One group that is probably pretty small but isn’t listed here—animals in wildlife rehabilitation clinics: this page says 8k to 9k animals (I’m guessing mostly vertebrates?) enter clinics in Minnesota every year. If that scales by land area for the contiguous United States, that would be 270k − 305k animals per year in the US, so maybe a few million globally? But that’s just a guess from the first good source I saw.
On pet shelters—I used to work at one, and every month, we reported our current animal population (along with a lot of other stats), to this organization - https://shelteranimalscount.org/ - I think their data could probably be used to get a very accurate estimate of animals currently in shelters in the US.
Good point, I forgot about them. I’ve heard that they purchase frozen mice to feed animals at these clinics. So these clinics may also increase the number of farmed rodents by increasing the demand for them.
EDIT: I’ve edited the article so now it mentions wildlife rehabilitation clinics
This really awesome and helpful! Thanks Saulius!
One group that is probably pretty small but isn’t listed here—animals in wildlife rehabilitation clinics: this page says 8k to 9k animals (I’m guessing mostly vertebrates?) enter clinics in Minnesota every year. If that scales by land area for the contiguous United States, that would be 270k − 305k animals per year in the US, so maybe a few million globally? But that’s just a guess from the first good source I saw.
On pet shelters—I used to work at one, and every month, we reported our current animal population (along with a lot of other stats), to this organization - https://shelteranimalscount.org/ - I think their data could probably be used to get a very accurate estimate of animals currently in shelters in the US.
Good point, I forgot about them. I’ve heard that they purchase frozen mice to feed animals at these clinics. So these clinics may also increase the number of farmed rodents by increasing the demand for them.
EDIT: I’ve edited the article so now it mentions wildlife rehabilitation clinics