Where is animal suffering concentrated?
This atlas counts the animals that are farmed, caught and living in the wild, and measures how much they suffer in Suffering-Adjusted Days (SADs), Ambitious Impact’s metric: time spent in pain, weighted by how intense it is and by each species’ capacity for welfare. One SAD is one day of disabling pain for one person. Every assumption can be changed below, and every number links to its source.
Key insights
What the atlas shows under its default assumptions. Every number here is worked out from the data when the page loads; the charts further down follow the assumptions you choose.
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Where is the suffering?
Choose a measure and your moral assumptions. The charts below all use the same settings, and the link in the address bar reproduces this exact view.
More assumptions: sentience, dying, and per-species values
Edit any value to override the default for that row. Pain is in disabling-equivalent hours (an hour of excruciating pain counts as about 11 under AIM’s weights) before the moral weight and sentience are applied. An edited value is used under every set of weights. Edited values are kept in the page link so you can share them.
Suffering-Adjusted Days (SADs) per year
What SADs tell us
Expected days of disabling-equivalent pain per year. Time in each pain intensity is weighted by how intense it is, by the species’ welfare range and by the chance it is sentient.
What SADs don’t tell us
- How many animals there are (switch the Measure to Animals alive now or Killed per year).
- Whether a species is sentient: this is a probability-weighted average, so small chances across huge numbers can dominate.
- How easy the suffering is to reduce (see Interventions).
- Good experiences: positive welfare does not cancel out suffering here.
How the total divides up
Burden vs. attention
How much philanthropic money goes to each area of animal suffering, compared with how much suffering there is under your assumptions. Points far below the diagonal lines get little funding for the size of the problem. This compares the size of each problem with its funding; it is not the cost-effectiveness of any intervention.
Funding figures are rough annual estimates.