Hi Stijn, Interesting post! I have a few questions about your meat-to-animal conversions.
1. In the “Deathprint of meat” section you clearly cite the sources for the meat-to-emissions conversions, but not the meat-to-animal conversions. From reading further down the piece it seems they probably come from Saja, K. (2013). Is that correct?
2. Saja (2013) seems to calculate 2 kg of chicken meat for “Average animal products per one animal life”, which would be 0.5 chickens per 1kg though in your table you have 0.667 for animals killed per kg meat for chicken meat. I think that 0.667 is Saja’s figure for Fish (1.5kg of meat per 1 fish)?
3. If you did use Saja (2013), I wonder if you could elaborate on why, especially since as you note it “excludes the animals used as feed (e.g. fish meal and insect meal given to farm animals).” One could also use the conversion factors from Faunalytics (2020) which I believe do include feed fish (here 1kg of chicken meat would be associated with 0.87 animal deaths). There are of course also other more recent conversions Warren (2018),Hurford (2014) for number of animal deaths, and for days of life (or suffering) e.g. Drescher (2017), Tomasik (2007).
my meat-to-animal conversions were not based on Saja, but simply on the weight of edible meat produced by an animal. For chickens, I used the slightly more conservative value of 1.5 kg edible meat per broiler chicken, instead of Saja’s 2 kg. That means 1⁄1.5=0.66 animals/kg. Perhaps broiler chickens in the US grow heavier and are closer to Saja’s 2 kg per chicken?
Haven’t thought about using those other sources like Faunalitics. Thanks for mentioning it.
Hi Stijn,
Interesting post!
I have a few questions about your meat-to-animal conversions.
1. In the “Deathprint of meat” section you clearly cite the sources for the meat-to-emissions conversions, but not the meat-to-animal conversions. From reading further down the piece it seems they probably come from Saja, K. (2013). Is that correct?
2. Saja (2013) seems to calculate 2 kg of chicken meat for “Average animal products per one animal life”, which would be 0.5 chickens per 1kg though in your table you have 0.667 for animals killed per kg meat for chicken meat. I think that 0.667 is Saja’s figure for Fish (1.5kg of meat per 1 fish)?
3. If you did use Saja (2013), I wonder if you could elaborate on why, especially since as you note it “excludes the animals used as feed (e.g. fish meal and insect meal given to farm animals).” One could also use the conversion factors from Faunalytics (2020) which I believe do include feed fish (here 1kg of chicken meat would be associated with 0.87 animal deaths). There are of course also other more recent conversions Warren (2018), Hurford (2014) for number of animal deaths, and for days of life (or suffering) e.g. Drescher (2017), Tomasik (2007).
Hi Neil,
my meat-to-animal conversions were not based on Saja, but simply on the weight of edible meat produced by an animal. For chickens, I used the slightly more conservative value of 1.5 kg edible meat per broiler chicken, instead of Saja’s 2 kg. That means 1⁄1.5=0.66 animals/kg. Perhaps broiler chickens in the US grow heavier and are closer to Saja’s 2 kg per chicken?
Haven’t thought about using those other sources like Faunalitics. Thanks for mentioning it.