The scale of human-caused animal suffering is difficult to comprehend. Concrete numbers help advocates understand where welfare interventions can have the greatest impact.
The numbers of animals affected by human activities are so large that they become difficult to reason about. One useful approach is to identify the categories of animals where suffering is most concentrated, where evidence of capacity for suffering is strongest, and where interventions are most tractable. Factory-farmed animals combine enormous scale, strong evidence of sentience, and high certainty of suffering from documented conditions. Wild fish caught for food represent the largest number of animals killed annually under conditions most likely to cause pain. Effective animal welfare advocacy requires grappling with scale — even small percentage improvements in factory farming welfare standards affect billions of individuals.