Death toll attributable to your relationship with alcohol:
Insects, ≥1 mm share only):
~8,000 flies & midges — Drift and residues sterilise damp margins; breeding edges go silent.
~7,000 moths & caterpillars — Treated foliage; larvae die mid-growth, mid-transformation.
~3,000 beetles — Soil disturbance and sprays; crushed or neurologically shut down.
~1,500 ants & colony insects — Nest networks disrupted; colonies fail underground.
~700 pollinators & “beneficials” — Collateral kills; caught in chemistry aimed at “pests.”
~200 aquatic emergent insects — Ditch/edge degradation; breeding windows close.
~5,000 other insects — Small lives erased as background cost.
Other invertebrates (mechanical, ≥1 mm share only):
~12,000 earthworms — Split by disturbance; dragged into light; die exposed.
~8,000 springtails — Habitat reset; moisture lost; populations collapse.
~2,000 mites — churned and crushed in disturbance.
~1,500 spiders — Cover removed; crushed in passes; prey web collapses.
~200 snails & slugs — Crushed or desiccated on exposed ground.
~100 millipedes & centipedes — Burrows destroyed; bodies shredded in disturbance.
~200 other macro-invertebrates — Grubs and soil predators erased as “operations.”
Other invertebrates (pesticides, ≥1 mm share only):
~900 earthworms — weakened by toxins; many die, soil thins.
~800 springtails — exposure knocks populations back after each spray window.
~700 mites — feeding disrupted; populations crash after exposure.
~900 spiders — secondary poisoning through prey; nervous systems fail.
~800 snails & slugs — impaired movement; dehydration and exposure finish them.
~300 millipedes & centipedes — residue exposure adds a second kill-pathway.
~200 woodlice & isopods — toxins + habitat stress compound losses.
~400 beetle larvae & grubs — residues hit developing stages hard.
~400 other macro-invertebrates — larvae and predators die after residue exposure.
Including insects and invertebrates in the 0.1 mm to 1 mm size range, would add 450,000 lives, mostly comprised of mites and springtails.
Alcohol
Alcohol isn’t "a treat." It’s nicely dressed up poison; ethanol, a toxic solvent and biocide used in disinfectants and cleaning products because it kills cells. Over a lifetime you drink about 2,463 litres of literal poison. Not for nutrition, not for health, but to chemically dull your brain: to slow reaction time, weaken judgement, impair memory, and make your nervous system misfire in ways we market as "relaxation." If you know all this and you're still bargaining with the definition, or are reaching for a "yeah but...", you're refusing to think, you're a cognitive coward.
And your continued cowardice has an agricultural footprint: roughly ~14.6 m² of cropland kept in production every year to grow the barley, grapes, and apples that get fermented and distilled into something otherwise used for sterilisation of surfaces. The bottle is marketing; the reality is crops worked and sprayed on repeat so you can pay to poison yourself. Over your lifetime, the total deaths associated with poisoning yourself in this way approximates to 50,000. That's about half a teaspoon of pureed insects in each pint of beer, or a couple of pea-sized blobs dropped in each glass of wine.
