Real-time estimates of animals consumed by humans worldwide

https://www.humanconsumption.live/

by speckx • 6 months ago

48 71 6 months ago

CurrentB9• 6 months ago

I went vegan six months ago after being exposed to numbers like this and thinking about it a bit. In particular, imagining extending the empathy I felt for my pets to all these other unseen animals that really aren't much different. I thought I'd try it for a week to see how hard it was. It was so easy that I never looked back. These numbers all could be pretty close to zero and we humans would still thrive just as much as we are now, but causing much less suffering to other beings.

77773322153• 6 months ago

Would you raise your own animals to kill and eat? Animals eat other animals, it's nature.

xnx3• 6 months ago

Murder and rape are also part of nature, but humans can reflect and consider the effects of their actions in ways other animals can't.

CurrentB9• 6 months ago

Personally that would be even worse for me, though I understand maybe "better" on a societal scale by some metrics. To feed a being every day and care for it, to gain its trust, to appreciate their individuality, then to have them killed when they reach some fraction of its potential lifespan, I just don't want to do that. I'm perfectly happy eating legumes.

hshdhdhj4444• 6 months ago

Animals do a whole bunch of things to other animals we wouldn’t consider acceptable.

Cannibalism, eating your young, rape, etc.

I’m not sure why killing for food is the one place we should choose to define our values and ethics based on what animals in the wild do.

paprikanotfound2• 6 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

mmooss3• 6 months ago

There are many good arguments I think, but not this one. Nature is eating your neighbor's children; it's starvation, epidemics, and massive forest fires; it's unrestrained homicide and rape; it's leaving your physically weakened child to die; it's eating the head of your spouse; it's survival of the fittest; ... (you get my point).

The other animals in nature are not my standard of behavior. In a sense, the point of any culture is to exceed nature and by as much as possible.

midtake• 6 months ago

Yes. That is far more harmonious with nature than using machines of industry to enslave animal species and slaughter them on profit-driven schedules.

Don't get me wrong, I eat meat, but I also understand that the grand majority of fellow meat-eaters have never hunted or reared livestock. Instead they are complete soyboys (ironic isn't it) who merely consume the output from the machine. These same beta cucks will open their mouths to screech "but animals eat animals in the wild!" Completely missing how unnatural an industrialized slaughter machine is.

The only reason they are enslaved is that they lack organization and understanding. Had they those two, they could kill us all.

barbazoo3• 6 months ago

Even just being aware of one’s privilege to eat animals or even animal products and the impact on other living beings for our “pleasure”. A little more humility would go a long way in terms of animal welfare.

MisterTea• 6 months ago

one’s privilege to eat animals

What privileges us vs a crow, catfish or lion?

rmah3• 6 months ago

I disagree.

CurrentB9• 6 months ago

With what exactly?

blell• 6 months ago

I understand this kind of people is allergic to “per capita”, but really, showing a list of consumption by region when the regions are of such different sizes is next to worthless.

barbazoo3• 6 months ago

Per capita would be great. The absolute numbers are still mind boggling.

welferkj• 6 months ago

I'm "allergic to per capita" specifically in cases where it doesn't matter but keeps getting brought up as a bad faith retort.

As an example, it doesn't matter who emits CO2 or where from, since we're all emitting it into the same air, and the only thing that matters is the absolute amount. Similarly, I imagine it's cold comfort for domestic animals in subsaharan Africa that their torturers, rapists, and murderers are marginally less prolific than those in other regions.

xnx3• 6 months ago

I don't consume animal products, but -while well intentioned- I'm not sure a dashboard with these types of huge numbers does much as an advocacy tool.

People are ill equipped to put such large numbers in context, let alone ~40 of them.

Like a slide deck, better to limit to one number and one message per page(/screen). Otherwise, it's just a data dump.

graemep2• 6 months ago

I do not see the point of large numbers. If its not OK to eat meat, then its not OK to eat one. If is OK, why does scale make it not OK?

I did not expect Asia to be quite so dominant. I did expect, but interesting to see confirmation, that the Americas grow so much grain for animal feed.

jampekka• 6 months ago

The scale is highly relevant for environmental issues.

https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture

Edit: replaced scattered numbers with a proper source.

rmah3• 6 months ago

Most people live in asia. thus most foods are both produced and consumed in... you guessed it asia.

seanwilson• 6 months ago

There's also the significant cost to climate change because growing crops to feed to animals instead of eating crops directly loses the majority of calories, but it gets ignored because doing something about it is going to be unpopular:

https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture

More than three-quarters of global agricultural land is used for livestock, despite meat and dairy making up a much smaller share of the world's protein and calories.
Despite the vast land used for livestock animals, they contribute quite a small share of the global calorie and protein supply. Meat, dairy, and farmed fish provide just 17% of the world’s calories and 38% of its protein.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

Livestock are fed from two sources – lands on which the animals graze and land on which feeding crops, such as soy and cereals, are grown. How much would our agricultural land use decline if the world adopted a plant-based diet?
Research suggests that if everyone shifted to a plant-based diet, we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%.

zahlman3• 6 months ago

but it gets ignored because doing something about it is going to be unpopular

It gets talked about all the time.

CurrentB9• 6 months ago

Do you think it widely leads to behavior changes among people that support environmental causes?

davidmurdoch• 6 months ago

Something interesting to see is a version of if this that displayed a % of total animals instead of absolutes.

nickkell2• 6 months ago

What would make it interesting? Most of the animal mass on earth is livestock for human consumption. More animals are reared to replace the ones that are slaughtered.

It might be interesting for wild fish, but I'm not sure if there are accurate numbers for the wild populations remaining.

schlap• 6 months ago

Hell yeah, live leaderboard of humans.

Add a K/D Ratio next plz

Cu3PO42• 6 months ago

I personally find the "animals killed since you opened this page" number to be the most unsettling. YTD numbers are so large, I find them hard to process.

If you choose to eat meat, please be aware of the conditions most of these animals exist in and how they die. I'll spare you more numbers, because they don't do the cruel reality justice anyway. Instead, I'll leave you with some video material: https://animalequality.org/blog/factory-farming-facts/

margalabargala3• 6 months ago

The quantity of animals killed scales inversely with size. Most of the "animals killed since opening this page" are shrimp.

I am open to hearing evidence that shrimp have the capacity to care about the conditions in which they live and die but as of now I don't believe they do.

slifin• 6 months ago

I am going to continue eating meat and plants but that's because the choice between eating plants or meat misses the point

The issue here is the industrialisation of the land and the shortcuts that farmers are doing that essentially kill the land, animals and plants in a way that is unmaintainable

The way this should work is animals should be herded on to land to eat and poo, once the grasses are nearly eaten the animals should be rotated on to other fields, the new grass regrows in this fresh environment because it has no competitor and plenty of fertiliser this process kills weeds and rejuvenates soil ready for planting

This mimics the nomadic lives that early humans would have led, following their herds of animals to fresh new pastures

Then the farmers worked out they didn't need animals to do this process they could just plow their fields and then that gets rid of the weeds, not quite as good as animals doing it in terms of soil health but effective and quick

Then the farmers were sold weed killers which meant they didn't need to plow their field, they just needed to buy GMO glyphosate resistant seeds and flood their fields with glyphosate, some types of crops are even killed close to harvest with glyphosate so it'll be in your food at high rates for certain crops

The problem with this approach is glyphosate is assumed safe because its mechanism for killing weeds is based on a system we don't directly have as humans, but our gut bacteria do, it also competes with glycine in our bodies used to create proteins, I wouldn't want to drink glyphosate from the bottle but it's being added to my food so effectively I do that

It also degrades the soil quality into dust, instead of being full of earth worms which would normally feed the birds, the local wildlife etc

So these mono culture fields are just turning huge swathe of land into sterile dust bowls that exacerbate climate change

Then these crops are either sold directly to me as a plant eater or given to the animals to make them bulk up and sick

As someone who eats a lot of meat I want my animals to be grass fed (or their natural diet) I don't want them to have to take antibiotics because the farmer needed to bulk them up with cheap glyphosate laced mono culture grains and cereals to get more profit out of the animal

So if you are vegan you cannot just wipe your hands of this problem because you're still contributing by eating these mono crops - What we really need from consumers is for them to care how their plants and animals are raised and not accept glyphosate or other weed killers in their supply chains

Animals should be pasture raised from a moral point of view but also a health and climate point of view

CWIZO• 6 months ago

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-dam...

Pasture raised animals are the most damaging way to raise animals for food when it comes to the environment. You've got it backwards here.

doodlebugging5• 6 months ago

I thought it was a page about recipes for cannibals or tuberculosis tracking from the name. Luckily the title helped clarify the misleading website name.

Y'all some hungry mofos. That counter zipped thru 13 million poor tasty, little critters while I was on that page. The cattle numbers seemed low relative to others. Maybe because they are larger and each feeds more individuals.

What about normal game animals like deer, squirrel, wild turkey, rabbit, dove, quail, pigeon, etc? I think this site only gives a glimpse of the true scope of animal deliciousness.

I also disagree with the numbers since most look they are wild-ass guesses intended to inflate or mislead so as to cause those of us who consume all this delicious meat to switch to more sensitive plants, insects, or algae, or fungi.

Imagine the numbers you'd have to report if you were accurately reporting seed consumption of typical grains, legumes, leafy vegetables, herbs (which are delicious with meats), and spices and all the other things that vegetarians or vegans profess such deep attractions to that they can ignore all the destruction wrought by the agricultural practices relevant to their foodstocks. Some of the agricultural lands being tallied are used for growing crops like soybeans for consumption as pseudo-meat by vegans who couldn't be morally outraged enough about habitat loss for their beany things to worry about their own destructive impact on mother earth.

What happens to the collective consciousness of a fungal colony when someone comes along and rips off a few warty things for their supper? Do you think that the fungus stores a memory of the event and the participants so that once they finally hit the dirt that memory can pass along the subterranean chain so that the fungus can move in return the favor?

zahlman3• 6 months ago

I thought it was a page about recipes for cannibals or tuberculosis tracking from the name. Luckily the title helped clarify the misleading website name.

Agreed. It's called "human consumption", but it neither relates to the consumption of humans, nor the phenomenon in humans called "consumption", nor does it cover all consumption by humans, or even all food consumption.

Y'all some hungry mofos.

Less than one animal per person per day, and the overwhelming majority of them are fish and invertebrate sea life (two thirds of that in the Asia-Pacific region).

doodlebugging5• 6 months ago

It takes a lot of small sea critters to make on big fish like a tuna.

If we weren't supposed to eat all this stuff then why did Jesus feed those hungry people in Matthew (14:14-21) bread (vegan food) and fish (non-vegan food)? Was he just covering all his bases or was it because fish really aren't meat?

And if fish aren't meat then that website needs to account for that since the numbers would definitely seem to be greatly exaggerated on top of probably being invented.

dang• 6 months ago

OK, we've taken cannibal connotations out of the title above.

(Submitted title was "HumanConsumption.Live – Real-Time Global Animal Consumption Stats". I've replaced it with a phrase from the subtitle.)

doodlebugging5• 6 months ago

The post title makes more sense now. The website name is a bit misleading but is out of your control. Leading with that initially created the opportunity to lampoon them in a good-natured sort of way.

If anyone's feelings were hurt by anything I posted here today I remind you to think of the plants. Mine have spent more than a week nearly frozen under a thick blanket of sleet waiting for me to have the opportunity to remove their cold weather protections so that they can once again feel the warmth of Mr Sunshine for a few hours before being covered again to protect them from the hard freeze we'll have again tonight. I love my plants and they grow well for me. And then I eat them, all the edible parts anyway, sometimes with meat but not always.

fooker4• 6 months ago

If these numbers seem extraordinarily high to you, try and estimate the scale of deforestation it would take to replace all this food with grains and vegetables.

(Hint: about 5-10x the available fertile land on earth)

Uriopass• 6 months ago

What do you think those animals eat?

CurrentB9• 6 months ago

Someone else linked these in the replies, but that's simply not true. Most land taken up to grow plants is used to inefficiently feed livestock. Feeding humans plants only would be much much more efficient in terms of land use.

https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

fooker4• 6 months ago

Most land taken up to grow plants is used to inefficiently feed livestock.

Because it is just not suitable for growing crops that humans can realistically consume. If you can figure out a way to change this at scale, it'll be a discovery on par with Haber's process w.r.t. impact on human civilization.

I think we can eventually get there, as evidenced by billionaires and real estate companies buying up bad farmland over the last decade or so.

macbr• 6 months ago

You don’t have to keep feeding the chicken/pigs/etc. if you stop eating chicken/pigs/etc. Most livestock is fed food specifically grown to feed livestock.

lucyjojo• 6 months ago

water lentils

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMEMC74OxAQ

fooker4• 6 months ago

Neat, didn't know about this.

pseudohadamard• 6 months ago

Dammit, misread the title and was looking forward to a count of humans consumed by animals.

Real-time estimates of animals consumed by humans worldwide

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