[aoner]

If plants suffer this is actually an argument FOR plant-based diets, since less plants/sentient beings suffer. Meat is a super in-efficient (land/water/energy consumption) way of turning plants, which are already food, into food.

[vibrato]

Unless you consider that those grasses and rainwater used by the cow would’ve been completely ignored if the cow wasn’t there. And no, humans wouldn’t be able to get energy from those grasses without the cow.

[aoner]

I think you are underestimating the scale of our cattle. The majority of deforestation is due to cattle [1]. The world is basically dominated by us and our cattle [2] leading to massive losses in biodiversity [3].

If everyone in the world would eat the recommended USDA diet (mostly backed by industry and totally not healthy for you) we'd need another Canada to sustain us all [4]. By the way, most of the grasslands are man-made and we should try and reforest those areas to combat losses in biodiversity and climate collapse. Furthermore about a third of all fresh drinking water (not rainwater) is used for cattle [5].

[1]: https://rainforests.mongabay.com/0812.htm / https://scholar.google.nl/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=defor...

[2]: http://peakoilbarrel.com/carrying-capacity-overshoot-and-spe...

[3]: https://www.ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment

[4]: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[5]: http://www.takepart.com/article/2016/02/18/4-billion-people-...

[vibrato]

I think you should look into the accounting of those sources. So much of what you posted is totally irrelevant to cattle ranching, particularly in the United States. You’re just throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, “look, muh data”