The Animal Agriculture industry is very inefficient and “wastes” many animals’ lives by catching them from the wild or breeding them into existence, but then not using them.
When we discuss the scale of animal agriculture, we often talk in terms of the billions of individuals bred and slaughtered to satisfy human demand for animal flesh, secretions, and skins. However, there is an often-ignored hidden facet to this global machine that receives far less scrutiny: the amount of sentient life that animal agriculture “wastes”. By this, we mean all those sentient beings (any living organism who is a member of the Animal Kingdom) who are bred into existence or captured from the wild by the industry, but who are treated as surplus, discarded, or killed without ever being used for the primary purpose for which they were bred or caught in the first place.
These Nonhuman Animals are the invisible victims of an industry that treats feeling, conscious individuals as disposable items on a balance sheet. They are born or caught, forced to suffer in horrible conditions, and killed, only to be cast aside as unwanted “waste”. Do we know how many we are talking about? Nobody will ever know for sure, but we can make a rough estimate.
Calculating this would be difficult, though. Agricultural statistics usually record tonnes of production or numbers slaughtered, not the animals who disappear before slaughter. Fisheries are particularly problematic because the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) records catches primarily by weight rather than by individual. Any global figure must therefore be regarded as a general rough estimate.
Discarded Wildlife
The largest source of wasted vertebrate animal lives is almost certainly commercial fishing. Fishing vessels do not catch only the species and sizes they intend to sell. Nets, hooks and traps also capture non-target fishes (we use veganised language, so this is not a grammatical error), undersized individuals, crustaceans and other animals. Some are retained, but many are thrown back into the sea, dead or injured.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)’s most recent major global assessment estimated average annual marine fisheries discards in 2010-2014 at 9.1 million tonnes, with a 95% confidence interval of 6.7–16.1 million tonnes. That represented approximately 10.8% of the total catch by weight. Bottom trawling alone generated about 4.2 million tonnes of these discards.
Tonnes, however, conceal the number of lives involved. Fishcount, using FAO capture tonnages combined with estimated body weights for individual species, estimates that approximately 1.1-2.2 trillion wild fishes were caught annually on average during 2000–2019.
If, simply to establish an order of magnitude, we assume that the number of discarded fishes is proportional to their share of catch weight, a 10.8% discard rate would imply roughly 120-240 billion fishes discarded annually. This calculation is highly uncertain and could actually underestimate numbers because discarded fishes are often juveniles or small non-target species, meaning that a tonne of discards can contain more individuals than a tonne of landed fish. The older Fishcount methodology also explicitly noted that its estimates did not include fishes caught as bycatch and discarded.
Fishes are not the only casualties either. Fisheries accidentally catch seabirds, turtles, marine mammals and vast numbers of invertebrates. Historical FAO work estimated marine-mammal discards alone in the hundreds of thousands annually, while acknowledging major gaps in data for invertebrates, recreational fishing and other sectors.
Shooting creates another, much smaller but illustrative form of waste. Britain releases tens of millions of captive-bred pheasants and partridges every year specifically to be shot. Estimates cited by the League Against Cruel Sports put releases at 61.2 million birds in 2018, while industry-derived figures for 2016 suggested that only 18 million of 47 million released pheasants and 5.9 million of 10 million released partridges were recorded as shot. Less than half of the birds shot are eventually eaten, and only around one-third of released pheasants and partridges are actually shot; others die from vehicles, predators, disease or exposure.
Depending on what exactly we count as “wasted”, British game shooting alone therefore involves tens of millions of birds annually who are bred for shooting but either never reach the gun or are shot without subsequently being eaten. Against fisheries bycatch, this is numerically small, but it exposes the same phenomenon of creating or capturing individual animals in vastly greater numbers than the final product requires.
The Surplus Males
In industries where economic value is strictly linked to female biological functions such as egg and dairy production, male individuals are viewed as useless byproducts. They cannot produce milk or lay eggs, and because they have not been selectively bred to grow flesh at the same rapid rate as species exploited purely for meat, keeping them alive is considered financially unviable.
Modern commercial chickens have been selectively bred into specialised lines: broilers grow rapidly for meat, while layers produce large numbers of eggs. Male layer chicks can do neither economically, as they cannot lay eggs and grow much less efficiently than broilers. Consequently, approximately 6-7 billion male layer chicks are culled globally every year. A UK government review similarly cites the widely used estimate of approximately 7 billion day-old males annually.
In other words, the industry incubates roughly two chicks for every female replacement it requires and subsequently eliminates most of the males. In-ovo sexing is beginning to prevent some male chicks from hatching, particularly in parts of Europe, but conventional chick culling remains widespread globally — and we can still consider “waste” when chicks are killed inside the egg before hatching.
Dairy creates a related, although more complicated, surplus. There are approximately 270 million dairy cows worldwide, and dairy cows generally need to produce a calf roughly once a year to maintain milk production. A roughly 50:50 sex ratio would therefore produce something approaching 135 million male dairy calves per year.
However, it would be misleading to call all 135 million “wasted” in the context of this article. Many enter “beef” or “veal” production, but males from specialised dairy breeds have historically had much lower economic value than females, producing populations of so-called “surplus calves”. In Great Britain, for example, research reported that 15% of male dairy-sired calves were euthanised at birth in 2018. New Zealand has historically slaughtered around 2.2 million surplus “bobby” calves at only four to seven days old, although these animals can enter meat or other value streams and therefore do not all satisfy our strict definition of waste.
There is no robust global statistic for male dairy calves killed without entering any productive chain. If the historical British 15% figure were used merely as a global illustrative rate, it would imply around 20 million calves annually. That should be treated as a scenario rather than an established global estimate.
Culls, Mortality, and Overproduction
Even an animal of the “right” species, breed and sex may never reach the slaughterhouse. FAO-derived figures show that 73.8 billion chickens were slaughtered globally in 2021, while total land-animal slaughter now exceeds 80 billion animals annually. Yet slaughter statistics count survivors, not every chick originally placed on farms.
Mortality in commercial broiler production commonly runs into several percentage points. A large recent study found mean mortality of 3.2% in conventional fast-growing broiler flocks, while European industry described 4-7% mortality over a typical six-week production cycle in the late 1990s.
Applying a conservative 3.2% rate to roughly 74 billion chickens reaching slaughter implies approximately 2.4 billion additional chickens dying or being culled on farms each year before they become “meat”. This extrapolation is necessarily approximate, but it shows why slaughter statistics systematically understate the number of animals bred into meat production.
Then come animals rejected at the slaughterhouse. A 2017 study shows that the global condemnation rates were 1.04% for broilers, 1.85% for turkeys, 1.23% for meat ducks, 1.42% for force-feeding ducks, and 1.20% for guinea fowl. In one commercial broiler study, carcass condemnations averaged 0.6%, with causes including emaciation, disease, ascites and processing problems. Applying even that modest percentage to global chicken slaughter would represent roughly 440 million birds whose bodies failed to become the intended food product.
Disease outbreaks can generate still larger episodes of deliberate destruction. In 2022 alone, more than 131 million domestic farmed birds were lost through death or culling because of H5N1 avian influenza outbreaks. When avian influenza is detected, authorities commonly cull infected birds and healthy birds in contact with them to contain transmission, and that animals culled under these disease-control measures should not enter the food or feed chain. Across 2013-2022, WOAH data recorded approximately 324 million birds culled because of avian influenza.
Similar losses occur through African swine fever and other farmed animals’ diseases. There are also animals killed because they are injured, underweight, deformed or otherwise considered commercially unsuitable; deaths during transport; hatchery failures; and emergency destruction when farms have more animals than processing capacity or market demand can absorb. Some categories overlap, which makes simply adding every published number unreliable. A bird killed because of disease, for example, may already appear in an on-farm mortality statistic.
So, what does the total look like? The largest reasonably quantifiable component is fisheries discarding, at perhaps 120-240 billion fishes per year, followed by roughly 7 billion male layer chicks, perhaps 2-3 billion broiler chickens dying before slaughter, hundreds of millions of condemned carcasses and disease-related culls, tens of millions of game birds, and an uncertain number of surplus dairy calves and animals from numerous smaller categories. A defensible conservative order-of-magnitude estimate is therefore around 130-250 billion individual animals “wasted” by animal agriculture each year.
For comparison, Fishcount estimates 1.1-2.2 trillion wild fishes caught annually, around 130 billion farmed finfishes slaughtered in 2022, while FAO records around 83 billion land animals slaughtered for meat in 2022. Once egg-industry hatchlings and animals dying before slaughter are added, humanity probably breeds or captures somewhere in the broad region of 1.4-2.7 trillion individual animals annually for these industries. On those assumptions, approximately 5-17% of the animals bred or caught may never fulfil the productive purpose for which the system created or captured them. A reasonable central estimate is at least one individual animal in ten.
That percentage is much less certain than the conclusion behind it. Fisheries statistics are measured in tonnes; discarded fishes differ in size from landed fishes; farm mortality is poorly recorded in many countries; dairy-calf outcomes vary enormously; disease culls fluctuate dramatically from year to year; and countless invertebrates are absent from conventional statistics altogether.
But even the lower end shows that animal agriculture does not merely kill the animals represented on supermarket shelves, but it breeds, catches and handles an additional population measured in hundreds of billions of individual lives, many of whom become economically redundant somewhere between birth or capture and the final product. In a system operating on the scale of trillions of animals, even a seemingly modest percentage of “waste” represents an enormous quantity of sentient life.
However, in the end, we should consider that all these trillions of sentient beings, the ones considered waste by the industry and the ones who produce profit, are wasted from a biological and ethical point of view, because they did not live the life they deserved and we did not need them to survive and thrive — as plants, fungi, algae, bacteria, and inorganic products can provide everything we need.
The entire animal agriculture industry is a waste.
