Live counter

The animals you have already spared

Pick the day you stopped eating animals. This counter runs in real time from per-capita slaughter data — about 59 animals a year for an average omnivorous diet — and shows the emissions, water and land that never got spent on your plate.

I stopped eating animals on

Saved in your browser only. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Before that, I ate

Animals spared in 1 days

0.14

Counting up by one animal roughly every 8,916 minutes at this diet baseline.

Who they were

42%

0.1

Chickens

21%

0.0

Farmed & wild fish

35%

0.0

Shellfish & crustaceans

0.0

Ducks

0.0

Turkeys

0.0

Pigs

0.0

Sheep & goats

0.0

Cattle

And everything else you kept

3 kg

CO₂e not emitted

≈ 1 litres of petrol unburned.

1 m³

Water saved

≈ 9 days of household water use.

6 m²

Land freed

≈ 0.00 football pitches.

1 kg

Grain left for people

≈ 3 plates of food.

Share your count

A number attached to a person persuades more than a statistic. Post yours.

Since 2026-09-21 I've spared about 0 animals, 3 kg of CO2e and 1 m³ of water. Count yours:

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Questions about the numbers

How is the number of animals spared calculated?

We take per-capita slaughter numbers from FAOSTAT food balance sheets and Fishcount's estimates for fish and shellfish, sum them to about 59 animals per person per year for an average omnivorous diet, and multiply by the time elapsed since your start date and by a diet-intensity factor you choose.

Does one person going vegan actually reduce the number of animals killed?

Yes, in expectation. Production responds to demand with an elasticity below one, so economists estimate that removing one animal's worth of demand prevents roughly 0.5 to 0.75 of an animal being farmed. This tool reports the demand you have withdrawn, which is the part you control.

Why do fish and shellfish dominate the count?

Aquatic animals are small, so a single serving can represent several individuals, and per-capita consumption is high. Fishcount estimates tens of billions of farmed fish and over a trillion wild-caught animals killed each year worldwide.

Where do the emissions, water and land figures come from?

Poore and Nemecek's 2018 Science analysis of 38,700 farms and the 2023 Nature Food study of 55,000 UK diets. A vegan diet cuts food-related emissions by roughly 75 percent, and land use by about 75 percent, relative to a high-meat diet.

Is my start date stored anywhere?

No. It stays in your browser's local storage so the counter is still running next time you visit. Nothing is sent to a server and there is no account.

Impact calculator

Model years ahead, not just behind.

Start in 7 days

The plan for someone whose count is still zero.

Share kit

Graphics and scripts for talking about it.

Sources: FAOSTAT food balance sheets (2022); Fishcount.org.uk per-capita fish and shellfish estimates; Poore & Nemecek, Science (2018); Scarborough et al., Nature Food (2023). Figures are global averages and deliberately conservative. Text and data on this page are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with a link to veg.ac.

What the live counter is counting

The ticker converts an abstract statistic — per-capita animal consumption — into elapsed time. It is an estimate, not a receipt, and the assumptions behind it are worth understanding before you quote the number.

Where the per-person figure comes from

National slaughter statistics divided by population give a per-capita number of animals killed for food each year. In high-income countries this lands at roughly 25–30 land animals per person annually, dominated overwhelmingly by chickens: a single person eating an average Western diet accounts for around 23–25 birds, one to two pigs every few years, and a fraction of a cow. Fish and other aquatic animals are counted separately and are far larger in number, which is why they are shown as their own line rather than folded into the total.

Why chickens dominate every count

A broiler chicken yields roughly 1.5 kg of meat; a beef steer yields around 250 kg. To supply the same weight of meat you therefore need well over a hundred birds for every steer. This is the arithmetic behind the 'small bodies problem': shifting from beef to chicken lowers emissions per kilogram while raising the number of animals affected by roughly two orders of magnitude. Any honest counter has to show both dimensions rather than collapsing them into one score.

Land, water and emissions run alongside

The same avoided demand carries an environmental figure. An average omnivorous diet is associated with roughly 2.0–2.5 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent per year from food alone; a vegan diet averages closer to 1.0–1.5 tonnes, alongside about 75% less farmland and a substantially smaller freshwater draw. The counter shows the difference between those two diets, not the whole of your food footprint.

What the number is not

Consumption is statistical, not causal at the individual level: no single animal is spared the moment you change your order. What changes is aggregate demand, which producers respond to with a lag and an elasticity of well below one. Economists' estimates suggest that avoiding one chicken reduces production by roughly 0.6–0.8 of a chicken over time. The counter deliberately does not apply that discount, because it is showing your dietary share of the system rather than a claim about individual causation.

Animals behind an average annual diet

High-income-country averages per person per year.

Animal	Approx. per year	Why the number looks like that
Chickens (meat)	23–25	Small bodies, high throughput, ~6-week lifespan
Farmed fish & shrimp	20–70	Counted by individual, rarely by carcass weight
Wild-caught fish	50–100+	Highly variable; excludes bycatch
Pigs	0.4–0.6	One pig supplies roughly two people for a year
Cattle	0.08–0.1	One steer supplies roughly ten people for a year
Laying hens & dairy cows	0.3–0.5	Shared across eggs and dairy consumption

FAO production statistics; national slaughter data; Our World in Data.

Getting a number you can trust

Set the honest start date

Use the date your diet actually changed, not the date you first considered it. Partial periods are better modelled by choosing a later date and treating the earlier months as reduction rather than elimination.

Account for partial change

If you still eat animals occasionally, divide the counter's total by the share of meals that changed. Someone eating plant-based five days in seven should read about 70% of the figure shown.

Read the fish line separately

Aquatic animal counts carry the widest uncertainty of anything on this page. Treat them as an order of magnitude rather than a precise total.

Use it as a floor, not a ceiling

The counter excludes bycatch, male chicks culled in egg production, and animals lost to on-farm mortality. The real figure attributable to average demand is higher than what is displayed.

Using the counter honestly

Fair uses

Showing the scale of an ordinary diet to someone who has never seen the arithmetic.
Comparing your own before-and-after as a motivation aid.
Pointing out that chicken and fish dominate animal counts even when meat weight is small.

Unfair uses

Presenting it as a precise count of specific animals rescued.
Using it to score or shame other people's diets.
Quoting the total without the per-capita assumption behind it.
Adding land animals and fish into a single headline number.

Counter questions

Does my choice really reduce the number of animals farmed?

In aggregate, yes, though not one-for-one. Producers respond to sustained demand changes rather than individual purchases, and published elasticity estimates put the effect at roughly 0.6–0.8 animals per animal avoided. The direction is unambiguous; the precision is not.

Why is the fish number so much larger?

Fish are small and counted individually. A single tuna can weigh as much as a thousand anchovies, so any count by individual animal is dominated by small species — the same effect that makes chickens dominate the land-animal count.

Does the counter include eggs and dairy?

Yes, as a fractional share: laying hens and dairy cows are attributed across the eggs and milk an average diet consumes, including the male chicks and surplus calves those industries generate.

Can I share my figure?

Yes, and the share card includes the assumptions in small print. Sharing a number without its assumptions is how good statistics become bad arguments.

Why does it keep running when I close the page?

It is calculated from elapsed time since your start date rather than from time spent on the site, so the figure is the same whether you visit daily or once a year.