nice, we saved cow, chicken, and pigs from extinction.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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we kill 3T animals a year for food/medicine/clothing/etc. Maybe we should stop?
edit: sorry, that was quite extreme of me to suggest we don't kill 3T animals a year.
I'm going to go brutally murder and deep-fry my dog just to cancel out whatever grass you ate today, you extremist vegoon! something something lions something desert island grumble grumble muh canines
Hope that serves as a warning the next time you feel like ~~expressing an opinion that differs from mine~~ being preachy.
Look I get you but
points at fangs
Canines though
^ Vampire! Run for your lives!!!
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not sure what the edit is for... you looking to be disagreed with? are there comments I can't see?
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Not saying at all this isn't a problem, but I hate bullshit statements that are deliberately deceiving.
These numbers are all by mass. Not actual number. Cows are huge. So are chickens, for birds. How this comic is laid out infers that there's 60 cows for every 40 of every other mammal, and that isn't even remotely close to true.
I think biomass is probably more important than sheer number for these comparisons. Although I would also accept 'proportion of world's arable land being used to sustain them' as I suspect the ratios come out pretty similar for obvious reasons.
The problem is that the infographic says "of all the mammals on Earth", which means individuals, not biomass. So the infographic is objectively false.
Intentionally misleading
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On top of that, it's an annoyingly disproportionate graphic. The cow is much wider than the human so its area is much more than 60% of the area of the graphic.
The owl might be 3cm high and the hen 6cm high, but 9cm² and 36cm² would be the rough areas, even if it weren't for the fact that again, the hen picture is much, much wider than the owl.
With 30% and 70%, the owl should just be a little under half as big as the hen, but it looks like about 1/4 or 1/5 of the size of the hen.
Source?
Im gonna go out on a limb and say this is udder cowshit. Rats are mammals, as are raccoons, squirrels, and whole fucking masses of little basically unfarmable varmints. You're telling me that there's like 12 farm cows for every wild rat on earth?
Horse. Shit.
The source apperently takes the percentages by biomass, not by count as it seems. So small varmints will not have as much of an impact as a human or cow would.
in the comments section. straight up 'sourcing it'. and by 'it', haha, well. let's justr say. My pnas.
Which I think is intentionally disingenuous as it massively favours the large mammals over the far higher number of species of smaller mammals.
For example you'd need over 70 squeal monkeys to make to the biomass of an average American.
Humans and other great apes can be considered mega fauna, so it doesn't seem surprising that us and the animals we consume make up a higher percentage of bio mass. Were bigger.
I don't think it's disingenuous. It represents the total share of resource consumption. If something has 2x the biomass, it consumed 2x the materials needed to produce that biomass (purely in terms of the makeup of the body, that is)
I don't think count by itself is very relevant. There's more bacteria in a glass of water than there are humans in a country, but what does that tell you, exactly?
Although I do agree the infographic should be changed to specify biomass
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Quick Internet search.... https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
They are referring to biomass.
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1 cow ~ 1200 lbs / 545 kg
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1 rat ~ 0.5 lbs / 0.25 kg
1 cow ~ 2400 rats by biomass
Well thats not what the infographic says. It specifies "mammals", not "mammals by weight".
OK so how many tons of cow are accounted for by whales?
Or does the survey cherry pick land animals too?
This is very depressing. I feel science and technology has improved a lot and now people should consume lab grown meat and lab grown milk. Humans should try to reduce their imprint in the world. Human growth has become unsustainable. We produce so much food but still there is hunger. So many kids around the world are dying of hunger. Something has to change. Otherwise I feel the system will collapse.
I don't think this is loss. I'm ready to eat crow if I'm proven wrong, but I think the real joke is the amount of time people will spend staring at this image and trying to figure out how it's loss
You forgot the citation bro.
It's by biomass.
It's from this article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study
Which is discussing this research: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
Title made me think they were doing some 4 levels deep "loss" meme. It almost has it but frame 3 isn't close.
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By mass.
Are pets livestock, or did they miss a category of mammals? In the US there are more dogs than children.
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I didn't realise rhinos were so small. No wonder I never see them.
birbs are only 2/3rds unreal confirmed ✅
End of the Holocene, Last of the Megafauna party.
It’s so fucking surreal to me how much megafauna extinctions have happened in the past 50’000 years.
I don’t think people realise we had like giant land birds (3+ meters tall), megasloths (elephant sized), giant kangaroos roaming round not that long ago.
The garden burned. We were best adapted.
https://www.americanforests.org/article/the-trees-that-miss-the-mammoths/
(In many places, we burnt the garden).
We’ve been shaping ecosystems through fire for so long.
That article’s on my to read list now, thanks.
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