+1 to reporting numbers of animals instead of tonnage or biomass. The OWID meat and dairy production page does have a ānumbers of animals slaughteredā section, so it would be great for that to be expanded both to other large numbers of animals (like various fish species, crustaceans, invertebrates) and beyond slaughter (such as alive at any one time).
Here are some articles with sources of such data. I havenāt really looked into how hard they would be to maintain and update. It is biased towards data collected by Rethink Priorities staff because it was the easiest I had to hand, but hopefully others can add anything major I missed:
+1 to reporting numbers of animals instead of tonnage or biomass. The OWID meat and dairy production page does have a ānumbers of animals slaughteredā section, so it would be great for that to be expanded both to other large numbers of animals (like various fish species, crustaceans, invertebrates) and beyond slaughter (such as alive at any one time).
Here are some articles with sources of such data. I havenāt really looked into how hard they would be to maintain and update. It is biased towards data collected by Rethink Priorities staff because it was the easiest I had to hand, but hopefully others can add anything major I missed:
Recent estimates put the total number of animals on earth at around a sextillion (Schukraft 2019a) - includes annelids and nematodes iirc
Sentience Instituteās (2019) farmed animal estimate : 69B to 254B land animals & fish
Lewis Bollardās (2017) farmed animal numbers based on FAO land animal stats and Fishcount farmed fish projections, compiled here.
Estimates of global captive vertebrate numbers (Å imÄikas 2020a)
Rodents farmed for pet snake food (Å imÄikas 2020b) *between 51 and 167 billion farmed fishes were slaughtered for food globally in 2017
Fish Groups Utilized by Humans (Fish Welfare Initiative 2020)
35-150 billion fish are raised in captivity to be released into the wild every year (Å imÄikas 2019a) *[1.1 trillion fish are already killed for fishmeal (Mood & Brooke 2019),]
Fish used as live bait by recreational fishermen (Å imÄikas 2018)
Lewis Bollardās (2021) insect farming newsletter
Silk production: global scale and animal welfare issues (Rowe 2021)
1 trillion to 1.2 trillion insects are raised on farms annually for food and animal feed (Rowe 2020a)
The scale of direct human impact on invertebrates (Rowe 2020b)
Global cochineal production: scale, welfare concerns, and potential interventions (Rowe 2020c)
It can be estimated that between 2.9B to 7.7B snails were slaughtered for their meat worldwide in 2016 (Waldhorn 2020)
At any given time there are more than a trillion managed honey bees (Schukraft 2019b) *210-530 billion farmed shrimps/āprawns. *43-75 billion farmed crayfish, crabs and lobsters
An upcoming report on shrimp numbers from Daniela R. Waldhorn.
Also note these Accuracy issues in FAO animal numbers (Å imÄikas 2019b)