Ducks are the second most slaughtered land animal on the planet, but campaigns against the consumption of duck meat are rare. This blog explores what it would take to put ducks on animal advocates’ agenda.
In discussions of industrial animal agriculture, chickens dominate. Their numbers are so vast, with more than 76 billion individuals slaughtered globally in 2023, that they’ve become the central subject of many animal advocacy campaigns, especially in an Effective Altruism framework that places a premium on the quantity (where chickens sit alongside fishes and invertebrates). Indeed, the vast majority of animal advocates already know that chickens are the most slaughtered land animal by a large margin.
The quiet second place that rarely enters the conversation of global animal slaughter is a species that few animal advocates regularly consider: ducks. According to the FAO, nearly 4.2 billion ducks were slaughtered in 2023 alone. That’s more than 10 times the number of cows, more than five times the number of sheep, and more than two times the number of pigs slaughtered globally the same year. This is an illustrative example of the small-bodied animal problem. Chickens have already brought this into focus: because they’re small, more of them are needed to produce the same volume of meat, leading to astronomical slaughter figures. Ducks fall into the same category. Compared to cows or pigs, they don’t yield much meat per individual, which means many more individuals are needed to meet demand.
The difference is that ducks don’t occupy the same cultural space as chickens or other farmed animals — and despite being the second most slaughtered land animal on the planet, ducks remain relatively invisible in the public consciousness. They’re not as symbolically loaded as cows or pigs, not as omnipresent (on menus or in popular culture) as chickens, and not as “cute” as lambs. However, their suffering is real, industrial, and routine.
Learn more in the full post on the Faunalytics website: https://faunalytics.org/why-dont-more-animal-advocates-talk-about-ducks/
Huh, I didn't realize this. My guess is that this is largely because most animal advocacy projects are based in the West, and most ducks are farmed in Asia. From: https://worldostats.com/animals-wildlife/duck-population-by-country/
Helpful chart! That's what the authors concluded as well: