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by justrealist 1046 days ago
Taking as a given that we've eliminated 99% of natural predators, there's nothing inherently ecologically wrong with humans eating cattle instead of wolves eating bison.
1 comments

I believe the distinction here is scale. The rate at which natural predators killed bison is only a small fraction of the rate that cattle are killed for food.

If human livestock consumption were closely matched to natural grazer consumption, essentially acting as a 1:1 replacement, this argument makes more sense. I don’t think that’s been true for at least a century at this point though.

Citation needed. A quick Google search says the US has about 90 million heads of cattle, while the peak population of wild bison was 60 million and of wild deer was 40 million. That seems pretty close.
>That seems pretty close.

You're wildly off in your calculations because you've failed to account for replacement rate. It's 90 million heads of cattle with 30 million killed each year.

https://usda.library.cornell.edu/concern/publications/rx913p...

How many wild bison/deer/elk got killed each year? Right now it seems about 2/3 of fawns die, most of them eaten by predators: https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jwmg.21...

I wonder if that number was higher before humans reduced the number of predators.

I agree with this, I was disagreeing with the broad complaint in the OP

> Killing them and eating them is not compatible with the environmental benefits of grazing

which does not attempt to qualify the disagreement at all.