[vkou]

> You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has remained relatively stable over time.

It hasn't, though. You need to be comparing pre-industrial herd sizes (Which fed less than a billion people) to modern herd sizes (Which feed nearly 8 billion people.)

The per-capita beef consumption was not 8 times larger back then.

It's true that there were large herds of wild ruminants wandering around, hundreds of years ago. However, the increase in the biomass of domesticated cattle vastly overshadows the decrease in biomass of all wild land animals.