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Meat and dairy When animals are fed human-edible crops, this is the most inefficient part of the global food supply in terms of calories, protein and micro-nutrient terms. The inefficiency is also costly in greenhouse gas terms especially when the animals are ruminants (sheep and cattle) and typically double their impact through the belching of methane. Other problems include the two thirds of the world's antibiotics that are used in animal farming, and the welfare of the beasts themselves.

Even plants and animals were mechanised. Around the time that Homo sapiens was elevated to divine status by humanist religions, farm animals stopped being viewed as living creatures that could feel pain and distress, and instead came to be treated as machines. Today these animals are often mass-produced in factory-like facilities, their bodies shaped in accordance with industrial needs. They pass their entire lives as cogs in a giant production line, and the length and quality of their existence is determined by the profits and losses of business corporations. Even when the industry takes care to keep them alive, reasonably healthy and well fed, it has no intrinsic interest in the animals' social and psychological needs (except when these have a direct impact on production).

Whilst more than two thirds of all farm animal food are grass and pasture, which cannot be eaten directly by us, the human-edible crops that we feed them amount to more than three quarters of the calorific needs of the entire human population.

Animals contribute 590 kcal to the human food chain as meat and dairy. BUT they eat 1740 kcal per person per day of human-edible food as well as 3810 kcal of grass and pasture.

'advertisements featuring cute animals tend to be more successful than ads that don't'.

If animals are conscious, then what are predators supposed to eat?

Animal feed Here we are not talking about grass or pasture. We are talking about plant matter that is digestible by humans but is instead fed to animals. Globally, there is enough of this to provide about 1800 calories per day to every person on the planet; that's about three quarters of the global food requirement for human energy. In return, animals give us back about 10% in the form of meat and dairy products. Cutting out animal feed would hugely help us feed the world and preserve biodiversity.

The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, Marjorie Spiegel argues that like human slaves, non-human animals are subjected to branding, restraints, beatings, auctions, the separation of offspring from their parents, and forced voyages. Moreover, despite the animal-rights movement, we keep treating our ever-smarter machines as slaves without a second thought, and talk of a robot-rights movement is met with chuckles. Why?