Eighty-eight billion a year

The world slaughtered a staggering 87.9 billion land animals for meat in 2024, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)¹. That is about 2,790 animals every second and 241 million a day. At that pace, the world slaughters one land animal for every person alive roughly every five weeks³.

The count covers every kind of farm animal FAO tracks, from chickens and ducks to pigs, sheep, goats and cattle, as well as smaller numbers of rabbits, geese, turkeys and animals such as camels and horses. It counts animals killed for meat only.

Nine in ten are chickens

Chickens make up 78.5 billion of the total, or 89%. Ducks come a distant second at 4.2 billion, followed by pigs at 1.5 billion. Geese, sheep, rabbits, goats and turkeys each number between half a billion and a billion, and cattle come near the bottom at about 300 million¹.

Weighed as meat, the order turns over. Beef and buffalo make up about a fifth of the world’s meat, 77 million tonnes, from cattle and buffalo that together are well under 1% of the animals. Poultry supplies around two fifths, 146 million tonnes², and needs almost all of the animals to do it, because a chicken yields less than two kilograms of meat.

Four times as many per person

The number keeps rising, and much faster than the population. In 1961 the world slaughtered 8.4 billion land animals, and by 2024 that had grown 10.5-fold¹. Over the same years the population grew 2.7-fold³.

Most of the gap comes from what each person eats. Meat eating rises with income, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and FAO expect emerging economies to drive most of the growth to 2034⁴. More of that meat is also chicken, the smallest animal on the list, so each tonne takes more lives than it did when beef and pork made up a larger share.

A fifth of the animals in one country

China slaughters more land animals than any other country, 17.5 billion in 2024, about a fifth of the world total. The United States follows with 10.0 billion and Brazil with 6.6 billion¹.

These figures count where animals are slaughtered, which is not always where the meat is eaten¹. A country that exports a lot of meat carries some of other countries’ eating in its total.

What the count leaves out

Fish are not in this number, and they would dwarf it. A peer-reviewed estimate puts wild fish caught at between 1.1 and 2.2 trillion a year, around half of them ground into fishmeal and oil⁵. Fish farms add roughly 130 billion more, an estimate from the same researchers that has not yet been peer reviewed⁶.

Land animals are missing too. The egg industry kills around 7.8 billion male chicks a year, usually on the day they hatch, because the males of egg-laying breeds are of no use to it. This practice is called chick culling, and the figure comes from a model by the animal-advocacy group Faunalytics, because no official body counts them⁷. Animals that die on farms before reaching slaughter are not counted either.

Where animal slaughter is heading

Slaughter has grown about 2.3% a year over the past decade¹. If it simply kept growing at that pace, a rough extrapolation rather than a forecast, the world would pass 100 billion land animals a year around 2030.

There are reasons to think it could grow even faster than the meat itself. The OECD and FAO expect poultry to be the fastest-growing meat to 2034⁴, and every tonne of meat that shifts from beef or pork to chicken takes many more animals to produce. A world that eats the same amount of meat, but more of it as chicken, slaughters more animals every year.

There are forces pulling the other way too. In some high-income countries meat eating per person has stopped rising, a change the OECD and FAO link to concerns about animal welfare, the environment and health⁴. Cheaper plant-based and cultivated meat could one day take a real share of the market, though for now it is small. Growth in Asia and Africa still outweighs all of this, so the count is likely to keep rising for years to come.

The rest of what the world raises and eats is in the food section.