Vegetarian Calculator Says Average Person Eats 7,000 Animals in a Lifetime

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While attempts to limit the consumption of meat often have to do with championing animal welfare and promoting health benefits, one group is going a different way. If numbers appeal to you, a group called the Vegetarian Calculator could sway your eating habits.

That’s because their website offerings quantifiable information with regards to how much meat the average person consumes over a lifetime of eating animals. According to the site, on average a person eats some 7,000 animals over the course of a lifetime.

The site break it down further: that’s about 11 cows, 27 pigs, 30 sheep, 80 turkeys, 2,400 chickens, and 4,500 fish.

Conversely, the website allows you to input the number of months or years you’ve been a vegetarian to calculate how many animals you’ve ‘saved,’ while also reporting on the sheer pounds of meat you didn’t eat as well as the pounds of CO2 not released into the air as a result of abstaining. The site is running on data from a USDA report from 2008.

It’s a fun tool to play around with, though the results might be general. The numbers seem to fall in line with the book Ninety-Five: Meeting America’s Fared Animals in Stories and Photographs, which suggest that 95 is the average number of animals spared each year by a vegan diet.

Of course one person adopting a plant-based diet doesn’t mean that there won’t be animals who suffer and die; the hope is that they are simply fewer breed into a system that sees the kept alive only for their resources. For some, it’s not about the number of animals saved, but the suffering that is done away.

For a more mathematical and complex approach, Counting Animals has an interesting look at how the numbers can and should be worked out.

Ultimately, it’s difficult at best to quantity the effects, but regardless, the message is clear: a plant-based diet saves animals lives while preventing many not having to undergo a lifetime of suffering whose only purpose is to make unnecessary food for humans.