Peter Hurford gives a very rough set of numbers for how many animals are required to support a standard American diet and gets:
1⁄8 of a cow
1⁄8 of a pig
3 chickens
3 fish
Is this alive at any moment?
I don’t see these numbers in the article you quoted, and based on the claim 13.2 chickens for meat and an elasticity of 0.76 for chicken meat from Compassion by the Pound, that would put it at ~10 killed per year.
Also, these numbers are probably out of date and use less reliable data than more recent ones. You can look at the slaughter statistics from the USDA (check Historical and sum over), divide by the number of Americans (or non-veg Americans) and adjust with elasticities. Over 9.2 billion broiler chickens in 2019, 330 million Americans, so > 27 per American, and adjusting for elasticity, 20 per American.
This accounted for imports and exports and non-slaughter deaths, and got 7.9 billion chickens killed per year from Americans, so > 18 chickens killed per American per year after adjusting for elasticity.
Sorry, I forgot this would be crossposted here automatically and this version was (until just now) missing an edit I made just after publishing: “how many animals” should have been “how many continuously living animals”. Since animal lives on factory farms are net negative, and their ongoing suffering is a far bigger factor than their deaths, I don’t care about the number of individual animals but instead how many animal-days. So I wouldn’t see breeding pigs that produced twice as much meat and lived twice as long as an improvement, though perhaps you would?
The numbers are Hurford’s:
36 days of suffering via beef 8 days of suffering via dairy 44 days of suffering via pork 554 days of suffering via chicken meat 347 days of suffering via eggs 76 days of suffering via turkey 949 days of suffering via aquacultured fish
but expressed in the much more natural units of continuously living animals and not animal-days per human-years.
After quickly looking at the numbers you posted it doesn’t look like any of them change this by more than a factor of two, and don’t look like they would change the bottom line of the argument at all. Do you disagree?
but expressed in the much more natural units of continuously living animals and not animal-days per human-years.
Ok, makes sense. Thanks for the clarification!
After quickly looking at the numbers you posted it doesn’t look like any of them change this by more than a factor of two, and don’t look like they would change the bottom line of the argument at all. Do you disagree?
Is this alive at any moment?
I don’t see these numbers in the article you quoted, and based on the claim 13.2 chickens for meat and an elasticity of 0.76 for chicken meat from Compassion by the Pound, that would put it at ~10 killed per year.
Also, these numbers are probably out of date and use less reliable data than more recent ones. You can look at the slaughter statistics from the USDA (check Historical and sum over), divide by the number of Americans (or non-veg Americans) and adjust with elasticities. Over 9.2 billion broiler chickens in 2019, 330 million Americans, so > 27 per American, and adjusting for elasticity, 20 per American.
This accounted for imports and exports and non-slaughter deaths, and got 7.9 billion chickens killed per year from Americans, so > 18 chickens killed per American per year after adjusting for elasticity.
Some other calculations:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YuFD4v7DFBcM57eSA/consequences-of-animal-product-consumption-combined-model
https://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/
https://impartial-priorities.org/direct-suffering-caused-by-various-animal-foods.html
http://ethical.diet/
http://sandhoefner.github.io/animal_suffering_calculator
http://sandhoefner.github.io/omnivore.html
Sorry, I forgot this would be crossposted here automatically and this version was (until just now) missing an edit I made just after publishing: “how many animals” should have been “how many continuously living animals”. Since animal lives on factory farms are net negative, and their ongoing suffering is a far bigger factor than their deaths, I don’t care about the number of individual animals but instead how many animal-days. So I wouldn’t see breeding pigs that produced twice as much meat and lived twice as long as an improvement, though perhaps you would?
The numbers are Hurford’s:
but expressed in the much more natural units of continuously living animals and not animal-days per human-years.
After quickly looking at the numbers you posted it doesn’t look like any of them change this by more than a factor of two, and don’t look like they would change the bottom line of the argument at all. Do you disagree?
Ok, makes sense. Thanks for the clarification!
No, that seems right.