Lies, damn lies, and statistics*
A Meat and Dairy Industries Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM There's an Elephant in the Room blog
March 2021

And for those who claim that breeding, eating and using our fellow animals to death is just what humans have always done, here’s a horrifying snippet of information. In 1961 when these records first began, that number was 2.70 per person. The number of defenceless creatures slaughtered per human has gone from 2.70 to 10.34 in 70 years.

February is the month that FAO (The Food and Agriculture Organization, a specialised agency of the United Nations) publishes the annual global statistics of the number of land-based individuals slaughtered in the latest statistical year, which is currently 2019. This is the fourth year that I’ve looked at these figures and blogged about them.

First of all I’d like to express gratitude to my friend, committed activist Markus Bøhning whose many vegan projects include tierrechtsaktivistenbuendnis. This year, he was the one who crunched the numbers from FAOSTAT’s raw data, examining the statistics back to when they were first published in 1961. It’s thanks to him that we’re able to look confidently at patterns and trends from year to year. But before diving into what the latest numbers tell us, context is vital; there are several things that need to be said.

Those who have read my blogs in the past will have observed a sense of increasing urgency, summed up in my ‘statistics’ blog of March 2019;

‘Make no mistake. We are now in the midst of the fight of our lives; the fight for THEIR lives, and the fight for the very existence of our living world. We no longer have options. Anyone who tells us differently, has a vested interest in lying to us’....

 

*The further I looked for the origin of the title phrase, the less sure I was of the attribution. I didn’t make it up but it seemed an appropriate title for this blog.

 

Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE (PDF)

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