Humans typically regard lions, tigers, bears, sharks and other powerful, sharp-toothed predators as the most brutally efficient carnivores atop the food chain, but for the best view of the creature most responsible for widespread slaughter, we need look no further than a mirror.

A first-of-its-kind international study of life on our planet, released this week, reaches the shocking conclusion that although the world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01 percent of all living things, humans have helped wipe out 83 percent of all wild mammals and half the plants on Earth.

At the same time, the number of animals raised to feed our burgeoning population has soared, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Consider: Livestock — mostly cattle and pigs — today comprise 60 percent of all mammals, while 36 percent are humans and 4 percent are wild animals.

Meanwhile, the world’s most prevalent bird? The chicken. The study by the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel found that farmed poultry today makes up 70 percent of all feathered creatures, with just 30 percent categorized as wild birds.

I suppose this could be food for thought while we wait in line for our burgers and chicken nuggets, but the study underscores more serious repercussions of such a massive biomass transformation.

As the British newspaper The Guardian reported, “The destruction of wild habitat for farming, logging and development has resulted in the start of what many scientists consider the sixth mass extinction of life to occur in the Earth’s four billion year history. About half the Earth’s animals are thought to have been lost in the last 50 years.”

Most alarming is this trend’s warp-speed acceleration.

“I would hope this gives people a perspective on the very dominant role that humanity now plays on Earth,” Weizmann Institute Professor Ron Milo, the study’s lead researcher, told the newspaper.

“It is definitely striking, our disproportionate place on Earth,” he added. “It is pretty staggering. In wildlife films, we see flocks of birds, of every kind, in vast amounts, and then when we did the analysis we found there are (far) more domesticated birds. When I do a puzzle with my daughters, there is usually an elephant next to a giraffe next to a rhino. But if I was trying to give them a more realistic sense of the world, it would be a cow next to a cow next to a cow and then a chicken.”

Here are some related findings:

Bacteria, once thought to represent a major portion of biomass, make up just 13 percent of all living matter, while 82 percent are plants. The remaining 5 percent are animals, ranging from fungi, to fish to humans.

Speaking of humans, The Guardian noted that, while homo sapiens command such overwhelming supremacy, they comprise a tiny percentage of the planet’s overall biomass.

“Viruses alone have a combined weight three times that of humans, as do worms. Fish are 12 times greater than people and fungi 200 times as large,” the newspaper reported.

I guess this is good news. I’d hate to think we weighed more than all the so-called lesser life forms.

I also suppose the study should make us feel guilty about what pigs we are — wait a minute, that unfairly insults pigs. We’re much more inconsiderate and greedy, at least when it comes to hogging resources — whoops, there I go again. Sorry, swine.

For better or worse, people have managed to fulfill the imperative set down in Genesis 1:26 that gives us dominion over all the fish, fowl, cattle, and creeping things on Earth. We certainly have proven to be more capable of survival than most other species.

Of course, the same can be said of cockroaches.

And while there are times I wish I could fly like an eagle, run like a gazelle, float like a butterfly or sting like a bee, I’m happy to be a human being.