What would the world look like
if this were not okay?

Exactly like this. Nothing would have to look different.

Land animals killed since you opened this page
0
~2,500 per second. 80 billion per year.
Per day
202,000,000 chickens  ·  3,800,000 pigs  ·  900,000 cows

You probably already know this is wrong.

Not as a feeling — as a conclusion. The people you respect most have already said it.

The question is not whether you know. The question is whether you're looking.

People who have thought hard about this

"The fact that I participate in a system that does this knowingly more or less condemns me as a total hypocrite. That laziness, given the magnitude of the suffering we're imposing on non-human animals, that laziness is a horrible thing about me."
Sam Harris — neuroscientist, philosopher
"In 100 or 200 years time, we may look back on the way we treated animals today as something like we today look back on the way our forefathers treated slaves. It requires a level of social courage, which I haven't yet produced, to break out of that."
Richard Dawkins — evolutionary biologist
"Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history."
Yuval Noah Harari — historian
"If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration."
Peter Singer — philosopher, Princeton
"I have always eaten animal flesh with a somewhat guilty conscience."
Albert Einstein — letter to Max Kariel, 1953

The numbers

Source: Our World in Data / UN FAO

Common sense across time

These people are not ahead of their time. They simply looked.

~500 BC
"Those who are accustomed to abominate the slaughter of animals as iniquitous and unnatural, will think it still more unjust and unlawful to kill a man."
Pythagoras — mathematician, philosopher (via Iamblichus)
1789
"The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"
Jeremy Bentham — philosopher
1813
"I wish no living thing to suffer pain."
Percy Bysshe Shelley — poet, atheist, vegetarian
1953
"I have always eaten animal flesh with a somewhat guilty conscience."
Albert Einstein — letter to Max Kariel
1975
"If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration."
Peter Singer — Animal Liberation
2015
"Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history."
Yuval Noah Harari — Sapiens

Consider the animals.

Watch Dominion  ·  Read Earthling Ed  ·  Our World in Data