment, participants were asked to administer increasingly toxic doses to what they believed was a living fish. More than half continued until they believed they had killed the fish. Those encouraged to think positively about science were more likely to continue despite signs of distress.

Across a separate sample of more than 31,000 Europeans, stronger pro-science attitudes predicted greater support for animal experimentation.

This does not mean science is the enemy. It means scientific authority must not become a moral exemption.

A laboratory coat does not turn violence into neutrality. A research licence does not make an animal disposable. The possibility of human benefit does not erase the individual whose body is being used to pursue it.

Replace, Do Not Refine

The researchers behind the UK cervical dislocation study call for validated tools, clearer procedures, stronger training and more consistent regulation.

Those changes might reduce some immediate suffering.

But a purpose-built device would still be designed to break an animal’s neck. A perfectly written procedure would still end with a dead mouse. A more reliable killing method would not explain why she was bred, confined, experimented upon and discarded in the first place.

The real scandal is not simply that laboratories are killing mice and rats with improvised objects.

It is that millions of sensitive, social animals are treated as disposable research materials, while institutions debate how to kill them more consistently.

Science is already capable of moving beyond animal experimentation. AI, human tissues, organs-on-chips and computer models are not concessions to ethics at the expense of progress. They are part of better, more human-relevant research.

The future of science should not depend on finding a more efficient way to break an animal’s neck. It should depend on no longer doing it at all.

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A rural county in South Korea has begun commercialising a leather-like material made from surplus Korean melons. The fruit would otherwise have been thrown away. Now, the peel is being turned into bags, card wallets, business card holders and pen cases. The material has already received vegan certification, and developers hope it could eventually be used for car interiors. This is another reminder that we do not need to raise, exploit and kill animals to produce durable materials.

From Waste To Wallets

Chilgok County, in South Korea’s North Gyeongsang Province, began researching the material in 2024. During the rainy season, large quantities of Korean melons known as chamoe were considered unsuitable for sale. Some were discarded into the environment, while fruit purchased to stabilise prices was also going unused.

Some English-language reports have described the fruit as watermelon, but the original reporting identifies Korean melon peel as the material being used.

The first experiments attempted to use the entire fruit. That failed because the high water and sugar content made it difficult to create a material with sufficient strength and durability. Researchers then separated the peel from the flesh. The peel was dried, ground into a powder and blended with a plant-based fabric. By December 2024, Chilgok County and an eco-friendly materials company had produced the first fabric. The county later partnered with fashion brand HLK to turn it into consumer products.

The amount of melon contained in the material has increased from 4% to 10%, with researchers aiming for 22%. That means this is not yet a sheet of pure melon peel. Like many plant-based leather alternatives, the final composition contains other materials needed to provide strength, flexibility and durability.

But animal skin is not pure or natural either.

Leather Is Someone’s Skin

Leather advertising encourages us to think about craftsmanship, tradition and quality. It rarely encourages us to think about the individual whose skin became the product.

Leather is animal skin that has been chemically treated to prevent decomposition, a lot is said about vegan leather not decomposing while archaeologists uncover leather thousands of years old. Without tanning, skin rots. The smooth jacket, polished shoe or luxury handbag only exists because someone was raised, controlled and killed. More than a billion animals are killed by the leather industry each year.

Cows are the most visible victims, but leather can also come from calves, goats, sheep, pigs, dogs, kangaroos, snakes, crocodiles and other animals. Labels do not always tell consumers whose skin they are buying. “Genuine leather” tells you almost nothing about the individual, how they lived or how they died.

Leather is often defended as a harmless by-product of the flesh industry. This is misleading.

Animal skin is a valuable commodity traded through a global industry worth hundreds of billions. Selling skins provides additional income to industries built on breeding and killing animals.

For dairy businesses, the skin of a newborn male calf can still be profitable even when there is little demand for his flesh. He cannot produce milk, so the industry has little reason to keep him alive. His young skin can then be sold as calf leather.

Leather does not just make use of something that would otherwise be discarded. It helps make animal exploitation more profitable.

“Sustainable Leather” Still Requires Animal Farming

The leather industry has responded to environmental criticism with labels such as “vegetable-tanned,” “chrome-free” and “responsibly sourced.”

These claims focus attention on how the skin was treated after death. They do not address the environmental destruction involved in breeding and raising the animal.

Before a skin reaches a tannery, land has already been cleared. Crops have been grown for feed. Water has been consumed. Manure has been produced. Greenhouse gases have been released. A report by luxury fashion group Kering found that more than 93% of leather’s environmental impact came from animal farming, particularly land use and greenhouse gas emissions. Changing the tanning chemical does not undo any of this. The animal still had to exist within an agricultural system designed to extract profit from their body. The land, feed and water were still required. The pollution still occurred. The animal was still killed.

Vegetable-tanned skin may use different chemicals, but it is not plant-based leather. It is still an animal’s skin.

Tanning Adds Another Layer Of Pollution

Animal skin must be preserved because skin naturally decomposes. Most leather is tanned using chromium salts. The process can create hazardous waste, contaminated water and serious health risks for workers and nearby communities.

Other chemicals used in leather production may include formaldehyde, dyes, solvents and coal-tar derivatives.

Tannery workers and residents living near poorly regulated facilities can face elevated risks of respiratory illness, skin conditions and cancer.

Wealthier countries have increasingly moved the dirtiest parts of leather production elsewhere. The products return as shoes, bags and car seats. The pollution stays with communities that often have fewer resources to challenge it.

Calling the finished product “luxury” does not change how it was made.

Melons Are Not The Only Alternative

Chilgok County’s material is part of a much wider shift. Companies are already developing leather-like fabrics from apples, pineapples, cactus, mycelium, corn, coconut waste, flowers and cork.

Danish company Beyond Leather Materials produces Leap from discarded apple material. Its newer version, Leap Flex, is designed to stretch by up to 130% and withstand 50,000 flex cycles. The company opened a full-scale production line in Germany in 2024, moving the material beyond laboratory experiments and small prototypes. Leap has been certified as 91% biobased and is being developed for fashion, furniture and interior design.

This is important because critics often dismiss plant-based materials as fragile novelties.

A wallet made from melon peel may sound unusual. So did shoes made from pineapple leaves, handbags made from apples and car interiors made from cactus.

The question is no longer whether agricultural waste can be turned into useful materials. It already is. The real questions are how quickly these materials can improve, how much plastic they contain, how long they last and whether they can be produced at scale.

Plant-Based Does Not Mean Perfect

Not every product marketed as vegan leather is automatically biodegradable, plastic-free or environmentally harmless.

Some materials contain polyurethane, polyester or other synthetic components. Others include only a small percentage of the plant named in their marketing. The Korean melon material currently contains 10% melon peel. That is progress, but it also means 90% of the composition comes from elsewhere. Companies should be transparent about this.

Replacing animal skin with a material containing plastic may still reduce animal exploitation and some environmental harms, but it does not eliminate every problem associated with production and disposal.

We do not need to pretend every new material is perfect.

Animal leather certainly is not.

The relevant comparison is not between a new material and an imaginary product with no environmental footprint. It is between different real materials, how they are produced, who is harmed and whether someone had to die.

There is also an uncomfortable detail in the Chilgok project. While the peel is used for the leather-like fabric, the melon flesh has reportedly been redirected into feed for animals imprisoned on farms. That means the project is not completely separate from animal agriculture.

The innovation still shows that agricultural waste can replace animal skin, but genuine progress requires us to move away from treating animals as food-producing machines as well.

Circularity should not mean finding more efficient ways to support the same system of exploitation.

Whose Skin Are You Wearing?

The leather industry depends on emotional distance.

Consumers see a handbag, not a cow. They see a belt, not a calf. They see a car interior, not rows of skins removed from animals whose bodies were sold in pieces. Plant-based leather disrupts that distance.

A melon-peel wallet does not require us to forget someone. An apple-waste chair does not depend on hiding a slaughterhouse. A cactus car seat does not begin with an animal being bred for profit.

These materials still need improvement. Some need to reduce their reliance on fossil-fuel-based coatings. Some need better durability. Some need to move beyond limited product launches and become affordable at scale. But they already expose the weakness of the argument for animal leather.

We are not using animals’ skin because no other materials exist.

We are using animals’ skin because industries have normalised it, designers continue specifying it and consumers have been taught to associate dead skin with quality.

South Korea is now turning discarded melon peel into wallets and bags. Apple waste is becoming furniture. Cactus is being used in car interiors. Pineapple leaves are becoming shoes. The alternatives are multiplying while the excuses are disappearing.

No fabric is worth someone’s life.

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Nueva Pescanova had planned to build the facility in Gran Canaria and produce around 3,000 tonnes of octopus flesh each year. Roughly one million octopuses would have been bred, confined and killed annually. Now the project has reportedly been scrapped.

Numerous groups campaigned against the farm. Scientists challenged the idea that highly intelligent, sentient animals could be forced into industrial confinement without severe consequences. Members of the public signed petitions, shared information and sent more than 43,000 emails to the Port Authority. The result came from sustained collective pressure.

Octopuses are curious, intelligent individuals who solve problems, use tools, remember humans and experience pain. Many are solitary animals who rely on complex environments, hiding places, exploration and control over their own space. Nueva Pescanova wanted to place them in crowded tanks and turn their bodies into another mass-produced commodity.

Reports linked to octopus farming have documented aggression, injuries, cannibalism and high mortality. The proposed killing method involved submerging octopuses in freezing water or ice slurry, risking slow and painful deaths.

Farming octopuses would also mean killing other aquatic animals to feed them. Octopuses are carnivores. This industry would not reduce pressure on marine life. It would expand the number of animals captured, confined and killed.

Stopping this farm is huge because new forms of animal exploitation become harder to challenge once they are normalised, funded and built into supply chains. Which is why we recently created a petition opposing Pembrokeshire councils decision to allow guinea pigs to be bred for meat in Wales. Normalisation starts small.

California and Washington have already banned octopus farming. Mexico and Chile have considered national restrictions, while similar action has been proposed elsewhere. More governments must act before another company tries again.

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Even after accounting for population growth, the amount supplied per person rose from 25 kilograms to 47 kilograms. This is regularly presented as changing consumer preference. It was nothing of the sort.

Chicken flesh consumption exploded because the industry transformed living birds into the cheapest, fastest-growing and most aggressively marketed source of animal flesh available.

Their bodies were redesigned. Their lives were compressed. Their suffering was hidden inside sheds holding tens of thousands of birds. Then chicken was sold to the public as the healthy and environmentally responsible choice.

Bred To Grow And Die

Chickens farmed for their flesh have been selectively bred to grow as much muscle as possible in the shortest possible time.

Commercial growth rates increased by more than 400% between 1957 and 2005. Modern fast-growing chickens can gain more than 60 grams every day and reach slaughter weight at around six weeks old.

Their skeletons and organs cannot keep pace.

Many experience joint pain, skeletal deformities, lameness, heart disease, respiratory distress and fluid around their organs. Some lose the ability to walk. Others struggle to reach food and water. Fast-growing chickens may spend up to 80% of their day sitting because moving has become painful or impossible. Foraging, perching, dust-bathing and exploring are replaced by the physical task of surviving inside a body engineered for somebody else’s profit.

Even their parents suffer.

Chickens used for breeding are deliberately denied enough food because allowing them to eat freely would cause the same rapid growth that their offspring are bred to experience. They live with chronic hunger so the industry can continue producing billions of chicks.

The system did not become cruel while trying to produce cheap chicken. Cruelty is how cheap chicken was produced.

The Healthy Chicken Myth

Chicken has been given a health halo that other forms of animal flesh have largely lost.

It is described as lean, clean and high in protein. People are encouraged to replace cows and pigs with chickens, often without being told that beans, lentils, tofu and other plant proteins are the actual alternative.

A 2026 US poll found that 36% of adults believed chicken could reduce the risk of high cholesterol. Another 18% thought the same about eggs. Chicken does not lower cholesterol. Chicken contains cholesterol.

An Italian study following 4,869 adults for nearly 20 years also found that eating more than 300 grams of poultry each week was associated with twice the risk of dying from gastrointestinal cancer and a 27% higher risk of death overall. The study was observational and cannot prove chicken caused those deaths. The researchers also acknowledged several limitations. But it adds to the evidence that chicken’s reputation as a uniquely healthy food was never as secure as the marketing suggested. The health halo did not simply mislead consumers.

It condemned more chickens.

The Small Body Problem

Environmental advice has created a similar problem.

Cows produce more greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of flesh than chickens. That has encouraged governments, campaigners and consumers to describe chicken as a lower-carbon replacement for beef.

But kilograms are not individuals.

It can take nearly 200 chickens to produce the same quantity of flesh taken from one cow. Replacing one large victim with hundreds of smaller victims may reduce emissions per kilogram while massively increasing the number of animals bred, confined and killed. This is known as the small body problem.

A 2025 meta-analysis found no overall evidence that animal-product reduction campaigns consistently cause people to replace cows and pigs with chickens and fishes. However, the studies were highly inconsistent, some interventions did increase consumption of smaller animals, and many failed to reduce animal consumption at all. The historical trend is less ambiguous.

Chicken consumption has increased sixfold. Around 70 billion chickens are now slaughtered globally every year, vastly outnumbering cows, pigs and sheep combined.

Calling chicken a climate-friendly form of animal flesh does not make those deaths disappear.

The Reform Trap

Norway has committed to phasing out fast-growing chickens by 2027. Similar corporate campaigns across Europe are pushing companies towards slower-growing breeds, reduced crowding and more opportunities for birds to move and behave naturally. These changes can reduce severe suffering. Research has found that slower-growing chickens experience less lameness, fewer cardiovascular problems, lower mortality and dramatically less extreme pain. Antibiotic use may also fall sharply. But maintaining the same demand for chicken creates another problem.

Slower-growing birds remain on farms for longer and require more feed, land, housing and energy. One European analysis found that moving to slower-growing birds increased land use by 14% and greenhouse gas emissions by up to 11% after processing. Another study estimated emissions increases of between 15% and 30%, depending on the breed.

A farm-scale model found that switching to slower-growing chickens could reduce excruciating pain by 91%. Yet meeting unchanged demand could require 48% more birds and increase the total time chickens spend on farms by 69%.

This is the trap.

Breed chickens for extreme growth and their bodies collapse.

Allow them to grow more slowly and the industry uses more land, feed and animals to produce the same quantity of flesh.

Neither option gives chickens freedom. Both begin from the assumption that their bodies belong to us.

The Pollution Leaves The Shed

The sixfold increase in consumption also required a physical transformation of the countryside.

More than 24,000 intensive pig and poultry farms now operate across Europe. The UK has 1,553 industrial poultry units holding at least 40,000 birds at a time.

In the Severn and Wye Valleys, there are reportedly 79 chickens for every human. Their waste does not disappear when supermarket packaging hides the farm. Chicken manure contains high concentrations of phosphorus, which can strip oxygen from rivers and contribute to the destruction of aquatic ecosystems. Industrial farms in England have recorded nearly 7,000 environmental breaches since 2015. Environment Agency inspectors found some form of non-compliance during three-quarters of inspections, yet recommended prosecution in fewer than 1% of cases.

Cheap chicken means crowded sheds, broken bodies, polluted rivers and regulators repeatedly asking the industry to please behave itself.

The FAO Finds Everything Except The Answer

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has now documented the rise in animal consumption, the regional inequality, the climate consequences and the likelihood that production will continue growing. Its own framework recognises that consumption is shaped by availability, price, marketing, convenience and regulation. Food choices do not emerge from nowhere. Governments and corporations construct the environment in which those choices are made.

Yet the FAO report stops short of telling wealthy countries to reduce animal consumption.

Instead, the preferred response remains innovation, efficiency and attempts to reduce the damage caused by production.

This is particularly absurd as another joint FAO report warns that extreme heat is already damaging agriculture, threatening workers and creating a feedback loop in which production losses encourage expansion, generating more emissions and even more warming. The organisation can identify every stage of the crisis.

It just cannot bring itself to challenge the industry causing it.

Replace Chicken With Plants

The UK Climate Change Committee is less evasive.

Its pathway to Net Zero assumes that, by 2040, 25% of meat and 20% of dairy will be replaced with lower-carbon foods, including legumes and plant-based alternatives. The aim is to reduce the number of animals farmed and release land for woodland and other forms of ecological restoration. That transition will not happen through vague appeals to eat “less red meat”. It requires governments, retailers, restaurants and public institutions to make plant-based food cheaper, more visible and more convenient.

Research into the small body problem found that choice architecture was the most promising approach. Making plant-based meals prominent, normal or default reduced the selection of smaller animals without encouraging substitution between species.

People do not need another supposedly responsible animal to consume. They need access to food that does not require an animal at all.

Chicken consumption has increased sixfold because chickens were engineered for rapid growth, hidden inside industrial farms and marketed as a healthy climate solution.

They are none of those things.

They are individuals whose bodies have been redesigned to serve an industry.

The answer is not a more efficient chicken, a slower-growing chicken or a chicken with a greener label. The answer is to stop eating them.

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Dogs and cats are welcomed into beds, included in family photographs and sometimes mourned like relatives. Goldfish can be placed in empty bowls. Reptiles spend their lives behind glass. Guinea pigs are bought for children who may lose interest within months. Insects and spiders are treated more like decorations than individuals.

The difference is not simply how much care each species needs. It is how much of ourselves we think we can see in them.

A recent study asked people to rate the memory, learning, intelligence, emotional attachment and capacity for suffering of familiar companion animals. The list included cats, dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, birds, reptiles, frogs, fishes, snails, stick insects and tarantulas. The results followed a predictable human hierarchy. Mammals came first. Birds followed. Then reptiles, amphibians, fishes and arthropods. The more an animal resembled us, the more intelligence, emotion and suffering people were prepared to recognise.

Intelligence Becomes Permission To Care

Participants who believed an animal was intelligent were also more likely to believe that animal could suffer and form a meaningful emotional bond with their guardian. That should concern anyone who shares their home with an animal.

Suffering does not depend on solving puzzles. Pain does not become morally important only when the individual experiencing it can learn words, recognise themselves in a mirror or perform for a researcher. Yet humans repeatedly treat intelligence as permission to care.

Dogs are praised when they learn the names of toys. One recent study found that some dogs could group unfamiliar toys according to their function. They understood that one object was for pulling and another was for fetching, even when the toys looked completely different.

This is impressive. It is also exactly the kind of intelligence humans enjoy recognising.

The dog responds to our words. The dog plays our games. The dog performs their understanding in a way we can observe and reward.

A goldfish does not fetch a ball when asked. A tortoise does not wag their tail when we arrive home. A tarantula will not look into our eyes and reassure us that our affection is returned.

So humans assume there is less happening inside them.

How convenient.

We Do Not Even Understand Dogs

Dogs sit at the top of the companion-animal hierarchy, but humans are still remarkably bad at understanding them.

In one study, people watched dogs reacting to positive and negative situations. When viewers could see the surrounding context, such as a treat, a leash, praise or a frightening object, they could usually distinguish between the situations. When the background was removed and only the dog remained, their accuracy collapsed. Worse, when researchers deliberately mismatched the dog’s behaviour with the surrounding situation, people trusted the background more than the dog.

A treat made the situation seem positive even when the dog’s behaviour suggested distress. A leash encouraged the same assumption. Participants insisted they were watching the dog, but their judgements were being shaped by the objects and humans around them.

Even experience did not necessarily help. People with more experience of dogs were less likely to identify negative emotional states. Familiarity had produced confidence, not understanding.

If humans misread dogs while believing ourselves fluent in their behaviour, what chance does a frog have?

Love Is Not Knowledge

The same problem appears in the myths people believe about dogs and cats.

Some guardians still believe dogs need to know who is in charge. Others think a wagging tail always means happiness or that dogs enjoy being hugged. Cats are described as low-maintenance. A cat who urinates outside their litter tray may be accused of spite rather than recognised as frightened, stressed, unwell or in pain. These beliefs are not harmless.

A misunderstood animal may be punished for communicating distress. A dog may be forced into physical contact because a human enjoys hugging them. A cat may go without medical care because their behaviour is treated as disrespect.

People often insist they love their companion animals. They may love them deeply. But love does not automatically produce knowledge. Attachment does not guarantee adequate care. Good intentions do not create suitable housing, companionship, veterinary treatment or enrichment.

Research involving more than 1,000 guinea pig guardians showed how specific proper care must be. Guinea pigs need other guinea pigs. They need space, hiding places, varied enrichment, constant access to hay and opportunities to express natural behaviour. They do not need to be treated like small dogs, furry toys or starter companions for children. Their needs come from being guinea pigs.

That sounds obvious. Human behaviour suggests otherwise.

Dogs As Children

Dogs increasingly occupy a childlike position in human families. Some people describe themselves as dog parents. Researchers have suggested that dogs can fulfil a desire to nurture while requiring less commitment than raising children. Dogs offer affection, dependency and a sense of purpose, but are generally easier for humans to control. This may sound like greater respect for dogs. It can easily become another form of projection.

A dog is not a practice child. They are not a substitute child. They are not a lifestyle accessory for someone who enjoys the appearance of caregiving.

They are a dog.

Treating dogs like human infants can mean ignoring what they actually need. It can produce overprotection, anxiety and behavioural problems. It can also encourage people to seek animals with exaggerated baby-like features. Humans are strongly drawn to round heads, large eyes and small noses. These features resemble human infants and trigger caregiving responses.

Breeders have turned that instinct into a market.

Dogs and cats have been selectively bred with increasingly flat faces and distorted skulls. Persian cats, pugs and other breeds now share physical features despite tens of millions of years of evolutionary separation. Humans have forced them to converge around our preferences. The price is paid through breathing difficulties, neurological conditions, eye injuries and dangerous births.

These animals receive enormous affection precisely because humans have reshaped them to look helpless. Then they spend their lives trapped inside bodies designed to satisfy us.

This is not proof that dogs and cats are valued properly. It is proof that even the animals humans value most are valued on human terms.

The Animals Behind Glass

For reptiles, amphibians, fishes and arthropods, the problem often begins before care is even considered. Their faces are less familiar. Their movements are harder for humans to interpret. Their communication may happen through posture, scent, vibration, colour, water movement or subtle behavioural changes. Humans fail to recognise the signal, then conclude that no signal exists.

An animal who does not visibly seek human affection may be assumed incapable of attachment. An animal who suffers silently may be assumed incapable of pain. An animal who remains still may be described as boring rather than frightened, cold, ill or trapped in an inadequate environment. The aquarium, tank or enclosure then becomes part of the furniture.

The animal disappears inside the display. This is the practical cost of ranking minds. Animals believed to be less intelligent may receive smaller enclosures, less stimulation, poorer healthcare and less attention. Their distress is easier to dismiss because humans have already decided that less is happening inside them.

Animals Do Not Need To Resemble Us

Public education about animal cognition can help. People should know that fishes learn, reptiles remember, frogs adapt and invertebrates solve problems.

But there is also a danger in making respect dependent on an endless courtroom trial of animal intelligence. Must every species prove themselves clever enough for humans? Must a fish pass a test before pain counts? Must a spider demonstrate memory before confinement becomes objectionable? Must a snake show affection in a recognisably mammalian way before their life matters? Scientific evidence can correct human ignorance. It should not become the price of admission to moral concern.

Animals are not failed humans.

They do not need to speak our language, copy our emotions, resemble our babies or participate in our games. They do not need to entertain us with surprising intelligence before we accept that their lives belong to them. The hierarchy exposed by this research tells us less about the animals being judged than about the humans judging them.

We recognise ourselves, call it intelligence and reward it with concern. Everyone else is left behind glass.

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A funeral. A condolence card. Time off work. A public language for loss. Then there is the grief society tries to make embarrassing. The grief of losing a companion animal and being told to “get another one.” The grief of seeing dead wild animals on roads while everyone else drives past. The grief of learning what happens to cows, pigs, chickens, fishes and sheep, then watching everyone around you keep paying for it as if nothing has changed.

Academics call part of this “animal ethical mourning”: grief that comes from moral commitment to animals. The language is academic, but the point is simple. Some people grieve animals because they recognise them as someone.

Society has a problem with that.

Not because the grief is irrational. Because it is inconvenient.

When someone grieves a dog, society may tolerate it, up to a point. It may allow a few tears, a social media post, a framed photo, a small memorial. But even this grief is often downgraded. “It was only a dog.” “You can get another one.” “At least they had a good life.” As if love is measured by species. As if a relationship becomes less real because the other individual had paws, feathers, scales or fins. And even within companion animals, the hierarchy appears. Dogs and cats are granted more sympathy. Birds, reptiles, fishes, rodents and others are more easily dismissed. The message is clear: your grief is only legitimate if society already approves of the animal you loved.

Wild animals are pushed even further away. A fox dead at the roadside. A badger killed because policy prefers scapegoats to solutions. Birds disappearing from places where they used to fill the morning. Fishes dragged from rivers and seas. Entire species pushed towards extinction while news articles discuss “loss” in the abstract.

This grief is often ambiguous. There is no single funeral. No clear ending. No moment where someone says: this is when the loss happened. It accumulates. One roadkill body. One empty nest. One disappearing population. One more reminder that human convenience keeps being treated as permission.

People are expected to absorb this quietly. Care too visibly and you are sentimental. Care too strongly and you are extreme. Care about animals used in ways society enjoys and you become the problem. That is where grief becomes contested.

Disenfranchised grief means grief that is not socially recognised. Contested grief goes further. It is not just ignored. It is argued against. This happens constantly to people who grieve animals imprisoned on farms. They are not just told their grief is excessive. They are told the animals are food. They are told exploitation is normal. They are told the deaths are necessary, natural, traditional, profitable, tasty, cultural, personal choice, none of your business. They are told to stop making people uncomfortable. But discomfort is not an argument.

The reason this grief is resisted so aggressively is because it reveals the lie at the centre of animal use: society cannot simultaneously claim animals do not matter and become angry when someone mourns them.

If they are nothing, why does grieving them provoke such hostility? Because the grief is an accusation without needing to be framed as one.

To grieve a calf taken from his mother is to recognise both of them as individuals. To grieve a pig in a gas chamber is to reject the idea that intelligence, terror and preference vanish because a supermarket wants bacon. To grieve a fish suffocating on a deck is to reject the language that turns someone into “seafood.” To grieve a hen used for eggs is to expose the body behind the product.

This is why people mock vegan grief. Not because it is absurd. Because it lands too close.

There is a useful term in this study: contrapuntal grief.

This is grief that exists beside someone else’s pleasure in the same event.

A hunter celebrates the kill while someone else grieves the animal. A person posts a photo of a burger while someone else sees the cow. A racegoer cheers while someone else sees a horse being used as a means to an end. A family laughs around a Christmas table while someone else cannot stop thinking about the turkey who did not want to die.

That is a brutal kind of grief.

It is not only that society refuses to recognise the loss. It celebrates the system that caused it.

Imagine grieving someone while everyone around you treats their body as a product, a joke, a hobby, a tradition or a treat. Then imagine being told you are the one making things awkward.

This is the position many vegans and animal rights advocates live in daily. The supermarket is a trigger. The restaurant menu is a trigger. Christmas adverts are triggers. Jokes about bacon are triggers. “But cheese tho” is not just an immature comment. It is a reminder that someone’s grief is being met with another person’s pleasure.

No wonder people burn out.

No wonder activists feel isolated. No wonder some people who care deeply about animals end up exhausted, angry, hopeless or ashamed of not being able to stop what they can see so clearly.

The grief is not the problem.

The injustice is the problem.

A society built on animal exploitation will always pathologise the people who react honestly to animal exploitation. It has to. If grief for animals is valid, then animals are grievable. If animals are grievable, they are not commodities. If they are not commodities, the whole system starts to look exactly like what it is: organised domination dressed up as normal life. That is why animal grief is political.

It challenges human supremacy at the emotional level. It refuses the training. It says: I will not only care where I am permitted to care. I will not only mourn those society has placed inside the circle. I will not pretend the victim stops being someone when humans decide to use them.

There is also guilt in this grief.

Many vegans know the feeling of looking back and realising they once funded the very things they now oppose. Many advocates know the guilt of not doing enough, not reaching enough people, not saving the individuals whose faces stay with them. People who have lost companion animals may replay every decision. People who rescue animals may carry the weight of every one they could not reach.

Guilt can destroy people when it has nowhere to go. But it can also become responsibility.

Not the fake responsibility of carrying the whole world alone. Not self-punishment. Not martyrdom. Responsibility as clarity.

You cannot undo yesterday. You can refuse to repeat it.

That is where animal ethical mourning becomes more than sadness. It becomes moral transformation. It becomes abolitionist politics. It becomes refusal. It becomes the reason someone stops participating, starts speaking, starts organising, starts building a movement that treats animals as individuals instead of resources.

Society wants animal grief to stay private, small and apologetic.

It should not.

Grief is not weakness. Mourning animals is not childish. Being unable to laugh along while others celebrate their exploitation is not a personal flaw. It is evidence that your conscience has not been successfully domesticated.

The real crisis is not that some people grieve cows, pigs, fishes, chickens, sheep, foxes, badgers, horses, dogs, cats, birds, reptiles and all the others. The crisis is that most people have been taught not to. And when a society has to mock grief to protect injustice, the problem is not the grief.

The problem is the society.

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The particles may accumulate in the liver, kidneys, lungs or spleen. They may cross protective barriers, damage organs or fail to reach their intended target. Each variation in size, coating, shape or surface charge can produce a different result. Finding the right combination has traditionally meant using more mice.

Now, a researcher in Switzerland has created a virtual mouse that can conduct many of these experiments without using another living animal.

Testing Nanomedicine Without Mice

Nanomedicine uses extremely small materials to diagnose, prevent or treat disease. Some nanoparticles are small enough to cross barriers within the body that conventional medicines struggle to penetrate. This could make them particularly useful for treating brain tumours. The blood-brain barrier protects the brain by blocking many substances, including most drugs. Carefully designed nanoparticles could cross that barrier and deliver chemotherapy directly to a tumour. But first, researchers need to understand how each nanoparticle behaves.

Jimeng Wu, a doctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, developed an artificial intelligence system that predicts how nanoparticles will move through a mouse’s body.

The system combines a virtual representation of the body with machine learning. Researchers enter measurable characteristics such as the particle’s size, coating and surface charge. The model then predicts how much of the material will reach different organs and how long it will remain there. Unlike conventional computer models, which often need to be recalibrated for each individual material, Wu’s system can adapt its calculations to different nanoparticles.

Researchers can therefore screen potential materials before manufacturing them, let alone injecting them into mice.

Built From Existing Experiments

The virtual mouse was trained using data from 18 previously published experiments on living mice. This does not erase the harm behind the original data. Those mice were still used. But the model can extract more information from experiments that have already happened instead of repeatedly reproducing them.

The researchers tested the system across five types of non-dissolvable nanoparticles. It performed particularly well when predicting broad indicators such as how much material reached different organs. Size, coating and surface charge were among the most important factors influencing the predictions.

The model is not finished.

Eighteen studies represent a small dataset. Many published papers also fail to describe the nanoparticles in enough detail to be useful. Some of the model’s predictions were considerably stronger than others, particularly when estimating how concentrations changed over time. The researchers say more data, further verification and more complex modelling will be needed. That is how science works. A new method does not need to be perfect before researchers begin developing and using it. Animal experiments certainly were never perfect.

From Virtual Mice to Virtual Humans

Wu’s longer-term goal is not simply to create a better simulation of a mouse. She plans to transfer the same principles into a virtual human model.

The current system predicts nanoparticle distribution in a mouse’s liver, kidneys, lungs and spleen. A human version could help researchers investigate how nanoparticles interact with organs including the brain.

That could make the research more directly relevant to the people medicines are intended to treat. Mice are not miniature humans. Differences between species affect metabolism, immune responses, organ function and disease progression. An experiment can produce consistent results in mice and still fail when a treatment reaches human trials.

Replacing a living mouse with a virtual mouse removes immediate animal use. Moving from mouse biology to human biology addresses the deeper scientific problem. The aim should not be to recreate animal experimentation on a computer forever. It should be to develop research designed around humans from the beginning.

AI Is Already Reducing Animal Use

Wu’s model is not an isolated experiment.

Researchers in Germany have developed another generative AI system called genESOM. It learns from small experimental datasets and creates synthetic data points that reflect the patterns found in real results. Its developers estimate that the system could reduce the number of animals used in some preclinical drug experiments by between 30 and 50%.

The UK government has also published a roadmap intended to accelerate the replacement of animal experiments. The plan supports AI analysis, organs-on-chips and 3D-bioprinted human tissues. It set targets to end certain skin and eye irritation experiments by the end of 2026, end mouse experiments used to measure Botox potency by 2027, and reduce pharmacokinetic experiments on dogs and primates by 2030.

The technology is advancing. Governments are investing. Researchers are demonstrating that alternatives can be faster, cheaper and more relevant to human health.

So why are animals still being used?

The Problem Is Scientific Culture

Animal experimentation is not sustained by scientific evidence alone. It is also sustained by habit, institutional authority and a peer-review system that continues to treat animal use as the default. A survey of 100 researchers in India found that 56% had been asked by peer reviewers to add animal experiments to research that initially contained none.

Around one in five had conducted animal experiments before being asked because they expected reviewers to demand them. Researchers who resisted faced consequences. More than half reported manuscript rejection or withdrawal, while 59% said the pressure pushed their work into lower-impact journals. Many also believed excluding animal experiments weakened their chances of receiving funding.

Animals were not always being used because an experiment required them. They were being used because researchers feared their work would not be published without them.

That is not scientific necessity. It is institutional coercion.

When Science Becomes an Excuse

Scientific authority can also make people more willing to accept harm.

In one experiment, participants were asked to administer increasingly toxic doses to what they believed was a living fish as part of Alzheimer’s research. The fish was actually a robotic model.

More than half continued until the dose supposedly had a 100% chance of killing the fish.

A second experiment found that participants encouraged to think positively about science were more likely to continue administering harmful doses despite seeing apparent signs of distress.

The researchers concluded that identification with scientific authority can make people more accepting of “instrumental harm”. Hurting someone becomes easier to justify when an institution promises that something valuable might result.

But scientific progress does not make exploitation morally neutral.

Science is a method for understanding the world. It is not permission to do whatever researchers find convenient.

The Replacement Is Already Underway

An estimated 125 million animals are used in laboratories around the world each year.

They are poisoned, infected, genetically manipulated, restrained and killed because animal experimentation has been built into research, funding and regulation over generations.

The virtual mouse shows that another system can be built.

This particular model remains limited. It needs more data. It needs independent verification. It cannot yet replace every experiment involving nanoparticles.

But it can already help researchers reject unsuitable materials before they are manufactured or administered to living mice. It can reduce duplication. It can make development faster and cheaper. Its principles may eventually support research based directly on human biology.

The obstacle is no longer a complete absence of alternatives. It is a scientific establishment that continues to demand animal experiments even when researchers offer something better.

Mice are not laboratory equipment. They should never have been treated as disposable containers for human data.

A virtual mouse cannot suffer.

That alone makes the choice obvious.

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Between 1998 and 2024, salmon farms deployed 510,833,000 lumpfishes, ballan wrasses and wild-caught wrasses inside sea cages. Their purpose was to eat parasitic lice from the bodies of farmed salmon. They were used as living pest-control devices.

The experiment failed.

Cleaner Fish Became Disposable Equipment

Salmon lice are a predictable consequence of imprisoning huge numbers of salmon together in open-net cages. The parasites attach themselves to the fish, damaging their skin and causing open wounds, infections and death. Rather than question the farming system responsible, the industry searched for another animal to control the problem.

Cleaner fishes appeared to provide a convenient biological solution. Instead of relying entirely on chemicals, farmers could place wrasses and lumpfishes inside cages and allow them to remove lice from the salmon. The idea was promoted as effective and environmentally responsible. It was rapidly expanded despite limited evidence from commercial farms.

Cleaner fish use in Norway peaked in 2019, when more than 61 million individuals were stocked in a single year. By 2024, the figure had fallen to 22.5 million.

Researchers have now identified four main reasons for the decline: uncertain effectiveness, horrific mortality, newer lice-control technologies and stricter regulation.

Most Cleaner Fishes Were Not Cleaning

Early trials suggested that cleaner fishes could reduce lice numbers. However, these experiments used smaller cages, fewer salmon and much shorter study periods than commercial farms. The results did not translate well to industrial conditions. An analysis of 488 Norwegian farms found that cleaner fishes only slightly delayed the need for the first lice treatment. Results varied considerably between farms.

The largest study of lumpfishes examined nearly 25,000 individuals across 80 farms. Only around 3% had lice in their stomachs. Most cleaner fishes were not eating lice most of the time. The industry had scaled up the use of millions of animals based on evidence that did not reflect the conditions in which they would actually be confined.

Some Farms Lost Every Cleaner Fish

Cleaner fishes were placed in an environment designed around salmon production, not around their own needs. They were transported into cages with conditions fundamentally different from their natural habitats. They faced bacterial, parasitic, fungal and viral diseases. Many became emaciated. Others were injured during mechanical lice treatments intended to protect the salmon.

Artificial shelters, additional food and health inspections were introduced in attempts to keep more of them alive. These measures required labour and money, while failing to demonstrate that mortality had been brought under control.

A national survey by the Norwegian Food Safety Authority found that half of farmers reported no cleaner fishes remaining when the salmon were sent to slaughter. That suggests mortality of 100% in those cages.

The cleaner fishes had simply disappeared from the production system through death.

The industry describes them as “cleaner fish” because their value is defined by the service humans expect them to perform. Once they fail to remove enough lice, become ill or die, they become another production loss.

Salmon Farming Multiplies The Number Of Fishes Killed

Cleaner fishes are only one group sacrificed to produce farmed salmon. Salmon are carnivorous. Farming them requires fishmeal and fish oil produced from wild-caught fishes such as anchovies, sardines and mackerels.

Research suggests the number of wild fishes used in aquaculture feed has been substantially underestimated. Traditional calculations often exclude capture deaths, unwanted fishes caught alongside target species and wild fishes hidden within ingredients classified as “trimmings”. Updated estimates found that aquaculture’s wild-fish inputs may be up to 307% higher than previously reported.

Salmon farming alone can require between 1.86 and 6.24 pounds of wild fishes for every pound of salmon produced.

The system does not save wild fishes. It catches them in vast numbers, reduces them to feed and uses them to fatten other fishes for wealthier markets.

European demand for wild fishes used in aquaculture feed is projected to increase by 70% by 2040. This could mean between 83 billion and 192 billion individual fishes being caught for feed every year. Wild fishes are killed to feed farmed salmon. Cleaner fishes are confined and killed to protect those salmon from parasites. The salmon themselves are eventually killed for human consumption. This is not efficient food production. It is a hierarchy of exploitation.

Mass Death Is Built Into Salmon Farming

The cleaner fish disaster cannot be separated from the wider salmon farming industry.

Inspection reports released in Britain revealed repeated incidents in which enormous numbers of farmed fishes died through poisoning, oxygen loss and negligence. More than 100,000 salmon suffocated at one facility after a worker left them unattended and their oxygen supply stopped.

At the same site, hydrogen sulphide killed more than one million fishes in ten hours.

At another farm, 600,000 fishes died following hydrogen sulphide exposure. When the problem happened again, more than 1.5 million died.

Authorities reportedly took no enforcement action over several of these incidents.

The industry continues to promote strict standards, advanced technology and responsible production. Yet mass death is not an unusual interruption to the system. It is repeatedly recorded across farms built around crowding, disease and mechanical control.

When activists filmed salmons with severe lice infestations, damaged bodies and twisted spines, the response went beyond public relations.

A salmon farming company commissioned an intelligence report containing information about campaigners’ addresses, phone numbers, businesses and social media activity. The report proposed covert surveillance and the use of a false identity to search for financial difficulties.

Private operatives later followed and photographed two campaigners. It is difficult to reconcile claims of transparency with an industry monitoring the people documenting what happens inside its cages.

New Technology Does Not Make Salmon Farming Ethical

Cleaner fish use has partly declined because farmers now have other ways to control lice.

These include physical barriers, systems that manipulate swimming depth, specialised feeds and lasers designed to target parasites.

These methods may reduce the number of cleaner fishes used. They do not address the captivity and slaughter of salmon or the wild fishes caught to feed them.

The researchers recommend phasing out lumpfishes and wild-caught wrasses by 2029. Farmed ballan wrasses should also stop being used unless the industry can prove commercial effectiveness and reduce mortality to 5%.

Ending the use of cleaner fishes would prevent millions of animals from being treated as disposable equipment. But replacing one lice-control method with another does not transform salmon farming into an ethical industry.

The cages remain. The parasites remain. The feed fisheries remain. The slaughter remains.

Salmon Is Not Necessary

Nobody needs to eat salmon. Plant-based alternatives are already available in major British supermarkets. Vivera produces salmon-style fillets, while Squeaky Bean sells smoked salmon-style slices and ready-to-eat salmon-style flakes. Biff’s also offers smoked salmon-style slices made from rice, konjac and beetroot. These products provide familiar flavours and textures without imprisoning salmon, sacrificing cleaner fishes or catching wild fishes to produce feed. More than half a billion cleaner fishes were used because the salmon industry created a parasite problem and wanted another animal to solve it.

They were not failed technology.

They were individuals who were treated as technology.

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In Switzerland, approximately 1.2 million animals are bred or used for scientific purposes each year. Around 600,000 take part directly in experiments.

What happens to the other half?

They are bred for laboratories and killed because researchers decide they are the wrong sex, age or genetic type. Others are simply excess to requirements.

They never participate in an experiment. Their lives are still destroyed by the animal research industry. These animals are described as “surplus”. A cold word for a living individual who was deliberately brought into existence and then discarded.

Harm That Official Figures Ignore

Animal experimentation debates usually focus on what happens during the experiment itself.

How painful was the injection? How invasive was the surgery? How severe was the disease deliberately inflicted on the animal? Those questions are important, but they leave thousands of cages outside the discussion.

Researchers Matthias Eggel, Samuel Camenzind and Paulin Jirkof argue that Swiss law systematically underestimates the harm caused by animal research because it does not properly recognise three things: laboratory confinement, killing and death.

Mice and rats spend their lives in small, barren enclosures that prevent them from burrowing, foraging, exploring and forming normal social relationships. These are not optional luxuries. They are fundamental parts of how these animals live.

Restrictions can cause boredom, frustration, anxiety and chronic stress. Research cited by the authors also links standard laboratory housing with increased rates of anxiety-related conditions, cardiovascular disease, cancer, stroke and premature death when compared with enriched environments.

Yet ordinary laboratory confinement is treated as the neutral background against which the “real” experiment takes place.

There is nothing neutral about a life in a cage.

Death Is Not Nothing

Swiss law also fails to treat death itself as a harm when animals are killed using an approved method.

This depends on an extraordinary piece of moral gymnastics.

The animal loses every future experience they could have had. Their interests are permanently ended. Their only opportunity to live is taken from them.

But because the killing method has been legally accepted, the death can disappear from the ethical calculation.

The authors reject this. They argue that death matters because it deprives an animal of future experiences and prevents any possibility of flourishing.

This applies whether an animal was used in ten experiments, one experiment or none.

Researchers may consider a surplus mouse scientifically worthless. That does not make her life worthless.

Approved Does Not Mean Painless

The process of killing is also treated too casually. Carbon dioxide is widely used to kill rodents, despite evidence that it can cause severe breathlessness, fear and potentially pain before unconsciousness. Cervical dislocation can go wrong, leaving animals seriously injured and still conscious. Barbiturate overdoses may take longer than expected to cause death.

There is no universally accepted killing method that reliably eliminates pain and distress.

Even Switzerland’s veterinary authority has acknowledged doubts about carbon dioxide and funded research into alternatives.

So the system does not merely ignore death. It may also ignore the terror and suffering that precede it.

The Experiments Nobody Needed

The surplus problem exposes something larger.

Animal experimentation is frequently presented as a tightly controlled system in which every animal is used only when absolutely necessary. The existence of hundreds of thousands of surplus animals makes a mockery of that image.

Laboratories breed on a large scale because researchers need animals with particular characteristics. Breeding produces animals who do not match those requirements. They are discarded as a predictable cost of doing business.

Then there are experiments created by the scientific publishing system itself.

A survey of India-based researchers found that 56% had been asked by reviewers to add animal experiments to studies that originally contained none. Researchers reported complying with around one in four of these requests. Another 22% said they had used animal methods solely because they expected editors or reviewers to demand them.

These were not always experiments researchers believed were necessary. Some were conducted to satisfy publishing conventions.

Animal experimentation does not simply produce surplus animals. It produces surplus experiments.

Researchers also reported that non-animal studies were pushed towards lower-impact journals, rejected or placed at a disadvantage when competing for funding.

Governments can announce new technologies and phase-out plans, but progress will remain slow while scientific gatekeepers continue treating animal data as a ritual of legitimacy.

Better Science Already Exists

The alternatives are not theoretical.

Researchers are developing organs-on-chips, human organoids, 3D-bioprinted tissues and AI systems designed around human biology.

One generative AI system, genESOM, was tested using data from a preclinical multiple sclerosis study involving female mice. Researchers deliberately reduced the dataset from 26 mice to 18, causing previously detectable findings to disappear. They then generated synthetic cases that restored key results without producing the same false positives seen with some competing methods.

The researchers were clear that synthetic data cannot replace biological replication in every situation. However, it could reduce the number of animals used in some preclinical studies and prevent demands for additional experiments.

The UK government has also published a roadmap promising greater use of AI, human-cell technologies and bioprinted tissues. Plans include ending some skin and eye irritation tests by the end of 2026 and ending mouse tests used to measure Botox strength by 2027.

The Missing Millions

Even the figure of 1.2 million animals in Switzerland does not capture everyone affected.

Most research regulation remains centred on vertebrates. Countless invertebrates receive little or no meaningful oversight.

A Canadian study involving 959 people found that the absence of oversight for experiments on invertebrates reduced public confidence and trust. Participants still expected animals such as sea stars and grasshoppers to receive substantial protection, even if they generally expected less than for mice and fishes.

That means the statistical blind spot may extend far beyond surplus mice and rats.

Animals excluded from experiments are hidden. Animals excluded from regulation are hidden. Animals killed before data collection are hidden. Animals used in unpublished or failed research are hidden.

Then the industry presents the remaining number as the scale of animal experimentation.

It is not.

It is simply the number the system has chosen to count.

Their Lives Were Never Surplus

The study’s immediate proposal is modest. Housing, killing and death should be recognised as harms when Swiss authorities decide whether animal research can proceed. They should.

But the argument leads somewhere more fundamental.

Once death is recognised as a genuine harm, it becomes harder to pretend that animal experimentation is merely a technical balance between scientific benefit and temporary discomfort. These animals lose everything. Their fear matters. Their frustration matters. Their deaths matter. The future taken from them matters.

An animal does not become ethically significant because a researcher successfully extracts data from their body.

The hundreds of thousands killed without ever reaching an experiment were not surplus.

The breeding was excessive. The system is wasteful. The science is trapped in outdated habits.

Their lives were the only thing that was never surplus.

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For most of the history of animal cognition research, scientists treated the idea that another species could use personal names as virtually unthinkable. Names were supposed to require a collection of abilities reserved for humans: vocal learning, symbolic thought, long-term memory and an understanding that a sound can represent a particular individual. Bottlenose dolphins possess all of them. They do not merely recognise each other. They refer to each other.

A Name for Life

Scientists Melba and David Caldwell first documented dolphin “signature whistles” in 1965. They found that each dolphin produced a distinctive whistle pattern unlike those made by anyone else around them. The same dolphin would repeat their whistle consistently, and the pattern remained recognisable across different recordings.

Later research found that dolphins usually develop these whistles during their first year of life. The whistle then remains remarkably stable, sometimes for decades. It functions partly as an introduction. Dolphins use their own signature whistles to announce who they are and where they are, particularly when separated from companions or joining a group. But the whistles are not limited to self-identification. Dolphins also copy the signature whistles of others.

When a dolphin produces another individual’s whistle, they are often trying to attract that specific dolphin’s attention. The equivalent in human conversation would be calling somebody by name. Other dolphins hearing the exchange can also recognise who is being addressed. This is not simply one dolphin imitating another. The sound continues to refer to the same individual regardless of who produces it.

That is what makes it a name.

More Than Voice Recognition

Scientists once argued that dolphins might only recognise the acoustic characteristics of familiar voices, much as humans can recognise someone speaking on the telephone. Researchers tested this by creating synthetic versions of signature whistles.

These artificial whistles preserved the pattern of the name while removing the vocal features associated with the dolphin who originally produced it. The dolphins still recognised who the whistle referred to. They turned towards the sound, approached the speaker, vocalised and responded as though a familiar individual had been named. The identity was carried by the whistle pattern itself, not by the voice producing it. Dolphins therefore understand that a particular learned sound represents a particular individual. That sound keeps its meaning when repeated by somebody else.

Humans spent centuries declaring language, names and symbolic communication uniquely ours. Dolphins were using them beneath the surface the entire time.

They Remember Who They Knew

Dolphin names are also supported by extraordinary social memory. Research has found that bottlenose dolphins can recognise the signature whistles of former companions they have not encountered for more than 20 years. More than two decades apart, and they still remember who someone is when they hear their name. That should not be surprising. Dolphins form long-term relationships, alliances and social groups. They cooperate, argue, reunite, separate and maintain complicated connections throughout their lives. Their names exist because their relationships require them.

Decades of research near Sarasota, Florida, have allowed scientists to follow individual wild dolphins across much of their lives. Some have been recorded using essentially the same signature whistle from youth into old age. A dolphin’s name is not a laboratory trick or a temporary sound attached to food rewards. It is part of who they are within their community.

We Have Barely Begun Listening

Signature whistles are only one part of dolphin communication.

Researchers studying the Sarasota population have identified at least 20 shared types of non-signature whistle. One appeared to warn dolphins away from something. Another seemed connected to encountering something unexpected. Around half of their calls remain poorly understood.

Researchers are now using hydrophones, suction-cup recording devices, drones, playback experiments and machine learning to begin decoding them. Humans may eventually understand far more of what dolphins say to one another. But we should not pretend dolphins suddenly became intelligent because we developed better microphones.

They were always communicating.

Our inability to understand someone does not prove they have nothing to say.

Nor should the value of dolphin communication depend on whether it resembles human speech closely enough to impress us. Their communication evolved for dolphin lives, dolphin relationships and dolphin environments. It does not need to imitate ours to be complex or meaningful. The more we learn, the more embarrassing human arrogance becomes.

Names Behind Glass

There is something particularly grotesque about learning that dolphins call one another by name while humans continue imprisoning them in entertainment facilities.

Spain has more dolphinariums than any other country in Europe.

Inside them, dolphins and other whales are confined in shallow tanks, separated from lifelong companions and forced to perform routines for paying crowds. Individuals who evolved to travel through vast, changing marine environments are reduced to circling concrete pools. They have names, yet facilities advertise them as attractions. They have relationships, yet humans decide who they live with and when they are separated. They remember companions for decades, yet families can be broken apart through breeding programmes, transfers and trade. They communicate across the water, yet their days are controlled by whistles from trainers demanding tricks. Captivity does not become acceptable because humans teach a dolphin to jump through a hoop. It becomes more obscene when we understand who has been imprisoned.

Spain Must End Dolphin and Whale Captivity

Dolphins are not exhibits. They are not entertainers. They are not breeding stock for marine parks.

They are individuals with names, memories, relationships and lives that belong to them.

Spain should ban the captivity of dolphins and other whales, prohibit breeding and trade, end dolphin swim programmes and stop their import and export. Those already imprisoned should be transferred to seaside sanctuaries wherever possible, where they can live in environments far closer to the sea they were denied.

The evidence is already overwhelming. The only thing missing is the political will to act on it.

Sign the petition calling on Spain to ban dolphin and whale captivity.

They know each other’s names.

It is time we stopped treating them as things.

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A poll conducted by Viva! of 2,000 people found that 74% did not know so-called enriched colony cages are still widely used across the UK. More than seven million hens remain imprisoned in these systems, producing around one in every five British eggs.

Each hen can be given less usable space than a sheet of A4 paper. Up to 80 birds can be confined inside a single cage.

They cannot properly stretch their wings, escape one another or experience sunlight. They spend their lives standing on wire before their exhausted bodies are sent to slaughter. Yet millions of shoppers believe cages disappeared more than a decade ago.

The Ban That Did Not Ban Cages

Traditional battery cages were banned across the European Union in 2012. That sounds straightforward. It was not.

The egg industry replaced them with what regulators called “enriched” cages. The word suggests improvement, comfort and stimulation. In reality, hens remained imprisoned behind wire. A perch, nesting area and small amount of additional space did not make the cage disappear. It made the cage easier to market. This is how animal exploitation survives public opposition. The most visibly indefensible system is restricted, given a new name and presented as progress. The public hears that battery cages have been banned. The industry quietly continues caging hens under a different technical classification.

When people were told that enriched cages were still being used, 94% said the practice was unacceptable. The problem is not that British shoppers overwhelmingly support cages. The problem is that most do not know they are still buying eggs produced inside them.

Selling An Imaginary Farm

Britain consumes around 14.5 billion eggs every year, but the packaging rarely shows where those eggs actually come from.

Instead, shoppers see green fields, wooden fences, sunshine and hens wandering through grass. Caged hens disappear entirely from the story.

Even eggs sold as “free-range” are promoted through carefully selected images that may bear little resemblance to the lives of the hens who produced them.

The Happy Egg Co, one of Britain’s largest free-range egg brands, was reported to the Competition and Markets Authority in 2025 over allegations that its advertising misled shoppers. Its packaging and promotional materials have featured healthy, fully feathered hens in green spaces alongside phrases such as “Happiness First”. Investigations of farms supplying the company have previously documented overcrowded barns, feather loss, injuries, beak trimming and outdoor areas described as bare and muddy. Noble Foods, which owns The Happy Egg Co, rejected the allegations and said its farms met or exceeded industry standards. But this response exposes the wider problem.

Industry standards do not turn exploitation into happiness.

A hen can meet every legal definition of “free-range” while spending most of her life inside a crowded shed. A hatch may technically provide outdoor access, but that does not mean every bird can reach or use it.

The label describes a production system. It does not describe an individual hen’s life.

The Government Is Still Consulting

The government launched a consultation in January 2026 on phasing out colony cages by 2032. That means hens could remain imprisoned in them for another six years (around 4 generations to them). Even then, a phase-out is not guaranteed until regulations are finalised and enforced. The proposal is better than allowing cages indefinitely, but it also confirms something millions of shoppers still do not realise: cages remain legal, common and commercially important. The egg industry has had decades to move away from them. Instead, it has lobbied, delayed and relied on the public misunderstanding what earlier restrictions achieved.

Hens alive today cannot wait until 2032. Hens born today won’t see two years. Millions will be confined, exploited and killed before the proposed deadline arrives.

Free-Range Is Not Freedom

Banning cages would remove one especially restrictive form of imprisonment. It would not make egg production ethical.

Hens used for eggs have been selectively bred to lay far more eggs than their bodies would naturally produce. This places immense strain on their reproductive systems and contributes to fractures, osteoporosis and disease.

Male chicks cannot lay eggs and are considered commercially useless. They are killed shortly after hatching or prevented from being born through developing technologies.

Birds who survive the laying system are slaughtered when their productivity declines.

Caged, barn or free-range, the commercial relationship remains the same. Their bodies belong to the producer. Their eggs belong to the producer. Their lives continue only while they remain profitable. The argument over cages matters because no animal should be imprisoned inside one. But replacing cages with crowded sheds does not give hens freedom. It changes the architecture of their exploitation.

Transparency Will Never Be Enough

The egg industry should not be allowed to hide cages behind phrases such as “enriched colony systems”. Brands should not be allowed to sell overcrowded sheds through cartoons of smiling hens and fields most birds may never use. Shoppers deserve accurate information.

But clearer labels alone cannot resolve the moral problem.

The truth is already simple. Eggs come from the reproductive systems of hens whose bodies have been bred, controlled and exploited for profit.

Nearly three-quarters of British shoppers may wrongly believe cages have disappeared.

The more uncomfortable fact is that the industry has spent years teaching them not to look too closely at what replaced them.

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Strip away the inflated price tag, and the reality is far less glamorous. Foie gras is the deliberately diseased liver of a duck or goose. Workers force a tube down a bird’s throat several times a day and pump food directly into their stomach. The purpose is not nourishment. The purpose is to make their liver swell to many times the normal size until they develop severe fatty liver disease. Then they are killed, and their diseased organ is served as a delicacy.

Disease by Design

The force-feeding process is known as gavage.

Ducks and geese can be made to consume several times more food than they would choose to eat. Their livers may grow to around ten times the normal size.

As their bodies struggle under the weight of the swollen organ, birds can experience difficulty breathing and moving. Tubes forced down their throats can cause injuries to the mouth and oesophagus. Infections, stress and other complications are not unfortunate accidents. They are predictable consequences of the production process. Foie gras cannot exist without deliberately making an animal ill.

Defenders often point out that wild ducks and geese naturally store fat before migration. But migration does not involve workers restraining birds and forcing pipes down their throats. Natural fat storage is not the same as industrially inducing liver disease for restaurant customers.

The comparison is absurd.

Cruelty Served as Culture

Foie gras survives partly because exploitation becomes easier to defend when dressed up as tradition. Call something heritage, cuisine or culture and suddenly people are expected to stop asking what happens to the animals involved. But a practice does not become acceptable because people have done it for a long time. A high price does not make violence sophisticated. A French name does not make a diseased organ luxurious.

No meal requires this.

No diner needs it.

No tradition gives humans the right to force an animal into pain, disease and death. Foie gras production has already been prohibited in countries including the UK, Germany, Italy, Norway and Poland. Other governments and cities have restricted or attempted to restrict sales.

These bans recognise what the industry cannot honestly deny. Foie gras is produced through intentional suffering. But foie gras is only a small part of what humans do to ducks.

Billions of Ducks Remain Invisible

Ducks are the second most slaughtered land animal on Earth.

In 2023, nearly 4.2 billion ducks were killed for food. That was more than ten times the number of cows, more than five times the number of sheep and more than twice the number of pigs slaughtered during the same year. Yet ducks are rarely central to animal rights campaigns.

Most people would probably guess that pigs or cows are the second most slaughtered land animal. Ducks barely enter the conversation at all.

Part of the reason is that duck farming is heavily concentrated in China and other parts of Asia, while much of the funding and messaging within international animal advocacy still comes from Western organisations. Animals who are less commonly eaten in Europe and North America are too easily ignored, regardless of how many billions are being killed elsewhere. In Britain, ducks are more commonly associated with ponds, parks and canals than farms and slaughterhouses. People take children to feed them. They watch ducklings follow their mothers across the water. They treat them as part of the landscape. Then duck appears on a restaurant menu and the connection disappears.

Foie Gras Is Around 1%

Foie gras deserves opposition. Force-feeding is violent, invasive and indefensible. But foie gras production is estimated to involve only around 1% of the ducks killed each year. That means a campaign focused entirely on foie gras risks leaving the other 99% out of sight.

Those ducks may not have tubes pushed down their throats, but they are still bred, confined, transported and killed because humans enjoy the taste of their bodies. On intensive farms, ducks may be crowded into indoor sheds without water deep enough to swim in. Water is not a luxury for water birds. Swimming, bathing and cleaning their feathers are basic parts of duck behaviour. Instead, many spend their lives in dry, dusty buildings.

Some have parts of their sensitive bills removed. Others suffer foot injuries, respiratory problems and disease linked to dirty conditions, overcrowding and poor ventilation. Their natural resilience does not protect them from suffering. It merely allows the industry to keep them alive in conditions that would kill more fragile birds sooner. Then, once they have reached a profitable size, they are slaughtered.

Ducks Are Not Ingredients

Foie gras exposes the arrogance at the heart of animal farming particularly clearly. A healthy bird is deliberately made ill because someone wants a richer flavour.

But ordinary duck farming is built on the same belief. Humans decide that another animal’s body belongs to us, that their freedom can be taken, and that their life can be ended for a meal.

The method changes. The underlying injustice does not.

Ducks do not need more humane exploitation. They do not need cleaner sheds, shorter journeys or gentler slaughter. They need to stop being treated as food.

Foie gras is not the only problem.

It is simply one of the hardest parts to hide.

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Allergies are not rare. Estimates suggest up to 40% of dogs may experience one during their lifetime. Environmental allergies are more common than food allergies, but diet remains one of the simplest things to investigate.

And plant-based food could make that investigation much easier.

Animal Proteins Can Be Allergens

Food allergies in dogs are often reactions to proteins. Chicken flesh is one recognised trigger, alongside other animal-derived ingredients commonly used in commercial dog food.

This creates an obvious problem. Many dog foods contain several animal proteins at once. Chicken, fish, egg, “beef” and vague “animal derivatives” can all appear in the same product. Even foods marketed around one main ingredient may contain others further down the label.

Switching to a nutritionally complete plant-based food removes several common animal proteins in one step.

That does not prove every itchy dog needs plant-based food. Most allergies are environmental, and plant ingredients can also trigger reactions. But when food is suspected, simplifying the diet and removing likely allergens is hardly a radical idea. It is the basic logic behind an elimination diet.

What Does the Research Show?

Research supports diet as part of managing allergic skin disease in dogs, although the evidence specifically testing plant-based diets remains limited.

A UK randomised trial involving dogs with diagnosed adverse food reactions compared two specialist foods. One used hydrolysed protein. The other used egg and rice with added plant compounds. Both maintained similar control of scratching, skin lesions, sleep and other clinical signs.

Another controlled study found that a food enriched with omega-3 fatty acids, antioxidants and plant polyphenols produced greater improvements in skin-lesion scores than a control food after 60 days. Guardians also reported a larger reduction in itching, although the difference between the groups was not statistically significant.

These studies do not demonstrate that plant-based food cures allergies. Neither test food was fully plant-based. Both also came with serious caveats, including industry funding, small sample sizes and, in one study, every dog receiving allergy medication.

What they do show is that nutrition can affect itching, inflammation and skin health. They also support the use of ingredients including antioxidants, fatty acids and plant polyphenols as part of a wider treatment plan.

Complete Nutrition Matters

Dogs need nutrients, not slaughterhouse leftovers.

A plant-based food must be nutritionally complete and appropriate for the individual dog. Simply removing animal ingredients from a homemade diet without understanding canine nutrition is not enough.

The British Veterinary Association ended its blanket opposition to meat-free diets for dogs in 2024, recognising that nutritionally sound options can be safe.

Persistent scratching should never be dismissed. Skin infections, fleas, mites and other conditions need to be ruled out. A vet may recommend an elimination trial lasting several weeks, during which treats and other foods must also be controlled.

A Straightforward Option

A plant-based diet will not solve every allergy. No honest person should claim otherwise.

But for dogs reacting to animal proteins, it offers something unusually straightforward: a complete food that removes several common suspects without replacing one slaughtered animal with another.

The dog gets a carefully controlled diet. The guardian gets a clearer picture of what may be causing the reaction. Other animals are not killed to fill the bowl. For some dogs, that change could mean less itching, healthier skin and finally being able to sleep without waking to scratch.

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A Russian neurotechnology company called Neiry claims to have implanted brain chips into cows on dairy farms to influence appetite, reproduction, and milk production. The company says electrodes were surgically placed into the brains of five cows, reaching areas involved in reproductive functions. It also claims the system can adjust neuromodulation when a cow’s appetite drops. In plain English, the aim is to interfere with a cow’s brain so she can be made more profitable.

Not healthier.

Not freer.

Not safer.

More productive.

The effects have not been independently verified. The details of the surgery, the research behind it, and the precautions taken for the cows have not been made clear. But even the claim itself should stop us cold. Because this is not just another dairy technology.

This is not a new milking machine.

This is not a feed additive.

This is a company claiming to place electrodes into the brains of cows so their bodies can be pushed harder for human use.

The dairy industry has always treated cows as production units. Their reproductive systems are managed. Their babies are taken. Their milk is sold. Their bodies are measured in yield, fertility, feed efficiency, and slaughter value.

Brain implants are not a break from that logic. They are the next step in it.

Once someone accepts that a cow exists to produce milk for humans, almost anything can be dressed up as innovation. Artificial insemination becomes efficiency. Separation from her calf becomes management. Robotic milking becomes progress. Genetic selection becomes improvement.

And now brain interference becomes technology.

There is a reason this sounds dystopian. It is.

Cows are not milk machines with nervous systems attached. They are emotional, social animals who form bonds, experience fear, seek comfort, remember, learn, and respond to the world around them. Lactation is not just a tap being turned on inside a body. It is part of a reproductive and emotional process shaped around pregnancy, birth, and a calf. To manipulate that through the brain for the sake of milk production is grotesque.

The issue is not whether the chip “works.” The issue is what kind of culture looks at an already exploited animal and asks whether her brain can be hacked for more output.

Supporters of this kind of technology will do what they always do. They will talk about efficiency. They will talk about future food systems. They will talk about monitoring, optimisation, innovation, and sustainability. They may even claim it could reduce suffering by making farms more precise.

But precision is not liberation.

A more technically advanced cage is still a cage.

A more efficient system of exploitation is still exploitation.

Animal neurotech raises questions that the dairy industry has no moral language to answer. What does it mean to control the mind of someone who cannot consent? What does it feel like to have a signal pushed through your brain to alter your behaviour? What happens when profit decides what counts as an acceptable level of distress, injury, or death? We already know where this logic leads.

Animal experimentation has long been used to develop brain technologies. Monkeys, rats, pigeons, cockroaches, and others have been turned into tools for human ambition. Some projects have tried to direct movement. Some have tried to stimulate reward systems. Some have tried to make animals into living surveillance devices or weapons.

Neiry has also claimed to be developing pigeon “biodrones,” using neurochips to control birds’ behaviour. That sentence should not exist. But it does, because humans keep confusing domination with intelligence.

The comparison with human brain implants makes the cow experiments even more disturbing. In people, deep brain stimulation is used in limited medical contexts, often for serious neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease. Even then, researchers take questions of identity, control, mood, and consent seriously. Patients can describe what they feel.

They can report distress.

They can refuse.

They can consent.

Cows cannot sign a form. They cannot explain whether they feel controlled by an external force. They cannot tell researchers whether their sense of their own body has changed. They cannot say whether a signal in their brain feels frightening, confusing, painful, or invasive. And they certainly cannot agree to brain surgery so humans can take more milk from them.

That is the moral difference the industry wants to skip over.

In human medicine, the stated aim is to restore function for the benefit of the patient. In dairy neurotech, the aim is to enhance output for the benefit of humans. Those are not the same thing.

A cow with a brain implant is not a patient receiving care. She is an exploited animal being modified for profit. There will always be people who call this the future. There were people who called battery cages efficient. There were people who called intensive confinement modern. There were people who called taking calves from their mothers standard practice, as if standard practice means anything morally useful.

But the question is not whether something is new. The question is whether it is right. And there is nothing right about cutting into a cow’s brain so her body can be pushed deeper into service.

The dairy industry already takes her milk. It already takes her baby. It already takes her life.

Now it wants access to her mind.

That is not progress.

That is the logical endpoint of seeing someone as a resource.

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Defra’s Farming Roadmap 2050 proposes helping farmers diversify into lower-emission farming systems, including growing lentils, pulses and oilseeds. That is not radical. It is basic common sense.

Instead of growing crops to feed animals, imprisoning those animals and then killing them, we could grow food for people directly.

The roadmap also accepts that agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution and biodiversity loss. It recognises that farming must become lower-input, more resilient and less destructive. It even acknowledges growing demand for plant-based foods.

Then the courage disappears.

There is no clear delivery plan for moving farmers away from animal agriculture. There is no serious commitment to reducing the number of animals bred and killed. There is no funding package capable of supporting farmers through a genuine transition.

Instead, the government also wants to spend money preserving animal farming through methane-suppressing feed, selective breeding and other technologies designed to make exploitation appear more sustainable.

A cow producing slightly less methane is still a cow being used for her body. A chicken imprisoned in a newer shed is still imprisoned. Making an inherently wasteful system marginally less wasteful does not turn it into a sensible way to feed the country.

The roadmap is even more contradictory on poultry farming. Alongside promises to restore nature and reduce pollution, the government is considering planning changes that could make intensive poultry farms easier to expand. More sheds. More pollution. More animals packed into systems built around speed, volume and profit.

The National Farmers’ Union has complained that the roadmap lacks funding and places too much risk on farmers. On that narrow point, they are right. Farmers cannot be expected to transform food production without proper financial support.

But the NFU’s answer is invariably more protection for animal agriculture, more production and fewer restrictions. They defend the system that created the problem, then demand public money to keep it alive.

Farmers deserve secure incomes and long-term support. That does not mean every existing form of farming must be preserved forever.

A serious farming strategy would help farmers move from breeding animals to growing beans, lentils, vegetables, fruit and grains for people. It would create reliable markets, fund new equipment and training, and stop approving more intensive animal farms.

The roadmap has opened the door to that future. Now the government must decide whether to walk through it or spend another 25 years trying to make animal exploitation look green.

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That is the moral arrangement at the heart of animal agriculture. The violence is hidden, the body parts are packaged, and the emotional cost is outsourced to workers expected to stand in the blood and keep moving.

A new study of German slaughterhouse workers helps explain how that becomes possible. Not because the workers are born without compassion. Not because killing animals is emotionally neutral. But because emotional neutrality is learned.

It is trained.

It is repeated.

It becomes part of the job.

The researcher interviewed 13 men working in German slaughterhouses, all directly involved in handling living animals, stunning them, and killing cows and pigs. Nearly all described themselves as emotionally unaffected by killing. Some framed this as having “it,” as if the ability to slaughter without emotional disruption was simply part of who they were.

But the study shows something more disturbing. The numbness is not natural. It is work.

Slaughterhouse workers have to manage emotions that would interfere with killing. Pity. Guilt. Regret. Grief. Compassion. The feelings most people would expect to surface when a living being is killed are treated as professional problems to be suppressed. This is what the study calls “professional emotional neutrality.”

In plain English: the job requires people to stop feeling what the animal in front of them would otherwise make them feel.

One of the main ways workers do this is by avoiding relationships with the animals. They do not know them. They do not name them. They do not spend time with them. They keep the contact brief, functional, anonymous.

Because relationship is dangerous. Relationship makes the animal visible. And once the animal is visible, killing becomes harder. This is why the categories matter so much. A dog is family. A cow is “beef.” A pig is “pork.” A cat is mourned. A calf is moved through the system. The same person can grieve a companion animal at home, then kill hundreds of cows at work.

That is not biology.

That is culture.

That is language doing violence before the knife does.

Workers separate animals into different moral categories. Companion animals are individuals who could be loved. Cows and pigs are constructed as objects, food, or material. Not because cows and pigs lack feelings. Not because they are less alive. But because the system cannot function if workers fully recognise them as someone. So the animal has to disappear before the body can be sold. This is where regulation becomes moral cover. Workers could tell themselves that if the killing was done properly, there was no reason for guilt. The line was not killing versus not killing. The line was correct killing versus incorrect killing. That is how the industry survives scrutiny.

It does not ask whether animals should be killed for products.

It asks whether the killing was tidy enough.

But even inside this machinery, compassion breaks through.

The study describes moments when routine emotional detachment failed. Calves trying to suckle. Animals looking back. Killing that felt pointless. These were the moments when the worker could no longer keep the animal abstract.

A former UK abattoir worker described the same thing in a BBC article. She said workers learned dissociation. They learned to stop thinking about cows as whole beings and to see them as saleable body parts. But some things shattered the numbness. A skip full of cows’ heads, eyes still attached. A freshly killed pregnant cow whose calf fell from her body. Newborn calves who sniffed workers, suckled their fingers, then were killed. After that, even the slaughterers were visibly upset. Of course they were.

The lie is not that slaughterhouse workers feel nothing. The lie is that feeling nothing is normal.

A systematic review of slaughterhouse employment found higher rates of mental health problems among workers, especially depression and anxiety. It also found workers using different coping mechanisms, from emotional detachment and repression to substance use, religion, family support, or simply trying to carry on. This should not surprise anyone. You cannot build an industry on killing and then act shocked when the killing damages those forced to do it.

But we need to be clear.

The workers are not the main victims of slaughterhouses.

The animals are.

The cow does not go home traumatised. She does not leave the job. She does not seek counselling. She is killed. Her body is cut apart. Her death is renamed dinner.

Still, the damage to workers tells us something important about the system itself. If killing animals for food were truly normal, why would people need to dissociate?

If it were morally simple, why would compassion have to be suppressed? If this were just another job, why would the workers have to learn how not to feel? The slaughterhouse runs on many things. Knives. Bolts. Chains. Blood. Speed. Profit.

But it also runs on numbness. It runs on the careful destruction of recognition. It runs on making sure the worker does not see someone, the consumer does not hear someone, and the industry does not have to answer for someone. Because once the animal is seen clearly, the whole story begins to collapse.

Not a product.

Not a unit.

Not material.

Someone. And someone did not want to die for this.

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And before anyone pretends this is some shocking betrayal of what Crufts is meant to represent, let’s be honest.

Crufts is not being damaged by scandal. Crufts is the scandal.

Earlier this year, the 2026 Crufts Best in Show winner, Lee Cox, was reported to have a previous conviction for causing unnecessary suffering to a dog in his care. Adam, a black cocker spaniel used for breeding, had an ear infection neglected so badly that his ear had to be removed.

The Kennel Club reportedly called that an isolated incident.

Of course they did.

The whole industry depends on the public believing everything is isolated. One bad breeder. One bad home. One bad case. One unfortunate exception.

But how many exceptions does it take before people admit they are looking at the system?

Crufts is sold as a celebration of dogs. What it actually celebrates is human control over dogs’ bodies. Their appearance. Their reproduction. Their genetics. Their movement. Their breathing. Their pain. Dogs are paraded as achievements. Breeds are treated like brands. Judges reward traits humans have decided are desirable, even when those traits make dogs suffer.

Flat faces.

Drooping eyes.

Oversized heads.

Compressed airways.

Bodies shaped not for the dog who has to live inside them, but for the human gaze.

French bulldogs, pugs and British bulldogs often struggle to breathe because humans bred them that way. Some cannot give birth naturally because puppies’ heads are too large for their bodies. Caesareans become routine. Major surgery becomes part of the business model.

Cavalier King Charles spaniels can suffer because their brains are too large for their skulls. Clumber spaniels are prone to ear infections, hip dysplasia, elbow dysplasia, spinal problems and eyelid abnormalities.

This is not love.

This is design.

This is not respect.

This is manufacturing.

And when dogs are manufactured, they are also discarded. The UK is already in a rescue crisis. Shelters are full. Dogs are being abandoned. Families are struggling with costs, time and care. Thousands of dogs are waiting for homes while breeders keep producing more puppies because there is money in bodies. Then Crufts goes on television and makes breeding look glamorous.

A polished ring.

A shiny coat.

A trophy.

A handler smiling beside a dog whose body may carry generations of human vanity.

Channel 4 cannot pretend broadcasting this is neutral. Television does not merely observe culture. It promotes it. It normalises it. It turns exploitation into entertainment.

Dogs are not accessories.

They are not status symbols.

They are not breeding machines.

They are not trophies with heartbeats.

They are individuals. They are someone, not something. They do not exist to be shaped, sold, shown, impregnated, judged and discarded for human pleasure.

The answer is not better breeding. The answer is no breeding.

Adopt from shelters. Support rescue. Stop buying dogs while others wait unwanted behind kennel doors. And stop pretending Crufts is about dogs.

It is about us.

Our vanity.

Our entitlement.

Our refusal to see someone suffering when the suffering comes wrapped in a rosette.

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Eat more protein.

Prioritise protein.

Get enough protein.

And, somewhere underneath all of that, the same assumption keeps appearing: animal protein is the gold standard.

A new study suggests something very different. Researchers looking at postmenopausal women found that replacing animal protein with plant protein was linked to significant weight loss, even when total protein intake stayed roughly the same.

The women were not simply eating less protein. They were changing where that protein came from. Animal protein went down. Plant protein went up. Body weight fell.

In the low-fat plant-based group, animal protein intake dropped by 23.3g per day, while plant protein rose by 22.1g per day. Total protein barely changed. Yet body weight fell by 3.6kg, compared with just 0.2kg in the control group. So perhaps the question was never just “how much protein?” Perhaps it was always “what kind?”

The researchers found that each 1kg of weight loss was associated with a reduction of 16.2g of animal protein per day and an increase of 12.7g of plant protein. The effect was independent of energy intake.

Animal products bring more than protein. They bring cholesterol, saturated fat, and a different amino acid profile. The study points to methionine, an amino acid found in higher concentrations in animal products, as one possible piece of the picture. Lower methionine intake was associated with lower BMI. This does not mean one nutrient explains everything.

It means the usual “protein is protein” line is too crude.

A trial found something else too. Moderate-to-severe hot flashes fell by 88% in the group eating a low-fat plant-based diet with daily soybeans. Half of the women who completed the intervention had no moderate-to-severe hot flashes at all by week 12. Less animal fat. More fibre. More soy. More plant protein. Fewer animal products.

The findings do not prove every individual will get the same result. The study was short, the group was small, and the intervention combined several changes.

But it does challenge a very profitable myth. Animal protein is not special. It is not even helpful.

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