Home > Work > Hidden: Animals in the Anthropocene
1 " 47 days: average slaughter age of broiler chickens in the United States. In the European Union it is 42 days. Depending on the breed, the natural lifespan of a chicken is up to 11 years. "
― Jo-Anne McArthur , Hidden: Animals in the Anthropocene
2 " No set of numbers can tell the whole story, but when it comes to the annual slaughter of farmed animals, the numbers have such an oppressive weight that they can easily overwhelm the stories behind them: 69 billion chickens, 1.5 billion pigs, 656 million turkeys, 574 million sheep, 479 million goats and 302 million cows. In total, 72.5 billion farmed animals were killed for human consumption in 2018. Ten times the global human population, slaughtered every year. Nor does this number include the ducks, rabbits, horses, geese, kangaroos, bison and other land animals killed so that we can eat their meat, And what about the fishes? "
3 " Some people express abhorrence at eating meat, yet make an exception for fish and other 'seafood' to remain a part of their diet. Fish, it seems to them, 'don't count.' Nor, it turns out, do they count when it comes to compiling the daily toll of animals slaughtered: cows, chickens, pigs and sheep are counted individually – fish – on the other hand, have their lives measured by the tonne. But even by weight, theirs is a colossal number – over 150million tonnes killed for human consumption every year in the first decades of the 21st century. "
4 " When we see animals in such vast numbers, their individuality is erased and our compassion is exhausted. I train my camera on this expanse of death and remember why there is no data on the marine animals we consume each year; we measure their deaths not individually but by the tonne. "