13/07/2026
FARMED ANIMALS IN EXTREME WEATHER
SUMMER HEAT WAVE
This summer, headlines talk about record heat waves in Europe and Asia. Almost no one talks about what that heat does to the animals in our food system.
🐷 Pigs can barely sweat, and modern breeds in intensive farms have almost no way to dump excess heat except gasping, lying still, or giving up on eating.
🐔 Chickens rely on panting to cool down. Under heat waves, especially in crowded sheds, this leads to disturbed blood chemistry, weaker immunity, and mass die offs. South Korea’s 2024 heatwave killed more than 700,000 farm animals, 658,000 of them poultry.
🐄 Dairy cows start to experience heat stress at relatively low temperature humidity levels; even moderate heat with high humidity can push them over their limit. New research warns that by mid century, 6.2 - 13.7 million cattle in Europe could face at least 15 extra heatwave days every year. In Asia, many animals live in these conditions not for a week long heatwave, but for months on end.
Recent analyses from FAO and the UN show that extreme heat in South Asia and across tropical Asia is already harming livestock: combining direct heat stress with drought, poor feed, and water shortages. Animals struggle to eat, to reproduce, even to stand, while warming waters trigger devastating fish fatalities. And here’s the cruel truth: these animals were not “born for this.”
Modern farmed animals have been selectively bred to produce more meat, more milk, more eggs, not to survive relentless heat. Their bodies generate more internal heat and cope with it worse, especially in cramped sheds with metal roofs and no real way to cool down.
They don’t “get used to it.”
They endure it, unnoticed, until they break.
Every time the temperature spikes, we see the crisis: mass deaths in transport, barns turned into ovens, emergency government alerts. What we don’t see is the everyday suffering when the cameras leave: days and nights where animals can’t escape the heat, can’t breathe comfortably, can’t rest, can’t recover. The climate crisis is making these heatwaves more frequent and intense and the very system that traps billions of animals in buildings where they cannot cope is also a major driver of that crisis. If we’re willing to declare heat emergencies for humans, we cannot keep pretending that the animals who feed our system are “fine” in the same heat.
They’re not fine.
They’re just invisible.
📷 Photo 4 Credit: Crystal Heath/Our Honor/We Animals
