Billions on land, trillions at sea:
How many animals do we kill for food?
Every year humans kill an almost unimaginable number of animals for food. The figures are large enough that they stop meaning anything, so here they are with some context.
On land: roughly 88 billion a year
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) counts land animals individually, which makes these the most reliable numbers in the field. Faunalytics’ analysis of FAO data puts the 2024 total at about 87.9 billion land animals, up roughly 1.85% from 2023. In 2023 the total was over 85.4 billion, and that growth rate was more than double the rate of human population growth.
That works out to about 234 million land animals killed per day in 2023, around ten for every person alive.
The species mix is lopsided. Chickens made up about 76 billion of the 2023 total, ducks about 4.2 billion, and pigs about 1.5 billion. Cattle, sheep and goats are in the hundreds of millions each. Chickens alone account for roughly 202 million deaths a day. The animals most people picture when they think of “meat” are a small share of the total.
In the water: trillions, with a wide margin of error
The sea numbers are far larger and far less certain, because the FAO doesn’t count fish. It publishes tonnage only, and Our World in Data notes that fish numbers are much more uncertain than land-animal numbers. Researchers have to estimate the number of animals by dividing tonnage by assumed average body weights.
- Wild-caught fish: One estimate puts annual catch at 1.1–2.2 trillion fish, and likely higher once illegal fishing, discards and ghost fishing are included. Fishcount’s range is 790 billion to 2.3 trillion.
- Farmed fish: Estimates run from 38.8–215.9 billion for 2019 (Sentience Institute) and 86–180 billion for 2022 (Our World in Data). A separate estimate for farmed finfish alone is 124 billion, which excludes shrimp.
- Shellfish and crustaceans: these are counted even less well, and are largely missing from the totals above.
Even the low end of the wild-catch range is more than ten times the number of land animals. Fish, not chickens, are the largest category of animals killed for food by a wide margin.
Why the numbers are probably undercounts
- Land totals cover animals slaughtered for meat. They exclude deaths in the egg and dairy industries and animals for which no data exists.
- Fish figures typically miss bycatch, discards and ghost fishing.
- Invertebrates, including shrimp, crabs and squid, are inconsistently counted.
What the numbers don’t tell us
Counting animals isn’t the same as weighing suffering. A trillion small fish and a billion pigs aren’t morally interchangeable in any simple way, and the science on fish sentience is still contested, though the evidence for pain and stress responses has strengthened. Readers should also be wary of any single headline figure for fish. The honest statement is “somewhere between about one and a few trillion,” not a precise count.
The takeaway
About 88 billion land animals and, by most estimates, one to two trillion wild fish are killed each year, with farmed fish adding tens to hundreds of billions more. Land-animal numbers keep climbing faster than the human population. Fish numbers are the biggest and the least well measured.
Sources
- FAOSTAT (FAO)
- Faunalytics, “Global Animal Slaughter Statistics & Charts”
- Our World in Data, “How many animals get slaughtered every day?”
- Fishcount.org.uk
- Mood et al. (2023, 2024) on fish numbers