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 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:

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.

2025 Updates

Research Team

This analysis was performed by Ali Ladak (MA), Clara Sanchez Garcia (MDS), and Jo Anderson (PhD), with additional support provided by Joe Millum (PhD). We are grateful for financial support provided by a grant from the Food System Research Fund. 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.

2025 data updates to the APIS were contributed by Faunalytics’ Data Analyst & Visual Coordinator Aro Roseman, with design support from Resource Director karol orzechowski.