Seventy-eight billion chickens a year
The world slaughtered a massive 78.5 billion chickens for meat in 20241. That comes to about 2,490 chickens every second, or a whopping 215 million a day. That is more chickens in one single day than there are people in Brazil9.
In 1961, the first year that the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimated the number, the total was 6.6 billion1. Since then, it has grown about twelvefold, and it is still rising, by around 2.4% a year over the last decade.
Only six weeks old
A meat chicken (also called a broiler) usually lives only four to six weeks. In the EU, broilers are mostly slaughtered when they are 28 to 42 days old, and modern breeds can reach 2.5 kilograms in about 35 days4.
That short life is why the yearly kill is so much bigger than the number of chickens alive at any one time. About 30 billion poultry birds are alive at any moment2, and the meat birds among them are replaced several times a year.
Bred to grow four times faster
A broiler grows this fast because it was bred to. For decades, breeders have picked the birds that grew fastest on the least feed and bred from them, generation after generation.
Researchers at the University of Alberta showed how far that has gone. They raised chickens from a 1957 breed, a 1978 breed and a modern 2005 commercial breed side by side, on the same modern feed. The modern birds grew more than four times as much (a 400% increase) and needed half as much feed for every kilogram they put on. The breast meat alone grew by around 80%10. Because all three breeds ate the same diet, almost all of that difference is down to genetics.
The chickens pay for that growth with their bodies. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the EU’s scientific adviser on food and animal welfare, concluded that the genetics of modern broilers causes more welfare problems than any other factor on the farm. Their skeletons often struggle to carry their weight, which leads to bone lesions and lameness. Many spend much of their short lives sitting on litter soaked with droppings, which burns their skin, and some die suddenly of heart failure, known as sudden death syndrome4.
Even the parents suffer. The hens and roosters used for breeding carry the same fast-growth genes, so they would grow too heavy to breed if they could eat freely. Farmers keep them on restricted rations, and EFSA lists prolonged hunger among their welfare problems4. EFSA’s advice is to move to slower-growing breeds and to stop breeding for even faster growth.
Ten chickens per person, every year
Each chicken yields roughly 1.7 kilograms of meat3. Spread across everyone alive, the 2024 slaughter works out to nearly ten chickens per person per year19.
That's how many chickens are slaughtered each year for every person on Earth
Two hundred chickens for one cow
A single cow gives around 364 kilograms of meat, and a chicken less than two3. Replacing the beef from one cow takes about 210 chickens.
Looking at this from a climate and CO2 perspective, that swap is a clear gain. A kilogram of beef from a beef herd comes with around 99 kilograms of greenhouse gases, and a kilogram of poultry with about 105.
Count animals instead of kilograms, though, and the picture flips. Because each chicken gives so little meat, every kilogram of beef replaced by chicken means around 210 times as many animals slaughtered. And that is the direction the world is moving. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and FAO expect poultry consumption to grow by about 21% by 2034, faster than any other meat. By then, poultry is expected to supply 45% of all the protein people get from meat6. In other words, a diet that is better for the climate can also mean many more animals killed.
All meat, from every species, eaten this year.
Chickens also need to eat
A chicken grows on feed, and much of that feed is soy. More than three quarters of the world’s soy, 77%, is fed to livestock, and chickens and other poultry are the biggest single user, eating 37% of it. Only 7% of the world’s soy is eaten directly by people, as tofu, soy milk and the like7.
Most of that soy comes from just two countries. The United States and Brazil grow around two thirds of the world’s supply between them, and in Brazil, soy farming borders the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado savanna7. The link to deforestation is less direct than it is often made out to be. Most of the forest cleared in the Brazilian Amazon becomes cattle pasture, not soy fields. But soy still plays a significant part, because soy farms can take over existing pasture and push cattle ranching further into the forest7.
There is a success story here too. In 2006, the big soy traders agreed to stop buying soy grown on newly cleared land in the Amazon. A study in the journal Nature Food found that this Amazon Soy Moratorium prevented about 18,000 square kilometres of deforestation in its first decade, while Amazon soy production still more than tripled14. The moratorium only covers the Amazon, and the worry now is the Cerrado, a vast tropical savanna to the south where forest and savanna can still be cleared for soy14.
The forests being cleared, part of it for feed.
Antibiotics in the flock
Chickens also get a share of the antibiotics given to farm animals. A study in PLOS Global Public Health estimated that farmers used around 99,500 tonnes of antibiotics and similar drugs on cattle, sheep, chickens and pigs in 2020, and expects that to rise by 8% by 203011.
Some of that treats sick animals. But in crowded flocks, antibiotics have long been given routinely, to prevent disease from spreading and, in the past, simply to make the animals grow faster. The more antibiotics are used, the more bacteria evolve to resist them, and resistant bacteria can pass from animals to people.
The EU has moved furthest to stop this. It banned antibiotics as growth promoters in animal feed from 200612, and since 2022 it has banned routine use on farm animals altogether, allowing preventive use only in exceptional cases13. Much of the rest of the world has not followed, and the study found the hotspots of use overwhelmingly in Asia11. The full picture across all livestock is on the page for antibiotics used on livestock.
The ones not counted
The egg industry killed around 7.8 billion male chicks in 2024, and none of them appear in the slaughter figure8. This practice is called chick culling: the killing of newborn male chicks, usually on the day they hatch. Males of the egg-laying breeds do not lay eggs, and they grow too slowly to be sold as meat, so the industry has no use for them.
No government or UN body counts culled chicks. This estimate comes from Faunalytics, an animal-advocacy research group, which worked it out from FAO’s own data on laying hens, so it deserves more caution than the FAO figures elsewhere on this page.
This is also where the one real improvement is. A technique called in-ovo sexing (in ovo is Latin for “in the egg”) checks whether an egg holds a male or a female before it hatches, so the male eggs can be removed and no male chick is ever born. About 40% of the EU’s laying hens now come from hatcheries that use it8. It has barely reached Asia, where 69% of the culling takes place.
Male chicks killed by the egg industry, counted separately from the meat birds.
Male chicks killed in the egg industry
Globally, this year
Three countries, a third of the birds
China slaughtered the most chickens in 2024, 11.9 billion. The United States came second with 9.6 billion and Brazil third with 6.5 billion1. Together they account for more than a third of the world total.
The global average of ten chickens per person hides a wide spread. The United States slaughters about 28 chickens a year for every resident19, almost three times the world figure. Some of that meat is exported, so where a bird is slaughtered is not always where it is eaten.
Where this could be heading
Slaughter has grown by around 2.4% a year for a decade1, and the OECD and FAO expect poultry to keep growing faster than any other meat through 20346. If the growth simply continued at that pace, a rough extrapolation rather than a forecast, the world would pass 100 billion chickens a year sometime around 2034.
That growth is not guaranteed to be smooth. Bird flu has swept through poultry farms since 2021, and in the United States alone more than 206 million birds have died or been culled to stop it spreading since 2022, most of them egg-laying hens15. Keeping billions of genetically similar birds packed together gives a virus a lot of chances, and outbreaks like this seem likely to remain part of the cost of cheap chicken.
There are also early signs of alternatives. The first meat ever sold that did not come from a slaughtered animal was chicken, grown from cells in a bioreactor and served at a restaurant in Singapore in December 202016. The United States approved cultivated chicken for sale in 202317. So far it is sold in tiny amounts, a rounding error next to 78.5 billion birds. But if it ever becomes cheap enough, it is worth noting that chicken, the most slaughtered animal on Earth, is where the technology started.
Chickens make up about nine in ten of the 88 billion land animals slaughtered for meat each year1.
Every land animal slaughtered for meat, chickens included.
Land animals slaughtered for meat
Globally, this year
The rest of what the world raises and eats is in the food section.
