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by rfeather
2393 days ago
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Where did the OP say that they have a dog? I grew up around hunting and farms and also don't find it surprising that animals are fairly intelligent. While your statement about pasturing being good for the environment is partially true in that there are some forms that do some good, by and large meat production is actually one of the largest causes of GHG emissions.[1] A lot of this land would actually be used more efficiently for production of non-animal proteins like legumes, especially considering the land that is used to supplement pasturing through production of animal feed in most modern agriculture. http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/ |
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> by and large meat production is actually one of the largest causes of GHG emissions.
Your link puts it at 14.5% for the entire life-cycle, which makes it one of the... smallest causes for GHG emissions. It's the smallest versus any other sector in the graphs I can find[1] (vs Commercial and residential, Transportation, Industry, Electricity are all larger slices of pie). Why say its one of the largest?
It really depends on the land and the crops. Lots of land cannot support anything but pasture, and lots of places would be ecologically improved with more pasture. Killing (say) a cow is worse than the killing all animals + ecosystem of the field that row crops require (obviously complete habitat destruction for any field critters at harvest time, but also pesticides and herbicides and such side effects).
If you are worried about GHG issues, why not talk about food footprint or animal deaths per calories? Should you really be trucking in lettuce from Mexico and California if you live in New Hampshire, where I live? Should you be buying avocados if what grows here are animals? Should lettuce be grown at all?
It seems very... speculative that so many are confident that the calculus tips in favor of "not the cow" here. If you eat pastured cow, you are supporting the ecosystem of cow (for its life or partial life if it EOLs in a feedlot) but also possums, raccoons, ducks, field mice, butterflies, snakes, birds, bees, and thousands of other insects that populate the fields of pasture. Ideally, for your entire meat consumption for the entire year, you eat a grand total of 1/2 cow. If you eat only row crops you support the destruction of these creatures, necessarily, unless at the same time you are carving out land for them elsewhere. But if there is reduced insect biomass in the world, or colony collapse disorder among pollinators, then I say this is blood on the hands of the vegetarians. Row crops (corn/soy/etc) have other destructive effects in the nature of their planting and harvesting, and good pasturing (which isn't all of it) builds soil and restores land. (If you want better pasturing everywhere, you're making an economic argument for something else, just like people who wish row crops didn't require mass pesticide/herbicide dousing.)
It gets even more nuanced and weird if you look into the ecological destruction required to keep other crops going. And it gets further nuanced still if you get into what GHG emissions for livestock are. In the 1800's Americans destroyed an absolutely massive biomass of bison, to near extinction[2], and replaced them with an almost equivalent biomass of cows, unintentionally making the methane impact... pretty neutral, on the lifetime scale of things. But maybe if the bison still roamed free today, environmentalists would advocate for destroying them, I don't know.
[1] for example: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting#/media/File:Biso...