Hi @Vasco Grilo🔸 , thanks for your comments! Below are some sources for those data points, and replies:

RE: The number of broiler chickens raised in China annually:

China’s Ministry of Agriculture reported there were 14.8 billion broiler chickens raised in 2024. You can see a news article on this here:  https://zootecnicainternational.com/field-reports/middle-far-east/chinese-broiler-production-reaches-record-high-amid-challenges/

Similarly, you can also see here China’s National Bureau of Statistics report here on 17.4 billion poultry raised for meat:  https://www.stats.gov.cn/sj/sjjd/202501/t20250117_1958344.html.  (Note, this number combines both chickens and ducks, thus the discrepancy with the 14.8 billion broiler chickens noted above.)

15 billion therefore appears to be the correct approximate number of broiler chickens raised per year, at least according to Chinese government statistics (which may not be perfectly accurate, but are likely more accurate than FAO estimates). 

RE: the number of egg-laying hens in cages globally:

Our comment that there are twice as many chickens in broiler chickens in China as egg-laying hens in cages globally is certainly meant as a very rough estimate, and you’re right that that estimate did indeed account for the fact that egg-laying hens typically are raised for close to 18 months. (That estimate was meant to be “number of lives per year of production”, so egg-laying hen years were pro-rated by 2/3). 

If instead we calculated on the discreet number of animals in cages per year, we estimate it would look more like 6.5 billion egg-laying hens are in cages each year globally and 10.5 billion broiler chickens in cages in China each year, and thus 1.6x as many broiler chickens in cages, as opposed to roughly 2x as many. 

RE:  Comparing number of animals vs number of animal years

Yes we would agree with you - ultimately, what matters is the number of animals impacted each day, and thus 1 egg-laying hen in a cage is equivalent to (in China, where broilers live a bit longer than in the West) about 6.5 broiler chickens in a cage. In terms of then adjusting for how much each animal suffers, we haven’t looked into your calculations of broilers vs egg laying hens, but agree on the importance of factoring that in.

General note:

The post was not meant to suggest that the caged confinement of broiler chickens is overall worse than the caged confinement of egg-laying hens, or to provide a quantified comparison of the suffering involved with each. We think that, overall, the suffering of egg-laying hens is surely a bigger problem, and as an organization, we spend more time and resources on ending the caged confinement of egg-laying hens. (We generated approximately 60 corporate commitments to end the use of caged eggs this year).  

The goal with the post was to give a general overview of the situation for caged broiler chickens because it is relatively unknown; because it appears uniquely tractable (for the reasons described in the post), and because any way you cut it it is a very major problem (ie even if you look at it on the per day level, on any given day there are ~7 times as many broiler chickens in cages in China as there are egg-laying hens in cages in the US and EU combined.)