Animal Product Impact Scales: 2022 Update
In September 2020, we published our Animal Product Impact Scales, outlining how many lives and days of suffering go into U.S. consumption of animal products each day. The purpose of this resource is to help a wide range of people prioritize animal product substitutes. Since then, it’s been used by nonprofit organizations, new alt protein start-ups, and individuals to make better choices about meat reduction.
With this data, which you can find on our updated hub page, you can see the impact of replacing specific animal products on both a national and individual level.
In this blog post, we cover:
- The updates we’ve made,
- Our most frequently asked question about the results,
- Some of the ways you can use this data, and
- A brief overview of where the estimates come from.
We would also like to acknowledge and sincerely thank Clara Sanchez Garcia and Ali Ladak for volunteering many hours of their time for this project. We couldn’t have produced these resources without your support.
The Updates
The original estimates released in 2020 were rigorous, detailed, and—based on feedback we’ve received—well-used. That said, we have been able to make several improvements and updates in the past two years. These are:
- In the dairy estimates, we have now accounted for pre-slaughter mortality of male calves. Calves who are used for veal were already included in the beef estimates, but pre-slaughter mortality figures previously included only female dairy calves.
- Also in the dairy estimates, we have now accounted for milk volume lost during the production of cheese, yogurt, and ice cream. The loss ratio for these products is quite high (4:1 and up), so this is an important update. However, it did not change the ranking of dairy products relative to other animal products or bump milk from the top spot on the dairy list, so the only change in interpretation is for advocates interested in the dairy list specifically.
- We have also updated the estimates for fish products based on new analyses conducted by the Welfare Footprint Project, which provide stronger estimates of lifespan and mortality.
- We also updated the estimates for fish, shellfish, chicken, egg, and pork products to incorporate more recent slaughter statistics with respect to the number of “feeder fish” lives that go to each of these animal groups. These updates are slight because Fishcount’s estimate of global feeder fish numbers has not changed since our last analysis, only the FAO slaughter estimates that we use to calculate the number of fish consumed per farmed animal.
- Finally, all estimates are slightly affected by new FAO estimates of yield per animal for the U.S., which had generally increased a bit since 2018: a symptom of the animal agriculture industry’s harmful, ongoing quest for bigger and more productive animals.
Impact Of These Updates
Overall, these updates had mixed effects on product rankings. There were no huge changes in the top 10 lists, but a few products moved up, down, or off the list as a result of them.
On the Lives Taken impact scale, ham fell out of the top 10—though not very dramatically, as it only moved to 11th place. It took the place of breaded chicken breast and filets, previously ranked 11th but newly moved up to 10th. You may notice that a few other products moved up or down a few places but there were no larger changes and the top three remained the same: unbattered fish filets, chicken shreds and ground, and unbreaded chicken breasts/filets account for the most death at almost 14 million animal lives per day.
The top 10 products for Days of Suffering remain the same, though the order changed a bit. Most notably, our estimates for the impact of fish products on suffering increased substantially thanks to the Welfare Footprint Project’s analyses.
Hidden Deaths: Our Most Frequently Asked Question
The question we receive most often about our impact scales is why pig products are so high on the “lives taken” list. This is a great question because fishes’ and chickens’ smaller bodies mean that they tend to be the most affected by human consumption. That’s still the case here. The tricky part to notice is that our impact scales take into account ALL lives affected by human consumption of a product, not just the life of the animal directly being consumed. In the case of pigs, we learned that every pig life is accompanied by over 50 fish lives in the form of “feed fish.” With this update, we double-checked those numbers and indeed, Fishcount have estimated that between 460 billion and 1.1 trillion wild fish are reduced into fishmeal and fish oil per year. While fish oil doesn’t generally go to livestock, approximately 22% of the resulting fishmeal is fed to the 1.5 billion pigs who are slaughtered annually. With our updated slaughter statistics, this produces an estimate of 58 fish lives per pig life lost.
It’s not just pigs. That’s just where the math is most obvious. Fishes are also ground up and fed to chickens and even other fishes. Each of the broiler chickens who will be slaughtered in the U.S. this year will consume one fifth of a fish each over their short lives, while layer hens are fed just over one whole fish each, and farmed fish are fed a staggering 19 other fish over the course of their lives.
No matter how you think about it, this is a massive waste of life. Not only are humans eating higher on the food chain than we need to by consuming other animals, we’re multiplying the impact by feeding other animals to those animals first.
Ways To Use These Results
This is not a definitive list, but here are some of the ways we’ve heard of advocates using our data in the past two years:
- Welfare-Informed Alt Protein R&D Decisions
Many alt-protein companies—those exclusively focusing on plant-based or cultivated animal product substitutes—are motivated by animal protection, just as advocates in volunteer or nonprofit roles are. To help animals, we need to reduce consumer demand for animal products, and a big part of that is providing people with alternatives they’re willing and able to buy.
Deciding on your first or next alt product is a multi-pronged decision, including everything from feasibility of production, to consumer appeal, to whether there’s a market gap to fill. And any new product may help shift at least a few more people away from animal products, but using our scales is one way to determine where the biggest potential impacts for animals are.
You might want to focus on creating a delicious, affordable substitute for one of the products most responsible for loss of animal lives, or one of the most responsible for animal suffering. Or you might already have a focus area for your company, like pork alternatives or dairy alternatives, so you might want to focus next on the highest-impact product in your category for lives or suffering.
- Welfare-Informed Investment Decisions
While most animal advocates don’t work in the alt protein sector, some make an impact for animals through donations or even investments. Advice similar to above applies: These folks might want to support or invest in companies that are working on products responsible for a large number of animal lives or a lot of animal suffering. Alternatively, if there are particular issue areas in your region or market gaps you want to help fill, you could look to support companies working on products in that category that could save a lot of animal lives or days of suffering.
- Estimate The Animal Impact Of Green Government Policies
Many federal, state, and local governments have committed to more climate-friendly, plant-based initiatives over the past decade or two. For instance, you can read about local resolutions supporting plant-based or green procurement and Meatless Mondays in our recent report (Faunalytics, 2022).
While the focus of these laws and resolutions is often on mitigating the climate impact of diet, you may be able to demonstrate or even shape their additional benefit of reducing animal harm.
For this type of work you’ll likely need more than the top 10s or top 3s, so you may want to download the full lists from our project page on the Open Science Framework. Depending on the data available, this kind of estimate may require some additional calculations, so feel free to reach out to our research team for support.
- Reduce The Harm Of Your Own Diet
These scales can be eye-opening for individuals in terms of their own dietary impact as well. Even a single person can affect many animals in a year, let alone over the course of a lifetime. I love it whenever someone tells me that they’ve changed their diet based on the numbers these scales show.
If you’re a reducetarian or thinking of becoming one, which products are you cutting out first? A lot of people tend to start with “red meat” products because they’ve heard that pigs are as smart as dogs or that cow farts are a huge contributor to climate change. Whatever your reasons, the number of sentient creatures affected by your choices are hard to ignore.
If you’re looking for your next product to cut, you might want to take a look at which products harm the most animals: which ones are associated with the most suffering per serving or which provide the fewest servings per life.
And on the flip side, if you’re someone who says “I could go vegan if it weren’t for ________” where the blank might be bacon or cheese or donuts, these scales can help there too. Check our lists for that one thing—or handful of things—you feel you couldn’t go without. If it’s not on the top 3 lists for suffering or lives, you might have to download the full spreadsheet to find the specific numbers.
How many animals does that one (or two or three) product affect? Now, how does that compare to the number of animals affected by every other product on the list added together? You’ll see that going “vegan except for ______” can still have a huge positive impact on animals. Being “veganish” is harder to explain to others, but it might be the right step for you.
Where These Estimates Came From
Below is a simplified overview of the methodology by which we arrived at the estimates in the infographics. For a detailed description of every step and data source, see the full Methodology document.
First, we got reports of which animal products people eat from a nationally representative, in-person survey of over 8,000 people in the U.S. We then categorized every food people reported eating in terms of the animal products and product formats it used. For example, chili con carne was categorized as containing ground beef, and the average weight for the beef portion of chili con carne was estimated from standard serving sizes provided with the dataset.
We multiplied our estimates of how much of each product people consume by the number of animal lives and days of suffering that go into each kilogram of edible animal product, using data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), as well as a long list of articles and resources produced by industry, academics, or advocates — the most reliable and unbiased source we could find for each estimate. The full list of sources is available in our detailed Methodology document.
The number of animal lives and days of suffering that go into each kilogram of edible animal product differs substantially for beef, pork, chicken, turkey, dairy, eggs, fish, and shellfish. This was the most challenging part of the process, as those estimates have to incorporate all of the following calculations:
- Amount of edible product per animal,
- Amount of product loss between slaughter and consumption due to various factors,
- Pre-production mortality (because animals who die before producing a consumable product should still be accounted as losses),
- The number of “feed fish” who are fed to other animals (pigs, chickens, and other fish),
- The number of male chicks and male dairy calves who die,
- Average lifespan per animal (to calculate days of suffering), and
- Price elasticities due to changes in supply and demand if consumption levels change.
Finally, to ensure that the above calculations and eccentricities did not bias the results, we weighted the final consumption estimates to known USDA totals. This ensures that the totals by product (pork, eggs, etc.) are accurate, while all the steps in between provide important adjustments to our estimates of the impact of individual product formats (sausage, breaded cutlet etc.), which was the central goal of this analysis.
As one final note on the methodology, some readers may have encountered other impact estimates where subjective multipliers are applied to the amount of suffering experienced. We did not do so, treating each day of life as one day regardless of the quality of that life. Although we believe that differences in quality of life and suffering are probable, biases due to anthropomorphization or lack of sufficient data are also likely and, in our view, more problematic. It is worth noting that many of those animals for whom quality of life is likely lowest (e.g., layer hens, farmed fish) are already high on the impact list for other reasons. Any reader who would prefer to recalculate the estimates with additional subjective days of suffering can do so using the data and code files available on the Open Science Framework.
Taking It Further
Again, you can find everything in one place on our Animal Product Impact Scales hub page—that’s the one to bookmark. And don’t forget you can always get in touch if you need help interpreting or working with the data!