Why Don’t More Animal Advocates Talk About Ducks?

Ducks are the second most slaughtered land animal on the planet, but campaigns against the consumption of duck meat are rare. This blog explores what it would take to put ducks on animal advocates’ agenda.

In discussions of industrial animal agriculture, chickens dominate. Their numbers are so vast, with more than 76 billion individuals slaughtered globally in 2023, that they’ve become the central subject of many animal advocacy campaigns, especially in an Effective Altruism framework that places a premium on the quantity (where chickens sit alongside fishes and invertebrates). Indeed, the vast majority of animal advocates already know that chickens are the most slaughtered land animal by a large margin.

At the 2024 Animal & Vegan Advocacy Summit in Washington, D.C., coming right on the heels of publishing our annual Global Animal Slaughter update, I posed the question informally to many advocates that I spoke with: which land animal comes in second place?

The answers were, in some ways, not surprising: many advocates mentioned pigs, with a smaller proportion mentioning cows or sheep. These responses were guesses, and very much incorrect.

The quiet second place that rarely enters the conversation of global animal slaughter is a species that few animal advocates regularly consider: ducks. According to the FAO, nearly 4.2 billion ducks were slaughtered in 2023 alone. That’s more than 10 times the number of cows, more than five times the number of sheep, and more than two times the number of pigs slaughtered globally the same year. This is an illustrative example of the small-bodied animal problem. Chickens have already brought this into focus: because they’re small, more of them are needed to produce the same volume of meat, leading to astronomical slaughter figures. Ducks fall into the same category. Compared to cows or pigs, they don’t yield much meat per individual, which means many more individuals are needed to meet demand.

The difference is that ducks don’t occupy the same cultural space as chickens or other farmed animals — and despite being the second most slaughtered land animal on the planet, ducks remain relatively invisible in the public consciousness. They’re not as symbolically loaded as cows or pigs, not as omnipresent (on menus or in popular culture) as chickens, and not as “cute” as lambs. However, their suffering is real, industrial, and routine.

Why Are Ducks Overlooked?

All of this begs the question of why, in an animal protection movement so often focused on quantity of suffering, do ducks not get more advocacy attention?

The first answer may be geographic: duck farming is concentrated in places that most Western animal advocacy organizations traditionally don’t pay attention to or don’t know as much about. The vast majority of the world’s duck production is concentrated in China and across Asia. Moreover, duck meat is relatively niche in the U.S., Canada, and much of Europe, aside from certain culinary subcultures or specific products like foie gras.

This regional imbalance has consequences. Western organizations drive much of the funding, media attention, and strategic framing in the global animal advocacy movement. When a particular species isn’t part of the Western diet in a major way, they get ignored, even when the scale of global suffering is immense.

There’s more than just geography at play, however — cultural and psychological factors are also key. Chickens are universally familiar and heavily marketed. People interact with chicken products every day, whether in the form of nuggets at a fast-food joint or rotisserie chickens at the supermarket. Meanwhile, ducks don’t have that same ubiquity — in a Western context, they’re mostly seen as semi-wild animals we encounter at ponds and parks, not food animals. This is textbook cognitive dissonance: we know ducks exist and we know they’re consumed, but we don’t often consider what happens to them on industrial farms.

For those who are aware of duck farming, attention often fixates on foie gras. Force-feeding ducks or geese to produce an enlarged liver is one of the clearest, most disturbing examples of animal cruelty in food production, and campaigns against foie gras have gained considerable traction in cities and countries around the world. But here’s the thing: foie gras production, while awful, represents only about 1% of ducks who are killed each year. In some ways, the focus on foie gras is useful and brings attention to animal cruelty in general. In another view, we could consider it a distraction: the focus on foie gras — and along with it, a single, extreme practice — obscures the much more widespread slaughter of billions of ducks for regular meat consumption.

Conditions And Context

There may be a perception that ducks are somehow tougher and more resistant to suffering. Ducks are hardy birds. They can survive in a variety of environments and tolerate some diseases better than chickens. But that doesn’t mean they suffer less in confinement. It might actually mean the opposite — they may be more likely to be crammed into conditions that would otherwise kill more fragile species. However, resilience is not the same as well-being.

Even in countries with less duck consumption, the farming practices are no less concerning. Ducks in factory farms are often kept in overcrowded indoor systems without access to water for swimming, a basic behavioral need. Their bills are sometimes trimmed without pain relief, and they suffer from foot injuries, respiratory issues, and high mortality rates due to poor ventilation and sanitation. Despite being waterfowl, they’re often raised in dry, dusty environments where they can’t express natural behaviors. The result is psychological and physical suffering — on a massive scale.

In all of the above, there’s an overall problem with data: national and international tracking of animal welfare/suffering and statistics are heavily biased toward animals who are farmed in the West, where reporting requirements and welfare studies are more developed. For ducks — especially those in low- and middle-income countries — reliable information on how they’re housed, transported, and killed is harder to find. This creates a feedback loop: less data means less awareness, which leads to less advocacy, which in turn means fewer people pushing for better data.

What’s more, in some contexts, ducks are a secondary animal in mixed farming operations. In some regions, they’re raised alongside fishes in integrated aquaculture systems or rice farming. These systems are sometimes held up as ecologically efficient, but they also make it harder to track animal welfare outcomes.

What Would It Take To Put Ducks On The Agenda?

The title of this blog is provocative — however, it’s worth mentioning that many animal protection groups do some form of advocacy for ducks. Still, it remains disproportionate to the number of animals affected.

What would it take to get ducks the attention they deserve? First, better data. In the past decade, animal advocacy has become increasingly driven by numbers: just look at cost-effectiveness analyses, suffering scales, or slaughter statistics. The slaughter statistics are very clear, and no secret — by reading this, you’re already in the loop. However, more work needs to be done to gather further information about the industry as a whole. Without reliable information, ducks will never rank high on the lists that determine where to allocate funding or campaign resources. Pro-animal researchers (not just industry/husbandry scientists) need to start digging into the specifics of duck farming systems — not just for foie gras, but for standard meat production.

Second, more global representation in the advocacy movement. Across Asia and in some other areas of the world, duck is not an occasional luxury — it’s a staple; not a rare indulgence but an everyday meal. Duck meat is not just culturally normal, it’s deeply embedded in food traditions that span centuries. Trying to challenge duck consumption from an outsider standpoint is a non-starter. Meaningful progress has to come from within, through local education efforts, economic alternatives, and, ideally, plant-based culinary innovation that respects cultural identities rather than attacking them. That means supporting local organizations, translating materials, listening to people on the ground, and helping build campaigns that reflect cultural realities, not Western sensibilities.

Regional organizations are beginning to put duck welfare issues on the table, and supporting these types of initiatives can have an immediate impact on many millions of individuals. Welfare Matters has noted that across Southeast Asia, several campaigns focused on duck egg farming have emerged in recent years and have resulted in positive progress. However, campaigns against duck meat production are still rare across Asia.

Third, integrating ducks into broader campaigns about farmed animals could move the needle in a meaningful way. Right now, most advocacy materials mention chickens, cows, pigs, and sometimes fishes. Ducks rarely appear in the photos, the infographics, or the calls to action, and that needs to change — even within Faunalytics’ own resources. Simple shifts, like including ducks in educational content or referencing duck slaughter statistics alongside those of chickens, could start to normalize their inclusion in the conversation.

Finally, there needs to be a reckoning with the psychological filters that cause people to ignore duck suffering. It’s easy to care about animals who look helpless, who have big eyes or soft fur. Ducks don’t always fit that mold. Similarly to chickens, they’re a bit alien: beaked, feathered, and less expressive to human eyes. But animal advocates know these differences don’t mean their suffering is any less real. Part of the work of animal advocacy is helping people break through those filters to feel empathy even when it doesn’t come naturally.

In 2023, over four billion ducks were slaughtered for meat. If the animal advocacy movement wants to live up to its own ideals of compassion, effectiveness, and taking a global perspective, they deserve significantly more attention.