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Wow this is so big! Congratulations! Thank you for doing this.
New page on animal welfare on Our World in Data
1 min read
These updates from Our World in Data are likely the most valuable emails that land in my inbox. Thanks!
Our team at Our World in Data just launched a new page on animal welfare! There you can find a brand new Animal Welfare Data Explorer, 22 interactive charts, and 4 new articles:
On Our World in Data, we cover many topics related to reducing human suffering: alleviating poverty, reducing child and maternal mortality, curing diseases, and ending hunger.
But if we aim to reduce total suffering, society’s ability to reduce this in other animals – which feel pain, too – also matters.
This is especially true when we look at the numbers: every year, humans slaughter more than 80 billion land-based animals for farming alone. Most of these animals are raised in factory farms, often in painful and inhumane conditions.
Estimates for fish are more uncertain, but when we include them, these numbers more than double.
These numbers are large – but this also means that there are large opportunities to alleviate animal suffering by reducing the number of animals we use for food, science, cosmetics, and other industries and improving the living conditions of those we continue to raise.
On this page, you can find all of our data, visualizations, and writing on animal welfare.
Great work – this looks really useful!
Minor comment: A few years ago, I looked into estimates of the ratio of animal lives lost to a kilogram of animal protein. One of the facts that were really striking to me was how much the ratio has changed over time in the US for many animal protein products (e.g., dairy cows produce significantly more milk now than they used to). Given how much the ratio has changed over time, it seems likely that there is also a fair bit of heterogeneity between countries. For the OWID charts that display "Animal lives lost per kilogram of product", "Animal lives lost per kilogram of product, including indirect deaths", and "Kilograms of meat produced per animal", it might therefore be worth adding one more sentence in the description clarifying whether the estimates are for the US, the world, or something else. One could of course find this information by clicking on the source, but it may not occur to everyone that the ratios may differ between countries.
Thanks again for posting this!