Two billion octopuses and 100 million sharks are eaten every year.
Consumption of meat could be a touchy subject. Vegetarians and those who eat meat never find a common ground. But amidst the debate around ethics of eating meat, there are some hard facts that cannot be ignored. And a vide going viral on social media shows exactly that. According to the statistics shown in the clip, humans across the world consume billions of animals. As per an old report in The Economist, humans are outnumbered by farm animals – chickens (19 billion), cows (1.5 billion), sheep (1 billion) and pigs (1 billion). Though the number of these animals at any one time is three times higher than the number of people, the figures are dwarfed by the number of animals we eat.
According to the viral video, chickens are on the top. The daily count is extremely large – 205 million chickens every day. To comprehend the scale, it will be easier to understand if the data is brought down to the average minute: More than 140,000 chickens are slaughtered every minute.
Unbeliavable! Total number of animals eaten by people globally🧐
— Tansu Yegen (@TansuYegen) January 21, 2024
The other animals on top are sardines (14 billion every year), shrimp (3 billion every year), duck (2.9 billion) and goose (2.1 billion).
Astonishingly, two billion octopuses and 100 million sharks are eater every year.
Nearly 1.5 billion pigs are killed to feed the growing appetite for pork, bacon, ham and sausages – a number that has tripled in the last 50 years.
World Economic Forum (WEF) said in its report that most of their demand has come from middle income countries like China, which became the world’s biggest consumer of meat as its economy boomed.
In contrast, WEF said, the consumption in Europe and North America has stabilised, even dropped in some regions.
India, despite rapidly catching up with China in terms of population, still consumes a tiny fraction of the world’s meat.
The staggering number of chickens is because of the fact that poultry has replaced pork at the dinner tables. From just 12 per cent, the share of chicken, duck, goose, turkey and fowl has increased to one-third of all the meat eaten worldwide.
The most popular red meat, beef, has seen its global share nearly halve in the last 50 years, to 22 per cent, said the WEF report. But it still remains nearly five times more popular than lamb.