Billions Slaughtered, Barely Mentioned

Everyone knows chickens are the most slaughtered land animals on the planet. But ask even seasoned animal advocates who comes second, and you’ll hear guesses like pigs or cows. Wrong. It's ducks. And hardly anyone talks about it.

In 2023 alone, over four billion ducks were killed. That’s more than ten times the number of cows, more than five times the number of sheep, and twice the number of pigs. Ducks are being mass-executed on a scale most people can’t even comprehend — and yet, they’re invisible.

Why? Because ducks don’t fit into the neat categories the Western animal advocacy movement knows how to exploit. They aren’t packaged into everyday convenience foods like chickens, romanticised like cows, or infantilised like lambs. They exist awkwardly between “wildlife at the park” and “niche culinary product.”  

And so, they’re ignored. Their lives written off. Their deaths unmentioned. One notable exception being Animal Justice Project, but they're very lonely in their advocacy. 

The industry does what it always does: it capitalises on cognitive dissonance. In the West, ducks are an afterthought. In Asia, duck flesh is a staple — but because most advocacy, money, and media come from the West, the billions of ducks raised and killed every year barely register in our conversations. It’s not that ducks suffer less. It’s that their suffering is easier for the movement to sidestep.

Even where ducks are farmed in the West, the conditions are horrifying: crammed into filthy sheds without access to water, mutilated without anaesthetic, forced to live in dust when their bodies are made for water. Toughness isn’t the same as wellbeing. Ducks are hardy animals — and that resilience is weaponised against them.

When ducks do get mentioned, it’s usually through foie gras campaigns. Force-feeding makes easy footage. Outrage is guaranteed.  

But foie gras accounts for just 1% of the ducks slaughtered each year.  

Focusing only on foie gras is like campaigning against whaling while ignoring industrial fishing. It’s a distraction that leaves billions of ducks betrayed and forgotten.

If the animal movement is serious about confronting animal exploitation, ducks cannot stay hidden.  

They must be named. They must be seen.

That means:

- Better data — because what isn’t measured gets ignored.

- Global inclusion — because advocacy built only for Western diets will always leave billions behind.

- Integrated campaigning — because ducks are not a niche issue; they are the second most slaughtered land animal in the world.

- Shattering psychological filters — because empathy isn’t just for the big-eyed and fluffy.

Billions of ducks have been reduced to commodities, erased from the conversation even by those who claim to fight for animals.

We owe them better.  

We owe them justice.

Inspired by Faunalytics article, Why Don’t More Animal Advocates Talk About Ducks? Written by Karol Orzechowski.