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.