Table Now Available for Land Animal Slaughter Counts (2019-09-09)

We now have available on the site a credibly sourced table showing the estimated annual slaughter counts of land animals by country, animal, and usage. Although the latest FAO data is from 2017, it can be used as approximations of current slaughter numbers.

Here is the story of how this came about:

Months ago, I looked for a table showing the number of land animals slaughtered by country, species, and usage (e.g, Meat, Milk, or Eggs). I had seen various numbers quoted on various web sites, often without any indication as to source, and sometimes with only a secondary source. Sometimes an organization was cited as the source without providing specifics.

After some research, I found there was a single source for such data. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The FAO maintains data sets and publishes the methodology on how the stats were derived. The FAO latest data on animals slaughtered is from 2017.

This was a good find, but the data was not presented in a way that could be easily consumed. It would take a lot a reformatting and transposing to make it presentable. There was a lot of data, and doing this manually was a multistep process that could have taken weeks. So I starting writing a program to take care of one of the steps in this process. The program would transpose data in a spreadsheet. Due to other demands on my time, I hired someone to finish the program.