Land Animal Slaughter by Country

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has an excellent dataset that looks at, well, food and agricultural production since 1961 (https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QCL ). This also includes data on the number and type of animals killed in each country. 

To help visualize the magnitude of the slaughter and changes over time, I created the above dashboard.^[1] You can find the interactive version at: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/jeffrey.haines/viz/AnimalSlaughterbyCountry2/Dashboard1?publish=yes. Note that in the interactive dashboard you can select multiple animals and/or countries.^[2]

In comparing across countries, we can see great differences in the number of animals killed per person. In Germany, not exactly a country known for vegetarianism, for example, 8.7 land animals were killed per person in 2021. Compare that with the giants USA (28.88) and Brazil (29.7). If the US and Brazil adopted diets more like Germany's, a significant amount of animal slaughter (and suffering) would be avoided. 

One thing I was struck by is how much of the increase in animal slaughter was driven by people killing more chickens. It is also interesting to note that chicken slaughter is moderately correlated (r = 0.45) with GDP per capita, but the slaughter of some other types of animals like geese, ducks, and goats have no correlation or a negative correlation with higher income levels.

We can also see that it is not just that there are more people - on average, people have been eating a lot more animals since 1961, with chickens bearing the brunt of almost all of that increase.

 In any event, if you decide to play around with the dashboards or graphs, I would love to hear if you uncover any insights or surprises or if there is anything related to animal the animal slaughter statistics that you would want visualized.

1. ^{^}

   This visualization was created as part of a paid work trial with Faunalytics.

2. ^{^}

   Countries have dissolved and formed in the decades since 1961, which creates some complexities in visualizing the data. For smaller countries that disintegrated (like Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia), I simply omitted their animal slaughter statistics from the visualization rather than attempt to apportion their animal slaughter statistics to their descendant countries. These countries were small enough that this did not noticeably affect global statistics. Omitting the slaughter statistics of the Soviet Union, however, created a misleading appearance of a sudden increase in the number of animals slaughtered in the early 1990s, when the USSR dissolved and its constituent republics gained independence. To avoid creating this impression, and since the FAO data does have breakdowns for specific Soviet republics, I assign all of the USSR's slaughter statistics to Russia.