The ‘Environmental Kuznets Curve’ is a hypothesis, according to which environmental burden rises when the income levels are low, but degradation starts to lower when income levels continue to rise. This approach has been utilized also to hypothesize that animal welfare and usage of animals by humans follow a similar trend. In this article meat consumption per capita is examined in the EU-15 context by comparing it with income levels. It was found that meat consumption rises with income in lower income levels but this growth gradually stabilizes. When the amount of animals slaughtered per capita was analyzed it was observed that with income levels of 11,000 US$, 19,000 US$ and 23,000 US$ per capita the amount of animals slaughtered per capita was equal to 6.8, 11.0 and 9.4 respectively. This indicates that the amounts of slaughter do indeed follow the trend hypothesized by the Kuznets curve. However the results should be interpreted with caution.
