The numbers of exploitation
Activists often say that 80 billion animals are killed each year for food. But that number only counts mammals and birds. Adding fish, crustaceans, insects, and others, the estimate is between 34 and 54 trillion animals killed each year.
The numbers in nature
There are no statistics on how many animals die from natural causes each year. But there are estimates of how many sentient animals live in the wild at any given moment: between 1 and 10 quintillion.
For comparison, the population of animals raised for exploitation at any given moment is about 434 billion:
- land vertebrates: 24 billion;
- fish: 180 billion;
- shrimp: 230 billion.
A comparison
If all these animals together were one whole year, the animals raised for exploitation would take up only a few seconds of the last day of the year. All the rest would belong to animals in the wild. (Check out the "A Year to Scale" tool on the site.)
The future
These numbers, for both exploited and wild animals, could become astronomically bigger in the future, for example with new technologies.
In short
- Exploitation kills between 34 and 54 trillion animals a year.
- Between 1 and 10 quintillion sentient animals live in the wild.
- In the future, these numbers could be much bigger still.