Where the Animals Are: the World's Cattle, Sheep, Goats, Pigs, Chickens and Other Farm Animals, Mapped Every 10 km and Counted by Country, 1961 to 2024

Most of the large animals alive on Earth are farm animals, but their geography is rarely shown in one place. I combine the FAO's Gridded Livestock of the World (GLW 4), which estimates the number of cattle, buffaloes, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, ducks and horses in every 5 arc minute cell in 2015, with FAOSTAT's national livestock counts for 1961 to 2024 and World Bank population figures, and publish the result as an open interactive atlas. In 2024 there were about 35.3 billion farm animals alive at once, 4.3 for every person: 3.6 birds and 0.67 mammals per person. Since 1961 chickens have multiplied 7.1 times and goats 3.4 times, against 2.7 times for people, while cattle per person fell from 0.31 to 0.19. Farm mammals outnumber people in 40 of 159 countries of a million people or more, most of all in Mongolia (16.4 per person). Some animals belong largely to one country: China has 44% of the world's pigs and India 53% of its buffaloes. On the grid, half of all pigs live on 1.3% of the world's land and half of all cattle on 5.9%. Weighted by livestock units, cattle are the main farm animal in 127 of 194 countries and on 42% of the world's land. A closer look at Britain and Ireland separates the sheep hills of Wales and the Borders from the dairy pastures of the west and the pig and poultry plains of the east. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/livestock-map/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/livestock-map.