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Earth · Prithvi
Four in a hundred: what is left of the wild
Weigh every mammal on Earth. Sixty parts are the animals we farm, thirty-six are us, four are wild.
also humanity · 24 September 2026 · 1 min read
The number people usually reach for is that most animals on Earth are now domesticated. The real figure is more precise, and harder to argue with.
Measured by biomass, livestock make up about 60% of all mammals on Earth, humans about 36%, and every wild mammal together about 4% (Bar-On, Phillips and Milo, PNAS, 2018). Elephants, whales, tigers, bats, deer, wolves, all of them, share that four.
Birds tell the same story in a different key: roughly 70% of bird biomass is farmed poultry.
Why weight, not count
Counting animals gives you a different picture, dominated by whatever is small and numerous. Weighing them shows how much of the living world’s mammal flesh is committed to us and to the animals we raise, which is what determines how much land, water and feed the rest can have.
What it means on the ground
Between 1970 and 2020, monitored wildlife populations fell by an average of 73%, with freshwater populations down 85% and land populations 69% (WWF and ZSL, Living Planet Report, 2024).
Four in a hundred is not a fact to despair over. It is a measurement of how much room we have taken, and therefore how much we can give back. Every corridor kept open, every pond left clean, every grove left standing moves that number.
Sources
- Bar-On, Phillips and Milo, “The biomass distribution on Earth”, PNAS, 2018.
- WWF and ZSL, Living Planet Report 2024.