There is a graph that should be posted in every butcher’s shop and in every ministry of the economy. It does not show the price of meat or the trend of GDP: it shows the distribution of mammalian biomass on Earth. It is the x-ray of a silent conquest, the portrait of a Planet that has shifted its biological center of gravity from equilibrium to the monoculture of meat.
In 1850, the mass of wild mammals roughly equaled that of humans and domestic animals. Today the proportion is brutal: 95% of mammal biomass is made up of us and our livestock. Wildlife — terrestrial and marine — occupies the remaining 5%. In less than two centuries we have halved the mass of free animals.
Functional extinctions: when species exist but no longer matter
We’re not just talking about extinctions in the form we know. The real catastrophe is more subtle: functional extinction. Species that survive, but not enough to count in the ecosystem. Nature is still there but emptied of its ecological role.
Behind this “Great Subtraction” there is not so much a hunter with a rifle as a logistical system that devours space. The enormous mass of cattle, pigs and sheep requires fodder, water and pastures. Every hectare dedicated to livestock is a hectare removed from biodiversity. We have converted the primary productivity of the Planet – what plants produce – into fuel for a single, gigantic biological machine: livestock farming. An ecological paradox where efficiency is measured in loss of diversity.
Yet while science documents this disproportionality with relentless clarity, the political and economic response remains distorted. A study published this year in PNAS, which analyzed more than 14,600 conservation projects over 25 years, reveals a structural problem: 83% of funds go to vertebrates, and of those, 86% focus on a few iconic species — elephants, whales, big cats. Not that these species don’t deserve protection: they certainly do. But while they receive tens of millions, amphibians — the most threatened group of vertebrates — get just 2.5 percent of the resources. Invertebrates, which make up the majority of life on Earth, have almost nothing. It is a more than effective photogenic conservation, where urgency gives way to charisma.
The paradox is even more stark: while only 6% of threatened species receive funding, 29% of funds are allocated to species classified as “minimal risk”. Brown bears and gray wolves absorb millions while entire families of amphibians and invertebrates disappear without witnesses or resources. It’s not a question of taking away protection from those who have it, but of asking ourselves whether we are really using limited funds where the risk is greatest.
In 1850, African elephants weighed as much as any wild mammal today
This imbalance is not just a question of budget, but of perspective. We have lost the memory of what was normal. Moving baseline syndrome — the habit of accepting an impoverished state of the world as natural — prevents us from seeing how much we have lost. In 1850, the biomass of African elephants alone equaled that of all wild land mammals today, according to the study published Oct. 27 in Nature Communications.
Over the same period, human biomass increased eightfold, and livestock biomass fivefold. The total number of mammals has tripled, but only because we have replaced wild life with our own. Whales have lost 70% of their collective mass, land mammals more than half. The world is no longer full of life: it is fuller of us. And as both studies document, the areas where fauna resists coincide less and less with those in which we invest to save them.
Recovering balance means changing demand. Not “how much meat can we still produce?”, but “how much space do we want to give back to the planet?”. And, in parallel: not “which animals excite us the most?”, but “which ones really risk extinction?”. As long as the scales tip like this, extinction will not be an accident but the very model of our economy: a world reduced to pasture, where conservation follows the logic of spectacle rather than that of risk.
