This article presents a short-term ethnography involving young people participating in animal-assisted youth work at a small-sized animal farm in the urban south of Finland. Over a 3-week period, three different summer camps organised at the farm were observed, and 24 interviews were conducted with 10–17-year-old youths. The study examines the social context of the animal-assisted youth work and analyses how young people refer to farmed animals as meaningful subjects, given that their fellow species members are simultaneously being mass bred and killed for human culinary purposes. It reflects on how youths’ embodied ways of ‘knowing’ farmed animals reflect a certain type of emotional engagement that affects their perspectives on meat eating. In parallel, young people use the studied farm as a reference for animals living in ‘good conditions’ when negotiating the ethics of their own animal consumption. The article further contributes at the intersection between the fields of youth research, humane education and critical animal pedagogics by asking whether animal-assisted youth work offers a space for young people to critically examine farmed animals’ subjectivities as residents with their own rights to live meaningfully without humans’ unnecessary exploitation of them.