Overview

Faunalytics has released a new set of Animal Product Impact Scales, identifying which animal product formats (out of 98 categories) cause the most days of farmed animal suffering and cost the most animal lives to feed the United States.

This analysis takes into account both animals who are directly consumed and those who are fed to another farmed animal, die before they can produce a consumable product, or are slaughtered because they are considered “useless” to the agriculture industry.

The Results

We created the following scales, ranking each animal product by its impact on animals in terms of total U.S. daily consumption. Full methodological details are presented in the subsequent section.

1) The products that cause the most days of animal suffering (first image) and animal deaths (second image) to feed the U.S. population per day. Top 10s pictured; full lists in this spreadsheet.

2) The products per category (i.e. chicken products, fish products, etc.) that cause the most days of animal suffering (first image) and animal deaths (second image) to feed the U.S. population per day. Top 3s pictured; full lists in this spreadsheet.

3) The most impactful products for consumers to reduce animal suffering (first image) and lives taken (second image) on a per-serving basis. Top 10s pictured; full lists in this spreadsheet.

A reminder that each of these scales is also available at https://faunalytics.org/animal-product-impact-scales/.

Methodology

Author: Ali Ladak, MA

This is a copy of our methodology document, which is also available on the OSF.

This section outlines Faunalytics’ methodology for estimating the number of animal lives that would be saved and the days of suffering that would be avoided if various animal food products were replaced. This was estimated for two different use cases:

If individual animal food products were replaced in the U.S. for one day, and
If an individual replaced a single serving of various animal food products in their diet with non-animal alternatives.

Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) were used to create total daily consumption estimates using R. Calculations estimating the impact of consumption on animals can be found in an Excel workbook entitled Animal Product Impacts - Calculations Workbook. These were incorporated with the total consumption estimates using R. All s...