Animal Product Impact Scales

When it comes to days of suffering, and the sheer number of lives that go into food consumption, not all products carry the same weight — both figuratively and literally.

Faunalytics’ Animal Product Impact Scales provide a crucial, data-driven resource for understanding the true cost of animal product consumption. Through thorough and exhaustive calculations and data gather, our datasets help to quantify the days of suffering and number of lives impacted by various animal-derived foods. By meticulously analyzing factors such as the number of animals required per serving, their typical lifespan, and the conditions they endure, we offer a comprehensive picture of the welfare footprint of different products — and a roadmap to making the biggest impact with your advocacy.

Whether you’re an individual aiming to reduce your personal impact, an advocate strategizing for maximum effectiveness, or an insitution developing a plant-based procurement policy, these scales will help empower you to make informed decisions. They highlight which animal products contribute most significantly to suffering and death, allowing for targeted efforts that yield the greatest positive change for animals.

Methodology

The full documentation, sources, data, and code are available on the Open Science Framework.

This 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 United States. 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:

1. Amount of edible product per animal,
2. Amount of product loss between slaughter and consumption due to various factors,
3. Pre-production mortality (because animals who die before producing a consumable product should still be accounted as losses),
4. The number of “feeder fish” who are killed and fed to other animals (pigs, chickens, and other fish),
5. The number of male chicks and male calves who die as an indirect effect of farming hens and dairy cows,
6. Average lifespan per animal (to calculate days of suffering), and
7. 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 or contact us for support.

2022 Updates

The original estimates released in 2020 were rigorous, detailed, and—based on feedback we received—well-used. In 2022, several improvements and updates were made:

1. In the dairy estimates, we 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.
2. Also in the dairy estimates, we 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.
3. We 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. 
4. We 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 were 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.
5. Finally, all estimates were 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.

2026 Updates

In 2026, we adopted the same methodological approach described above, while updating our estimates with the most recently available data and improving the accuracy of our calculations. We also expanded this resource to include data from the United Kingdom. A detailed description of all of these updates, the data sources used, and the updated calculations can be found in the full Methodology Document.

U.S. Data Updates

The 2026 U.S. estimates draw on the most recent available data across all animal product categories. Key updates include:

• Dietary consumption figures were updated using the 2021–23 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).
• Supply figures were updated using the USDA’s Loss-Adjusted Food Availability datasets.
• Demand elasticity figures for beef, pork, and chicken were updated using estimates based on retail scanner data, which offer improved accuracy over the survey-based figures used previously.
• Feed fish calculations were revised to reflect updated estimates of how fishmeal is allocated across farmed animal species, most notably reducing the share attributed to pigs and chickens, and substantially increasing the share fed to fish. This update reduced the number of hidden deaths associated with pigs and chickens and increased the number of hidden deaths for fishes, compared to our last update. For this reason, we have removed our previous infographic on hidden deaths, and will write in more detail about these updated findings in an upcoming blog post.
• U.S. egg estimates now account for the practice of molting, in which hens’ laying cycles are extended across two seasons. Approximately 37% of U.S. egg farms practice molting, and accounting for this meaningfully affects both the lifespan and egg yield figures used in the calculations. Because molted hens produce more eggs per day of life than non-molted hens, the 2026 estimates reflect fewer days of suffering per kg of eggs compared to previous estimates.

U.K. Data Updates

U.K. estimates are included in APIS for the first time in 2026. These draw on:

• The 2019–23 National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS) for dietary consumption figures.
• DEFRA supply data for food availability figures.
• U.K.-specific sources for mortality rates, lifespans, and animal product yields across all nine product categories covered by APIS: beef, lamb, pork, chicken, turkey, fish, shellfish, dairy, and eggs.

Where U.K.-specific data were unavailable — for example, farmed turkey mortality rates — U.S. figures were used as a substitute, and this is noted in the full methods documentation.

Methodological Updates

One methodological correction in this edition improves the accuracy of the days of suffering estimates for both countries. The previous formula incorrectly multiplied indirect impacts by the lifespan of the primary animal. Indirect impacts include:

• Feed fish consumed during the production of other animal products.
• Animals that die before reaching slaughter age.
• Male chicks and calves disposed of in the egg and dairy industries.

In reality, the suffering of these animals is independent of the animal they’re associated with: a wild-caught anchovy used as feed suffers for one day regardless of whether it’s fed to a pig or a chicken. The corrected formula treats these indirect impacts separately, which affects days of suffering estimates across all product categories.

Comparing U.S. and U.K. Estimates

Despite drawing on different data sources and, in some cases, different modeling approaches, U.S. and U.K. estimates are broadly consistent with one another, which supports the validity of both models. Notable differences include:

• Fish estimates differ the most in animal lives per kg, because fish consumption varies meaningfully between the two countries in terms of which species are consumed, and species vary considerably in body size, lifespan, and yield.
• Dairy estimates show a larger percentage gap than most other categories, but this is expected: dairy’s impact per kg is so small that even modest differences in underlying parameters produce larger percentage gaps. Dairy remains the lowest-impact product by a wide margin in both countries.
• All other categories fall within a range that is reassuring for the robustness of the methodology across different national data sources.

Research Team

The original analysis was performed by Ali Ladak (MA), Clara Sanchez Garcia (MDS), and Jo Anderson (PhD), with additional support provided by Joe Millum (PhD). The 2026 update was led by Chris Bryant (PhD) at Bryant Research, with support and feedback provided by Allison Troy (PhD) at Faunalytics. We are grateful for financial support provided by grants from Coefficient Giving and the Food System Research Fund. The APIS hub and infographics were re-designed as part of the 2026 update by karol orzechowski.

Our sincere thanks to the many people who provided feedback on the estimation: Tom Billington, Marco Cerqueira, and Haven King-Nobles of the Fish Welfare Initiative; Galina Hale and David Meyer of the Food System Research Fund; Lewis Bollard of Open Philanthropy; and Saulius Šimčikas of Rethink Priorities.