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While it’s obvious that vegetarian’s and vegans spare the lives of certain number of animals each time they avoid animal flesh and choose vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts and legumes, it’s unclear how many that amounts to in a year. The good news is that the awesome people at Counting Animals have done all the complicated math, so you don’t have to!
They looked at the total number of animals killed for food in the U.S. in a given year and the size of the U.S. population during that year and used a pretty interesting formula, incorporating semi-vegetarians and the Meatless Mondayers, to estimate the number of animals saved.
Their analysis revealed that a vegetarian saves:
- 34 land animals each year, over 32 of them being chickens.
- 219 fish each year.
- 151 shellfish each year, the vast majority of them being shrimp.
Therefore, vegetarian, saves at least 404 animals per year (34 land animals, 219 fish and 151 shellfish), which amounts to at least an animal a day!
What’s even more fascinating is that they claim these numbers are very conservative.
Now, this makes us wonder how many animals a Vegan, who not only does not consume animal flesh, but also dairy, eggs and other animal products used in food and for other purposes.
We sure hope the math geniuses at Counting Animals decide to tackle that next!
In the interim, what’s your best guess?
Image Source: Pascal Walschots/Flickr
Yesss! Perfect! The diet stuff is useful but what raelly got me from ooh, maybe to hell yeah I’m buying this! is the section on the nuts and bolts of how to train what the different workouts mean, suggested training plans, warming up and down all the stuff that everyone else magically seems to know but no-one ever talks about! I just want to bumble along on my own and slowly increase my fitness and how far I can run, rather than committing to joining a club or finding some training buddies, but I had no idea where to go from my current 5K-ish position except keep running further and further which is vague and not very inspiring so it never happened.So thank you for covering not only the diet and mental side of things but also the absolute nitty gritty basics! I may finally learn to run
There are many reasons for being vegetarian or vegan.
But saving animals is a flawed one. The best way to ensure good lives for farmed animals is to buy products that are free range or similarly secure good animal welfare. Otherwise only the “bad” will sell and so be produced.
And to take this to the extreme, if everyone was vegetarian or vegan, the animals would never live at all. No sheep, cows, pigs or chickens anymore.
hi Alive,
Your logic is horribly flawed. If everyone is vegan, there would be no more animals being raised for slaughter. That is true. It doesn’t mean that sheep, cows, pigs and chickens would go extinct. That’s ridiculous. Before humans came along and manipulated the populations of these animals for our food, all these animals existed naturally in the wild. Our society has become so accustomed to viewing them as food animals, we’ve completely forgotten about their native, wild existence. For example, in Michigan and many parts of the Midwest wild turkeys still roam the forests. In India, cows roam the countryside. If everyone were vegan, these animals would no longer be enslaved by us humans and would go back to existing in harmony with their natural environment.
Pigs maybe. Some of these animals have been bred to the point they can’t walk. It would probably not be a bad thing if they went extinct. Although it would be a sad thing.
I don’t think that if we all were vegans, farmed animals would extinct. There are people (although not so many so far) who doesn’t care if the animal the take care of is a dog, a cat, a pig or a chicken. If only person in the world would adopt one animal of a kind, nothing would be changed except number of animals.