Animals

We kill about 88 billion land animals a year, and far more fish

By WhyStopHarmingAnimals.com

In 2024, about 88 billion land animals were slaughtered for food[1]. Faunalytics, compiling the UN's FAOSTAT data, puts the figure at 87,896,729,120[1], up about 1.85% from 2023[1]. That is faster than the human population is growing[1]. Spread over the year, it works out to roughly 241 million land animals killed every day[1].

That number leaves out fish, and fish are most of the dead[1][2][3]. The recorded wild catch is estimated at 1.1 to 2.2 trillion fish a year[2], and farmed finfish add about another 130 billion[3]. Set against those figures, the 88 billion land animals are the smaller part of the total[1][2][3].

Each of these animals is an individual with a life of their own. In 2012, a group of neuroscientists at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference declared that humans are not unique in having the neurological basis of consciousness[4], and that all mammals and birds have it too[4]. In 2024, the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness extended the case to at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates, fish included[5]. The slaughter statistics describe a count of such animals.

Who is in the 88 billion

Chickens make up most of the land-animal count: about 78.5 billion in 2024, up from 76.2 billion the year before. After chickens come ducks, pigs, sheep, goats and cows. About 1.5 billion pigs and about 305 million cows were killed in 2024.

A species' share of the headcount says little about what farming it costs. Cows are a small fraction of the bodies, about 305 million out of 87.9 billion[1], yet they account for most of the land and climate bill of animal agriculture. Chickens are the reverse: small animals, killed in numbers that dwarf every other land species.

Broken down by day, the numbers are hard to hold in your head. Our World in Data, working from the same FAO source, put the daily toll at the order of 200 million chickens, 3.8 million pigs and 900,000 cows in the year it tabulated[6]. At the 2024 chicken total, that rises to about 215 million chickens a day, or 150,000 a minute.

The trend runs the wrong way. Slaughter grew about 1.85% from 2023 to 2024[1], so the number of animals killed per person on Earth went up[1].

Fish outnumber everyone else

FAO reports fish catches in tonnes[2], which is part of why their numbers stayed out of view for so long. Mood and Brooke converted those recorded landings into individual animals and published the result in Animal Welfare in 2024[2]. Averaged over 2000 to 2019, they estimate 1.1 to 2.2 trillion wild finfish caught each year[2]. For 2019 alone the estimate is 980 to 1,900 billion, which is still about 87% of all vertebrates killed for food or feed. About half of the wild catch went to fishmeal and oil[2], much of it fed to other farmed animals.

Fish farming adds to that[3]. Fishcount's estimate for 2022 is about 130 billion farmed finfish killed[3], with a range of 86 to 180 billion[3].

The real total is higher

These are the best global figures available, and they are incomplete[2]. FAO data come with delayed reporting and missing countries, and Our World in Data attaches explicit caveats to their accuracy[6]. There is almost no official count of individual fish at all. The Mood and Brooke estimate covers recorded catch only and excludes illegal fishing, discards and ghost fishing[2]. Every correction to these numbers would push them up.

Someone, not something

A number this large makes it easy to forget that each unit in it was a single animal. The research on the animals themselves points the other way. Cows answer the voice of their own calf. Pigs match dogs on many cognition tests and learn to use a mirror to find food. Hens keep track of around 100 flock-mates and show a stress response when their chicks are in distress. Cleaner wrasse, a small reef fish, pass the mirror mark test. The pages on each animal go through those studies in detail.

None of this is required to decide that killing billions of animals is wrong, but it removes the excuse that there is nobody there. Enjoying the taste of an animal does not give us the right to kill one, and we do not need to eat animals to live well.