Hacker News Reader

Comment by qume | Hacker News Reader

A nice alternative version of this would be 'Animals We Ate into Proliferation'

Basically any supermarket meat then? https://top5ofanything.com/list/535cb238/Most-Common-Types-o... (actually a little surprised to see sheep/duck ahead of pig)

So from that page I did a rough calculation - the following is in billions of tons of the animals alive in 2006:

Chickens 34 Cattle 560 Sheep 70 Ducks 2 Pigs 75 Total 741 (animals)

Humans 420

Looks like there are nearly two measures of livestock weight for every one of humans.

~7.6 billion humans weigh 420 billion tons? That would mean the average human weighs 55 tons! Talk about an epidemic of extreme morbid obesity!

Good spotting, for humans that's Million tons.

It's going to be quite some time until humans weigh 55 tons, but if you interpret the graph like people pitching to investors like to, we'll get there.

pig is a no-go in muslim culture, which constitutes a large part of the world population.

The duck thing seems to be entirely dependent on china consuming more ducks than pigs, which is very surprising for me.

Measured in whole-population calorie throughout, is there a more successful species than cattle? They even managed to breed (in their own passive, patient way) a large group of their bipedal accomplices into greater compatibility/dependence.

I'm picturing several classic movies remade from the cows' perspective. Logan's Run would be the obvious choice, but I could also see a bovine Charlton Heston shouting You've gotta tell 'em! BEEF IS COW! We gotta stop them! Somehow! Listen! Listen to me… MOOOOOO!!

This was more or less the premise of Chicken Run, which sets The Great Escape in a chicken farm.

We can play the home version:

chickens cows pigs

I think that's it! Sheep are mostly used for wool, goats for milk and the odd lambchop.

I guess there's some geese and ducks.

I would salmon, but does farming of them displace more of the habitat loss we've cost them with damns, mining, oil fields, etc?

I think it depends where you are, regarding the use of sheep.

In Australia and New Zealand, lamb consumption is quite popular. Australian figures from 2016 show 9.5kg of lamb consumed per capita[1]. From the article:

"This means that with underlying population growth, the total volume consumed in Australia is forecast to edge above 240,000 tonnes cwt by 2020, which will account for 46% of Australia’s lamb production."

Which means there's a further 250,000 tonnes exported.

The UK appears to be even higher in absolute numbers. Average purchase per week per person of mutton and lamb was 35 grams, which equates to 1.82kg per annum[2]. With a population of 63 million, that is once again a fairly large consumption of sheep.

[1] https://www.mla.com.au/prices-markets/market-news/2016-austr...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/284346/weekly-uk-househo...

> I think that's it! Sheep are mostly used for wool, goats for milk and the odd lambchop.

It very much depends on the country. Australia, NZ, South Africa and muslim countries consume significant amounts of sheep meat e.g. 5.5kg per capita in Saudi Arabia, 7.4 in Australia, 3.2 in Iran, …

> goats for milk and the odd lambchop.

Just to avoid confusion, lamb chops come from lambs - sheep. It's probably just a grammar issue, but I figured I'd note this.

Also, goat is delicious. Americans don't eat much goat or sheep, but they are regularly eaten elsewhere.

I always thought that was a "dam". Is it a "damn"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com