Our reading of data from FAO's FAOSTAT database. Spot an error? Tell us at hello@adatastory.com.
In 2024 the world slaughtered 130 chickens for meat for every rabbit. In 1961 it was 24. Rabbits are famous for breeding fast, and one gives almost as much meat as a chicken. So why did the chicken win? Sixty-four years of farm figures from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.
In 1961, by FAO's estimates, 6.6 billion chickens and 271 million rabbits and hares were raised and slaughtered for meat. By 2024 the chickens numbered 78.5 billion, about 215 million a day, and the rabbits 604 million. The chicken count grew 11.9 times, the rabbit count 2.2 times. The gap passed 100 to 1 in 2017.
By weight it is wider still: 128.31 million tonnes of chicken meat in 2024 against 0.85 million tonnes of rabbit, 151 to 1. On an ordinary day the world kept an estimated 27.7 billion live chickens.
Some countries have no recent rabbit count. Fourteen that had one in 2015–2019 have none for 2024, among them Italy (whose last is for 2023), Czechia and Hungary. Missing isn't zero, so we checked: add all 14 last counts, 41 million rabbits, to FAO's world total, and chickens still outnumber rabbits 122 to 1.
The average rabbit carcass in 2024 weighed 1,402 grams, the average chicken carcass 1,634. So size isn't why the rabbit lost. In 1961 it was the other way round: 1,463 grams of rabbit against 1,149 of chicken.
Since then the average chicken carcass grew 42% while the rabbit's shrank 4%, and the chicken has been the heavier of the two every year since 1994. Breeding is much of it. A study that raised chickens from 1957, 1978 and 2005 stock side by side on the same modern feed found that "from 1957 to 2005, broiler growth increased by over 400%, with a concurrent 50% reduction in feed conversion ratio", meaning half the feed for each kilo of weight gained (Zuidhof and others, 2014).
Rabbits do breed fast. A farmed doe raises about 40 young a year, says FAO's 1986 handbook on rabbit farming, against at most 0.8 to 1.4 for a cow or a ewe. But the same table, from a 1978 study by Dickerson, gives a breeding hen of a meat breed 100 young a year, and a turkey 60.
The chicken also turns feed into meat a little better. "In efficient production systems, rabbits can turn 20 percent of the proteins they eat into edible meat," the handbook says, and the "comparable figures for other species are 22-23 percent for broiler chickens". The rabbit's edge is what it eats: it can live on cellulose-rich plants that, the handbook says, "it is not economical to feed" to chickens.
Rabbits are raised for meat and for skins and wool. Chickens are raised for meat and eggs, and the eggs are a business of their own. In 2024 the world's 8.6 billion laying hens laid 1.775 trillion eggs, about 4.9 billion a day or 56,000 a second, by FAO's estimates. In 1961 it was 269 billion, so the egg count grew 6.6 times.
Hens lay more each, too: 205 eggs per laying hen in 2024 on FAO's world average, up from 142 in 1961.