The Animal Holocaust

It was once said that a single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. How much less morally comprehensible is the statistic of more than a hundred billion deaths? How do you even make something like that real to the mind? Current best estimates have it that humans slaughter over 70 billion land animals per year, not including marine animals or male chicks slaughtered by egg-laying hen hatcheries. This number is an order of magnitude greater than the total human population of Earth. With marine animals and chicks included, the yearly kill count easily exceeds the sum total of humans who have ever lived on Earth at any time in history—over 120 billion.