The Animal Clock

The Animal Clock tracks the number of animals that have been killed for food this year in the United States. At the moment I wrote this sentence, that number for ten months of 2025 was: 46,092,203,868.

Yes, that is 46 billion! Just in the U.S. alone. Here is a break down of this number from The Animal Clock website:

How many animals are killed for food in the US each year?

The United States Department of Agriculture reports that 9.76 billion land animals were slaughtered in 2020:

Chickens: 9,346,660,000

Turkeys: 223,003,000

Cattle (incl. calves): 33,242,000

Pigs: 131,563,000

Ducks: 22,484,000

Sheep (incl. lambs): 2,225,000

Aquatic animal deaths are challenging to calculate since these lives are measured in tons. A very thorough analysis completed by Counting Animals estimated that 3.8 billion finned fish and 43.1 billion shellfish were killed to support the U.S. food supply in 2013. Total U.S. fish landings remained flat at these levels at least through 2018. Taken together, more than 55 billion land and sea animals die annually to support the U.S. food supply. Adding in bycatch (sea creatures caught and discarded--injured or dead) and feed fish, the total number jumps substantially.

To put this in perspective, during World War II--the deadliest conflict in human history--more than 60 million people were killed over 6 years. The same number of animals die in support of the American food supply every ten hours.

How many animals die for food in the United States every second?

Land animals only (USDA 2020 slaughter + imports - exports + pre-slaughter deaths):

Every year: 8,533,141,000

Every day: 23,378,000

Every hour: 974,100

Every minute: 16,234

Every second: 271

Inclusive of land and aquatic animals:

Every year: 55,429,141,000

Every day: 151,888,000

Every hour: 6,328,000

Every minute: 105,480

Every second: 1,758

Please note that all of the above numbers are for the United States. When you add in numbers from the rest of the world, it becomes even more staggering. In a different article called "How Many Animals Are Killed for Food Every Day?" the author, Seth Millstein, says that it is an "astronomical number." He writes:

"Every year, humans around the world eat 360 million metric tons of meat. That’s a lot of animals — or more precisely, a lot of dead animals. At any given point, there are 23 billion animals in factory farms, and countless more being farmed or caught in the sea. As a result, the number of animals killed for food every day is almost too large of a number to comprehend....

"Every 24 hours, between 3.4 and 6.5 billion animals are killed for food. That comes to a lower-end estimate of 1.2 trillion animals killed every year. That’s a positively staggering number. For contrast, anthropologists estimate that the total number of human beings who’ve ever existed is just 117 billion."

I know that trying to comprehend these numbers is somewhat like trying to grasp the astronomical distances between the stars or the numbers of galaxies in the universe. When we start talking about billions of light years and billions of galaxies, our minds don't really have a chance. In all honesty, when if comes to these types of huge numbers—especially when it comes to animals raised for food—we really need to step back a bit from our minds iand just let the magnitude sink down into our beings. And then we may be able to really understand them—with our hearts.

There is much more—information, statistics, and profound thoughts—on the websites I cited for this post. I urge you to check them out now: Animal Clock and Sentient Media.

Mahalo for reading. Aloha...