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, including your own numbers for any animal, and every number links to its source or is labelled as our own judgement.
Sources for these counts
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.
Loading the key insights…
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.
Try your own numbers
Start from the published estimates and change them for any animal: how likely they are to feel anything, and how much their experiences count next to a human’s. The charts below follow, and the page link keeps your numbers so you can share them. The shaded band on each slider is Rethink Priorities’ range for that number, from their 5th to their 95th percentile, and the short upright line marks the starting point.
More assumptions: sentience, dying, wild nematodes and hours of pain
Enter hours of pain to replace the estimate for any group. Pain is in disabling-equivalent hours (an hour of excruciating pain counts as about 11 under AIM’s weights) before the moral weight and the chance of feeling anything are applied. Hours you enter are used under every set of weights and are kept in the page link. To change a group’s chance of feeling anything or its moral weight, use “Try your own numbers” above.
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.
- 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.