How Many Animals Does a Vegetarian Save in the UK?
ACE uses Harish Sethu’s calculations to understand how many animals a typical American consumes. However, we have an international audience and evaluate charities working in many countries, so it’s also useful for us to understand how much animal consumption varies between countries. Towards that end, we’ve constructed a rough estimate for the number of animals spared by a vegetarian in the UK. We found that the average resident of the UK eats about ⅔ as many animals as the average resident of the US, so creating a vegetarian in the UK spares about ⅔ as many animals as creating one in the US: accounting for elasticity, a vegetarian in the UK spares 24-110 animals per year. (Most of the uncertainty here is caused by the wide variations in the elasticity estimates we have found. If we do not account for elasticity, creating a vegetarian in the UK saves about 175 animals per year.)
Land animals
We directly calculated the number of land animals eaten by the average non-vegetarian in the UK. We used a report on UK agriculture in 2013 for as much of our data as possible, and 2013 population numbers from the World Bank. Rates of vegetarianism and related diets are the hardest to get reliable statistics for, but the Vegetarian Society has a fairly comprehensive page of statistics for the UK. We’ll follow a government survey from 2009 that asked about both vegetarianism and partial vegetarianism.
Following Sethu, we’ll use a formula that accounts for the number of vegetarians in the population. This means we’re calculating the number of animals spared when someone goes vegetarian who was previously not consciously attempting to reduce their meat consumption at all. Sethu’s formula is:
![\[\text{Number saved by a vegetarian}=\frac{\text{Total number of animals killed}}{\text{Population}\times(1.0-V-S/2-M/7)}\]](https://animalcharityevaluators.org/wp-content/ql-cache/quicklatex.com-d4d495b95e8f0a31ea2640c7aebde447_l3.png "Rendered by QuickLaTeX.com")
About 64,097,085 people lived in the UK in 2013. According to the survey we’re using, around 3% of them were vegetarian (V=.03) and 5% were “partly vegetarian” (S=.05). None of the surveys we found gave a percentage of the UK population that reduced their meat consumption slightly, for example by observing Meatless Mondays, so we’ll use the US statistic Sethu did and assume this is another 4% of the population (M=.04).
Calculating the number of animals killed is complicated, and we’ll do it in stages, starting with land animals. Our data is in a slightly different form than the US data, so we use a different method of calculating the total number of animals killed than Sethu did. The report linked above gives the numbers of animals of various types raised and slaughtered in the UK. It also gives the number of pounds of meat produced in this way, and the UK consumption of the same types of meat in pounds; from these numbers we calculate the percentage of UK consumption accounted for by UK production. We use this to determine the number of animals slaughtered for UK consumption. For instance, the UK produced 61% as much pork as it consumed; although it exported some pork, we’re only concerned with how many animals were killed to feed the UK population here, so we don’t need to deal with the exact amount imported or exported. We know that the number of pigs raised and slaughtered in the UK is 61% of the number of pigs slaughtered anywhere but eventually sold in the UK market.
Additionally, some animals being raised for food die before the time of slaughter, due to disease, injury, and lack of veterinary care on farms. We didn’t find these statistics for the UK in our brief search, so we used Sethu’s statistics for the US to calculate the relationship between the number of animals slaughtered and the total number of animals who died. For instance, in Sethu’s table, the number of cattle killed before slaughter was 5% of the total number of cattle who died. We assumed this would also be true in the UK, meaning that the total number of cattle slaughtered which we had calculated was actually 95% of the total number of cattle killed in order to satisfy UK consumers.
| Number Raised and Slaughtered in the UK | UK Production as % of UK Consumption | Total Slaughtered for UK Consumption | Deaths Before Slaughter as Percentage of Total Animals Killed | Total Animals Killed | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cattle and Calves | 2,594,000 | 83% | 3,125,301 | 5% | 3,289,791 |
| Pigs | 9,790,000 | 61% | 16,049,180 | 16% | 19,106,167 |
| Sheep and Lambs | 15,019,000 | 100% | 15,019,000 | – | 15,019,000 |
| Poultry | 976,000,000 | 90% | 1,084,444,444 | 7% | 1,166,069,295 |
| Total | 1,003,403,000 | 1,118,637,926 | 1,203,484,253 |
We get a total of 1,203,484,253 land animals killed for UK consumption, so:
![\[\text{Number saved by a vegetarian}=\frac{1,203,484,253}{60,205,476}\]](https://animalcharityevaluators.org/wp-content/ql-cache/quicklatex.com-bd1cce380138420827065d5a16dcbd97_l3.png "Rendered by QuickLaTeX.com")
This means the average vegetarian in the UK saves about 20 land animals each year, in the sense that if they weren’t vegetarian, we’d expect them to eat about 20 land animals per year.
Next we’ll account for fish consumption. Fish aren’t mentioned in the report linked above except in monetary terms, and the data on fish consumption is generally harder to find and to interpret, so in the interests of making a fairly quick estimate, we make simplifying assumptions. Assuming fish forms a similar proportion of the UK as US diet suggests that the average UK vegetarian saves 175 animals per year, including fish and shellfish, through their diet. (Our calculation above showed that the average UK non-vegetarian eats ⅔ as many land animals as the average American non-vegetarian, so we extended that to our previous calculation of the number of fish Americans eat. This number includes wild fish and shellfish that would be processed into fishmeal and used in aquaculture.)
Finally, we incorporate elasticity, a measure that tells us how changes in demand affect changes in the total amount produced after the signal filters through a market system that can adjust with price changes. Again, the data on product elasticity are hard to find and interpret compared to population data for humans and farmed animals, so we use the same elasticity ratios we did in our calculations for Americans. Accounting for elasticity, the average vegetarian in the UK saves 1.2-14 land animals each year, and 23-96 fish and shellfish. Thus the average UK vegetarian saves 24-110 animals per year, including all major factors.
These calculations are rough and could be improved—in particular, we used a lot of numbers from US or world sources when equivalent statistics may be available for the UK specifically. But we think that they’re strong enough to show that, even though people in other countries tend to eat less meat than Americans as part of their standard diet, there are still big gains for animals when they go vegetarian or vegan.
Hi
I read your website with a bit of confusion as although you mention that animal lives that are slaughtered to produce meat you have not taken into account as any point the lives of animals that are sacrificed in order to produce vegetables on a level sufficient to sustain current and growing human requirements. I assume here that you have some basic understanding of what it entails to grow vegetables on a commercial level and the amount of pesticides that are utilized to destroy insect that feed on these plants. Which in turn affects those animals that feed on those insects, In addition to this run off from fertilizer and pesticides adversely affects aquatic life and increased water consumption leads to the destruction of wetlands. In addition any life form that adversely affects the production of plants utilized as food needs to be eradicated. Current research in Australia – I apologise I forget the name of the researcher but this information is available on the internet – calculates that pound for pound more life is destroyed in the raising of vegetables than in the free range raising of animals for slaughter. You further neglect to take into account that animals that are not raised for food production will not be raised at all, so all the life that you say will be saved would never have experienced life at all. To believe that vegetable farming is less destructive to animal life is in my opinion not only naive but completely misinformed. The most basic truth about life is that survival is destruction. All creatures need to destroy in order to survive 9except perhaps bees) but we are not bees. I suggest that at the most basic you should at least educate yourself on the methods of farming and what it entails to raise crops. If you are not prepared to eat vegetables that you have to wash the slugs off and fruit you have to cut the worms out of then at least you should query where they went.
Hi Lydia,
Most animals farmed in the developed world (including in Australia) are not free-ranged for the majority of their lives (if at all). This means that they also consume crops farmed using pesticides and other methods that harm animals in the fields and the nearby environment, since feed crops are not grown with more animal-friendly methods than crops meant for human consumption. In fact, a diet that includes meat usually involves a larger total amount of farmed area than one which includes only plants because the animals raised for meat also use some of the energy from the plants they eat to live, rather than to put on muscle mass, so the transfer of energy from the sun to humans (through plants and possibly animals) is not as efficient in general. Additionally, animal farms are another source of environmental contamination and increased water consumption.
So while I would certainly be interested in the study you cite if you can find the reference, the fact is that, unless you are prepared to raise free-range animals yourself or check very carefully indeed where your food comes from, the most friendly diet to animals by the standard you’re presenting is the one most based in plants. (See for instance http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/664S.short)
That’s without including the lives of the animals you actually consume, because the question of when it would be better not to have lived at all is a genuinely tricky one and different people arrive at different answers. Again, if you care about animals, I think it is critical to be very well informed about the realities of the lives of the animals you are considering consuming, because the agriculture industry has an interest in presenting them as basically comfortable, while the reality is that in most cases they are very full of suffering.
Nice analysis.
You stated: “Additionally, some animals being raised for food die before the time of slaughter, due to disease, injury, and lack of veterinary care on farms. We didn’t find these statistics for the UK in our brief search…”
You might be interested in this article in The Guardian, which reported that AnimalAid, an animal rights group, estimated that 43 million farmed animals in the UK die before the time of slaughter for a variety of reasons, some of which you have mentioned. On their figures, this would be around 4.3% of the total animals slaughtered every year.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/29/animal-rights-group-sounds-alarm-over-40m-farm-deaths
The report itself is here, and notes the difficulty in calculating these figures due to the secrecy of the industry.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150909220425/http://www.animalaid.org.uk/images/pdf/booklets/UncountedDead.pdf
Thanks!
I appreciate the resources; if we revise this calculation, they’ll be very helpful.
Thank you for your Blog post, I really enjoyed it.
I wonder though how this works compared to Vegan, since the cruel farming doesn’t just get demanded by eaters of meat, I assume.
Animal products like oils, fats, eggs, milk products etc. (Ref:
http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/animals-used-food-factsheets/cows-milk-cruel-unhealthy-product/ )
This must create another demand for factory farming which in turn maybe doesn’t get the animal slaughtered outright but still creates environments for them to fall sick and die or be destroyed when they no longer produce the product they are being farmed for. What happens to the male chicks on an egg farm? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/8107957/40-million-chicks-on-conveyor-belt-to-death.html
How much pressure on these animal by products does an influx extra vegetarians create?
It’s an interesting subject and I’m trying to create a more holistic view of this at least in my head to understand how we can avoid moving from one type of cruel factory farming to another.
P.S. Not to mention vegetarian who feed their cats and dogs meat, {how many animals are farmed on the cheap for this kind of meat}
You might be interested in our general page about the effects of diet choices on animals, which mostly addresses the situation in the US. In particular, there are some comparisons there between the use of animals for meat and for other purposes. The reality is that so many more animals are used for meat than for dairy and eggs (even counting male chicks) that vegetarians would need to eat absurd amounts of animal products to counteract the effects of stopping eating meat, while diet studies have mostly found they eat similar amounts of dairy and eggs as non-vegetarians.
By-products such as “non-food-grade” meat fed to cats and dogs are more complicated to analyze, because for the most part animals aren’t raised directly to produce them. I think your best bet for finding a treatment of that kind of situation would be in the book Compassion By The Pound, but I’m not sure there’s any work on that area that isn’t very speculative.