2011-07-28
post/8183768118
Daily chart: where the world’s livestock lives. There are three times as many chickens as humans, according to new statistics from the UN. China has more chickens than any other country, yet tiny Brunei boasts 40 birds per citizen.
On the full Economist page, there’s this surprising (to me, anyway) nugget:
New Zealand lives up to its reputation as the world’s most productive shepherd, with 7.5 sheep for each New Zealander. It is also the second biggest cattle herdsman, with the equivalent of 2.3 cows per person
Unfortunately, you’d never get the cattle figure from the chart, because they’re ranked by population, not per-capita population. I think that’s a shame, because the per-capita figures are the more interesting of the two. (Look at Denmark’s 2.24 pigs per person, far higher than anything else in that top twenty. Presumably all that bacon they used to advertise on British TV was actually Danish.)
