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.
Saved in your browser only. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Animals spared in 0 days
0.03
Counting up by one animal roughly every 8,916 minutes at this diet baseline.
0.0
Chickens
0.0
Farmed & wild fish
0.0
Shellfish & crustaceans
0.0
Ducks
0.0
Turkeys
0.0
Pigs
0.0
Sheep & goats
0.0
Cattle
0 kg
CO₂e not emitted
≈ 0 litres of petrol unburned.
0 m³
Water saved
≈ 2 days of household water use.
1 m²
Land freed
≈ 0.00 football pitches.
0 kg
Grain left for people
≈ 1 plates of food.
A number attached to a person persuades more than a statistic. Post yours.
Since 2026-11-06 I've spared about 0 animals, 0 kg of CO2e and 0 m³ of water. Count yours:
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.
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 This tool reports the demand you have withdrawn, which is the part you control.
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.
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.
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.
Model years ahead, not just behind.
The plan for someone whose count is still zero.
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.
How the maths works
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.
The counter uses fixed annual estimates for an average omnivore, scaled by elapsed time and the diet setting. Its baseline includes about 26 land animals, 12.5 fish and 20.4 shellfish per year. These are illustrative assumptions, not country-specific consumption measurements: slaughter totals alone omit trade, waste and differences in diet.
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.
The counter adds illustrative environmental differences to the animal estimates: its average-diet baseline is 1,055 kg CO₂-equivalent, 550,000 litres of water and 2,400 m² of land per year. These fixed assumptions are not a personal footprint audit. Published diet comparisons vary with meat intake, sourcing and water-accounting methods.
Consumption estimates describe a share of demand, not a count of animals immediately spared. Producers respond to aggregate changes with a lag, and the size of the response varies by market and species. This counter does not model those responses; its totals are illustrative dietary shares.
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.
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.
If you still eat animals occasionally, multiply 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.
Aquatic animal counts carry the widest uncertainty of anything on this page. Treat them as an order of magnitude rather than a precise total.
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.
Sustained reductions in demand can reduce production, but not immediately or necessarily one-for-one. The response depends on markets, prices and species; this counter does not estimate that causal effect.
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.
The counter has no separate egg or dairy attribution model. Its fixed species rates do not explicitly include culled male chicks or surplus dairy calves, so it cannot show those effects separately.
Yes, and the share card includes the assumptions in small print. Sharing a number without its assumptions is how good statistics become bad arguments.
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.