How many animals are farmed and slaughtered each year
Globally
- 80 Billion Ritchie et al., 2017
- Few livestock are farmed in poor countries
- 31 billions land animals and between 38.8 and 215.9 billion #fish farmed globally Anthis and Reese Anthis, 2019
- #fish 1.1-2.2 TRILLION wild fin fishes a year according to Mood & Brooke 2024
- Faunalytics has a great interactive visualisation page on slaughter numbers up to 2018
- OWID slaughter stats (2023)
- For farmed at one time: sentience institute did this.
A critique of FAO numbers can be found here but they're the best we have
US
The Sentience institute has numbers on this. Their 2019 analysis suggests over 99% of farmed animals are factory farmed
UK
Livestock numbers
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/livestock-populations-in-the-united-kingdom/livestock-populations-in-the-united-kingdom-at-1-june-2023
see also WWF, 2022
factory farmed
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/23622/pdf/
For #Bryant/Project/cawf_hidden_harms we estimated using data from WWF, 2022, numbers were close enough except dairy cattle.