Many recent defenses of meat eating turn on the death of animals in plant agriculture. Despite their differences, a common feature of all such proposals is that they rank dietary options according to the overall number of animal deaths each diet requires. If eating a diet with free-range meat involves fewer overall animal deaths than a traditional plant-based vegan diet, then that is taken to demonstrate the immorality of traditional veganism. A problem for this family of views is their failure to note the ethical relevance of the doctrine of double effect (DDE). If the DDE is applicable to agricultural ethics then it raises the possibility that it remains immoral to follow a diet based on the deliberate killing of animals, even if doing so did result in fewer animal deaths than a plant-based diet. A challenge of bringing the DDE to bear on any debate involving animals is that the most sophisticated contemporary versions of the DDE employ a rationale that makes the DDE inapplicable to entities that are not persons. I outline a new version of the DDE that is applicable to our dealings with merely sentient animals and apply it to harms done to animals in agriculture.

Steven Davis has offered an influential argument for the view that the diet most consistent with animal protection philosophy is one that contains some meat. Davis cites the accidental death of field animals during vegetable harvesting. Empirical studies suggest that the number of field mice, rats, and similar creatures killed in crop cultivation may outnumber the total animal deaths involved in the raising of beef cattle, so long as the cows are raised on a diet of grass rather than grain. If so, then the most logical diet for animal advocates to adopt is one that includes hamburger and milk from grass-fed cows, in order to reduce the overall number of animals killed. Davis's argument for burger veganism overlooks philosophically significant forms of harm to human beings that are present in beef production but not vegetable harvesting, and bases his argument on the implausible assumption that there is no difference between deliberate and accidental killing. A final problem bedevils not only Davis’s orginal argument but subsequent variations that defend eating Australian red meat and roadkill. It is that more than one current trend in plant agriculture causes little or no collateral harm to animals.