76 billion animals, four countries, one system

Start with the number, because it’s worth sitting with before anything else: in 2020, roughly 76 billion animals were raised in intensive systems worldwide, and the FAO puts total annual slaughter, excluding fish entirely, at approximately 80 billion animals a year across meat, dairy and egg production. Fish aren’t even in that figure. Once you add them, by most estimates, farmed animals killed for food outnumber every other use humans have found for animals combined many times over.

Nearly half of the world’s chickens, pigs and cattle come from just four countries: China, Brazil, the USA and Indonesia. That concentration matters, because it means the argument “well, my country does it better” is mostly beside the point… the scale of the suffering is set by a handful of industrial powers, and everyone else’s marginally-less-awful practices are rounding errors against that backdrop. In the United States specifically, an estimated 99% of livestock were factory-farmed as of 2022, more than 10 billion animals, a figure that on its own exceeds the entire global human population. Ninety-nine percent isn’t an industry with a welfare problem at the margins. It’s a welfare problem wearing an industry as a disguise.

And it’s worth naming who carries the cost beyond the animals themselves, because factory farming was never a closed system. Without intervention, food-system emissions are projected to rise by roughly 30 to 40% by 2050 purely on population and demand growth, and the countries whose factory farms generate the highest emissions read like a list of the world’s major economies rather than some rogue’s gallery of bad actors. China, Brazil, the USA, India and Russia top that list. This isn’t a fringe practice somewhere else. It’s the operating system.

Live transport: the ocean voyage nobody survives unchanged

Britain’s live export ban, much as I wanted to celebrate it last time, was always a fairly modest cut in a much bigger wound. Australia’s version of this story is bloodier and more instructive because it shows what happens when an entire national economy gets built around exactly this trade.

Since 40,000 sheep and one crew member died aboard the sunken Farid Fares in 1980, campaigners have tracked roughly 3 million animals subjected to slow and agonising deaths aboard live export ships, with tens of millions more dying in overseas slaughterhouses that don’t meet the exporting country’s own welfare standards. Sheep sent on these voyages can spend up to three weeks at sea before arriving to be killed by methods their country of origin wouldn’t sanction domestically. Australia has finally legislated an end to it, sort of… live sheep exports by sea are due to stop from 1 May 2028, a full four years’ notice given to an industry that’s had five decades of warning already.

But watch how the argument actually plays out once legislation threatens the money, because it’s instructive everywhere, not just Australia. Industry bodies and opposition politicians have framed the ban as ideological vandalism against rural communities, promising to reinstate the trade at the next opportunity. Meanwhile, polling commissioned by the RSPCA found more than 70% of Western Australians, the state that accounts for effectively all the trade, actually support the ban, which rather undercuts the “the regions are all against this” narrative the industry prefers. The gap isn’t really between farmers and cities. It’s between an industry lobby with a direct financial stake and roughly everyone else, dressed up as a culture war because that framing is more useful to the people losing the argument on the merits.

And even where live transport hasn’t been banned, the conditions inside it tell their own story. Across the EU, an estimated 72% of pigs transported for slaughter travel overcrowded, at densities of 142 kilograms or less per square metre, with roughly 30% of those overcrowded shipments resulting in injury before the animals even reach the slaughterhouse. That’s not a rogue haulier cutting corners. That’s the industry standard, tolerated because nobody with the power to stop it has been made to watch it happen.

Two hundred million dogs, and the wealth line that decides how they die

This is where the international picture gets genuinely uncomfortable, because it stops being about industry villains and starts being about which country you were born in.

The World Health Organisation estimates there are more than 200 million stray dogs worldwide, and the consequences of that population aren’t distributed evenly. Roughly 55,000 people die of rabies every year, with another 15 million receiving post-exposure treatment, and 95% of those deaths occur in Asia and Africa. India alone is estimated to hold somewhere between 52 and 70 million stray dogs, with Delhi hosting around a million on its own. Pakistan has an estimated 3 million, with roughly 200,000 in Karachi alone, where mass poisoning campaigns remain routine. Morocco holds an estimated 1.2 to 1.5 million, with authorities and communities still relying on shooting and poisoning alongside newer, more humane catch-neuter-vaccinate-return programmes.

Here’s the part that should make you genuinely angry rather than just sad. In Western Europe, strict sterilisation and microchipping laws have nearly eliminated stray populations entirely, and the Netherlands has gone further still, becoming the first country in the world to have no stray dogs at all, achieved not through mass euthanasia but through sustained investment in sterilisation, education and enforcement. Meanwhile, developing regions, without comparable resources, remain locked in cycles of uncontrolled breeding, public health risk, and the cruel culling policies that wealthier nations quietly congratulate themselves for having moved past.

That’s not a difference in national character. Nobody in Karachi or Casablanca loves dogs less than someone in Amsterdam. It’s a difference in what got funded, decades ago, and kept funded, decade after decade, while the international conversation about animal welfare largely happened in rich countries, congratulating each other on solutions that were never made available to the places that needed them most. The Netherlands didn’t out-love the world. It out-invested it, and then let the story become one about virtue rather than budget lines.

Even in the countries with money, the maths is still grim. In the United States, around 6.5 million companion animals enter shelters every year, and nearly a million of them, dogs and cats combined, are euthanised annually, not because the country lacks resources but because resources still fall short of demand, exactly as they do in the UK, exactly as they do everywhere the funding is left to charitable goodwill rather than structural commitment.

The pattern, stated once, plainly

Look at all three of these strands side by side, and the shape is identical every time. Industry gets phased regulation, transition packages, years of notice and, where Australia’s example is anything to go by, a hundred million dollars of public money to soften the landing for the very businesses that built their model on the suffering now being restricted. Australia’s government proposed a $107 million transition package for the live sheep industry alone, on top of everything else the sector has already extracted from decades of largely unregulated operation. Meanwhile, the animals left behind by that same industry, the strays, the surrendered, the sick, get charity bake sales and a scramble for grants measured in thousands, not millions, and in poorer countries, get nothing structural at all… just poison, or a bullet, or a slow death from disease, because that’s cheaper than the alternative nobody’s willing to pay for.

We built a world where harming animals at scale is capital-intensive, protected, and transitioned out gently when it finally becomes indefensible. And we built the same world so that caring for animals at scale is chronically underfunded, volunteer-run, and treated as optional sentiment rather than infrastructure. That’s not an accident of history. It’s a set of choices, repeated in enough countries with enough consistency that it stops looking like a coincidence and starts looking like the actual design.

A final word

I don’t think this is a story with a natural ending, any more than the last one was. It’s not going to resolve itself while I’m alive to see it, and I’d be lying to you if I pretended otherwise… the animals in Karachi and the animals in a US shelter and the sheep on a ship bound for a three-week voyage are all, in their different ways, waiting on the same thing: a decision by people with money and power to treat their suffering as a cost worth paying to prevent, rather than a cost that’s cheaper to ignore.

What strikes me most, sitting out here with a dog who followed me home and never left, is how little any of this is really about animals at all. It’s about what a country chooses to fund when nobody’s forcing it to. Every stray dog poisoned instead of sterilised, every pig shipped overcrowded instead of slaughtered locally, every rescue centre turning animals away because the grant round closed last month… every one of those is a budget decision wearing the costume of necessity. It didn’t have to be this way. It still doesn’t.