[__MatrixMan__]

There are interesting philosophical conversations to have about fairness and efficiency, but they come up when you're in the ballpark of what some people would consider fair or efficient while some others would differ.

This is not that.

A cow spends its whole life radiating heat into the environment. That's energy that could be powering me. It's a pretty simple watts-in-watts-out calculation, and it's nowhere near efficient.

Sure, maybe no humans want to live where the cows typically graze, but there are other organisms which contribute to carbon capture and clean air and clean water and pollination and disease control... And they are displaced when you've got cows gobbling up all the new growth and preventing forests from forming.

What's unfair is that those ecosystem services are being degraded in service of a few people's dietary habits, and that their loss is subsequently impacting the rest of us.

Yeah, maybe there's a biodiversity benefit to controlling grazer population through hunting, but only as a stopgap until we manage to reintroduce natural predators which don't have to be policed or practice restraint: predator/prey population dynamics are better equilibrium seekers than government regulation re: permits and tags.

[belorn]

Where the ballpark is a good starting question. Is a cow better or worse compared to artificial fertilizers? Looking at the devastation caused by run-off from farms in the baltic ocean, there is a man made underwater desert that is constantly growing with the current size of approximately 100,000 km2. Those dead zones (as they are called), lead to massive death of all aquatic organisms.

If we talking about fairness, food should be sustainable and not causing massive harm to the environment. That seems however to be outside the ballpark of what people consider possible. The question is then where we should start.