Unit 3: Animals and the moral circle
3.2 Numbers that are hard to picture
3 minutes
How many chickens are slaughtered for meat worldwide each year?
chickens
To put that in proportion: about nine chickens a year for every person on Earth. Pigs come next among land animals, at about 1.4 billion a year. Then there are fish. Because the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization reports fish catches in tonnes, not animals, the numbers are uncertain. For farmed fish alone, estimates for 2019 range from 29 to 149 billion animals.
Bar chart of animals slaughtered for meat each year by species, dominated by chickens.
This loads the chart from Our World in Data.
Most chickens raised for meat live about six weeks. Most farmed land animals are kept in intensive systems: large indoor sheds, little space and breeds selected for fast growth.
Numbers this large run straight into the problem from Unit 1. They are too big to feel. Whether they should change what you do depends on a harder question.
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