The consumption of meat can be a contentious issue. Vegetarians and meat eaters never find common ground. But, among the discussion over the ethics of consuming meat, some concrete facts cannot be disregarded. And a video going viral on social media demonstrates just that. According to the data presented in the video, humans worldwide consume billions of animals. According to an old estimate in The Economist, people are outnumbered by farm animals, including chickens (19 billion), cows (1.5 billion), sheep (1 billion), and pigs. Though the number of these species at any given time is three times that of humans, the figures are dwarfed by the number of animals we consume.
The majority of their demand has come from middle-income countries such as China
According to the popular video, chickens are at the top. Every day, there are around 205 million chickens. To better appreciate the scale, the data should be reduced to the average minute: More than 140,000 chickens are butchered every minute. The other creatures on top include sardines (14 billion each year), shrimp (3 billion per year), ducks (2.9 billion), and geese (2.1 billion). Amazingly, two billion octopuses and 100 million sharks are eaten each year. Nearly 1.5 billion pigs are slaughtered to meet the expanding demand for pork, bacon, ham, and sausages, a figure that has tripled in the last 50 years.
According to a World Economic Forum (WEF) report, the majority of their demand has come from middle-income countries such as China, which became the world’s largest meat consumer as its economy grew. In contrast, the WEF stated that consumption in Europe and North America has stabilized, and in some cases has decreased. India, despite rapidly catching up with China in terms of population, consumes only a small proportion of the world’s beef. The skyrocketing amount of hens is due to the fact that poultry has supplanted hogs on dinner tables. Chicken, duck, goose, turkey, and fowl now account for one-third of all meat consumed globally, up from 12% previously. The most popular red meat, beef, has seen its global share nearly halved in the last 50 years, to 22 per cent, according to the WEF report. But it remains nearly five times more popular than lamb.