Since you opened this page,
land animals were killed for food.
That's about 2,600 every second, 83 billion a year. Most of them are chickens: about 200 million a day.
A chicken breast gets typed into a meal app. The chicken, obviously, would prefer it didn't.
Nobody types that thinking about the chicken. People aren't cruel. The animal option is simply the default: it's quick, it's familiar, and at the second the meal gets decided, nobody offers anything else.
That second is where we want to be.
The count is an estimate based on 83 billion land animals slaughtered for meat in 2022 (UN FAO data, via Our World in Data). It doesn't include fish, or animals that die before slaughter, so the real number is higher.
