>Growing plants to feed animals and then consuming those animals is an inefficient way of obtaining calories and nutrients. Shifting to a plant-based diet would allow us to feed more people with less land, reducing the pressure on wild habitats.
Not true. Ruminant grazing animals (like cows) use land that generally is not fit for farming plants that humans would consume. They make land productive that otherwise would not be. Also, farming for the staples of plant-based diets annihilates animal life. In order to farm soy beans or whatever plant you eat, you have to tear up the soil and in doing so you will kill every ground squirrel, ground nesting bird, snake, vole, groundhog and rabbit that lives in that plot. Then you have to spray chemical pesticides that will annihilate anything you haven't already mechanically killed with the combine. Not to mention ruminant grazers enhance the soil through their compaction, manure and urine while plant farming has to constantly add external fertilizer to maintain yields.
> grazing animals use land that generally is not fit for farming plants ... make land productive that otherwise would not be
Not every land has to be "productive". This thinking got us where we are.
> In order to farm soy beans or whatever plant you eat, you have to tear up the soil and in doing so you will kill every ground squirrel, ground nesting bird ...
Crop fields do indeed disrupt the habitats of wild animals, and wild animals are also killed when harvesting plants. However, this point makes the case for a plant-based diet and not against it, since many more plants are required to produce a measure of animal flesh for food (often as high as 12:1) than are required to produce an equal measure of plants for food (which is obviously 1:1). Because of this, a plant-based diet causes less suffering and death than one that includes animals.
This is your brain on veganism. You have no concept of how cattle are actually raised. They are grazed on grassland. No farmer is cultivating food plots of soy beans and bringing them to the cattle. You are thinking of feedlots which cattle go to before slaughter where they are fed corn or soy for a short period of time in order to fatten them up. The existence of a feedlot does not change the fact that for the vast majority of the animal's life it is on a grassland eating grass that would otherwise just grow and die in the winter. The vast majority of the energy that goes into growing cattle would otherwise go completely unused without them. That is why ruminants are special. They turn grass into protein, which is necessary for life, especially brain function. You just want to eat your disgusting soyburger and treat it as some kind of penance so you can then parade around as if you are morally better than people who eat meat. Sorry, we will never stop eating meat and you will never acknowledge the reality that ruminant grazing is good for the environment. You will never consider why there were tens of millions of ruminant bison covering North America for thousands of years. They were a tool of the balance of nature that helped the ecosystem. Keep killing small animals and pretending you're better than everyone else. It will work out really great for you.
For anyone reading this, for having seen and chatted with a farmer raising AAA Angus beef for McDonalds, everything the above commenter is saying is wrong.
The beef are in lots as soon as they are taken from their mothers and are fed from soy and other crops.
Most of the beef production is not fed grass - or it is a byproduct of giving them access to outside, but isn't their main nutrition.
> You have no concept of how cattle are actually raised. They are grazed on grassland. No farmer is cultivating food plots of soy beans and bringing them to the cattle. You are thinking of feedlots which cattle go to before slaughter where they are fed corn or soy for a short period of time in order to fatten them up.
While it's true that cattle are often raised on grasslands, the global demand for beef has led to many operations utilizing grain-based feedlots, which do have environmental implications. It's estimated that about a third of the Earth's arable land is used to grow crops for animal feed.
Furthermore, the conversion of forests and other natural habitats to grassland for cattle grazing is a significant driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss, particularly in places like the Amazon.
> The existence of a feedlot does not change the fact that for the vast majority of the animal's life it is on a grassland eating grass that would otherwise just grow and die in the winter. The vast majority of the energy that goes into growing cattle would otherwise go completely unused without them. That is why ruminants are special. They turn grass into protein, which is necessary for life, especially brain function.
Indeed, ruminants play a unique role in converting grass into protein. However, the issue isn't as straightforward as just utilizing grasslands. The environmental footprint of raising cattle, even on grasslands, includes water use, greenhouse gas emissions, and land degradation. This, combined with the growing global demand for meat, creates a sustainability challenge that cannot be overlooked.
> You just want to eat your disgusting soyburger and treat it as some kind of penance so you can then parade around as if you are morally better than people who eat meat. Sorry, we will never stop eating meat and you will never acknowledge the reality that ruminant grazing is good for the environment.
It's not about moral superiority but about finding sustainable and ethical ways to meet our nutritional needs. While ruminant grazing can have some environmental benefits, it's not universally "good" for the environment given the issues like:
- Greenhouse gas emissions
- Deforestation
- Land degradation
- Water pollution
- Water overconsumption
- Loss of biodiversity
- Antibiotic resistance
- Ocean dead zones
- Inefficient land and resource use
- Ethical concerns regarding animal welfare
- Contribution to zoonotic diseases
- Air pollution
- Eutrophication
- Soil erosion
- High energy consumption
- Chemical runoff from pesticides and fertilizers
- Destruction of habitats and ecosystems
- Inequality in global food distribution
- Public health risks from foodborne illnesses
- Nutrient pollution
- Strain on waste management systems
> You will never consider why there were tens of millions of ruminant bison covering North America for thousands of years. They were a tool of the balance of nature that helped the ecosystem.
The comparison between modern cattle farming and historic bison populations is not entirely valid. Bison roamed freely, contributed to nutrient cycling, and didn't contribute to the same environmental problems associated with large-scale livestock farming.
Ruminant grazing on natural grasslands is not sufficient to meet the demand for meat. This is why chunks of the Amazon are burned down to create more land for raising livestock. And raising crops for people is much more efficient (in terms of calories per acre) than raising those same crops for animals. Any arguments highlighting the destructive effects of industrial crop farming apply ~10x for meat since much of the meat we eat is raised on soy and other feed crops.
>> Growing plants to feed animals and then consuming those animals is an inefficient way of obtaining calories and nutrients. Shifting to a plant-based diet would allow us to feed more people with less land, reducing the pressure on wild habitats.
> Not true. Ruminant grazing animals (like cows) use land that generally is not fit for farming plants that humans would consume.
You are arguing a different point from GP. They were talking about growing and farming animal food, feeding that to the animals, and then eating the animals. You're talking about feeding animals directly from the land.
Why were there tens of millions of bison in North America before human development?
>value
This entire discussion is about the proper use of land. That discussion is impossible without some notion of value, or highest and best use. Any other consideration just ends in "all humans should die". If that's your position then its a waste of time even discussing the situation with you.
I'm not saying that grazing animals are a problem, I'm saying that markets and regulators are doing a bad job of managing their location and population size, and that wolves would do it better. Those markets and regulators have a certain values system: they want certain numbers to go up, certain people to be re-elected, etc.
Most humans also want their grandchildren to grow up in an environment that isn't teetering on collapse--which is not something that the dominant values system is considering. So my issue with "value" is not that it's useless, but that we're using it in a way that fails to acknowledge that different people value different outcomes. We're instead encouraged to seek value of an unspecified type and leave it to other people to decide which outcomes actually result from that seeking. It's a sort of blindness and it's leading us off a cliff.
I feel so sorry for your boy. He deserves a dad who loves him more than virtue signaling. Your boy is thrown into the world with no preexisting moral guilt. And you, his father, are justifying rather than decrying the racial discrimination of your own son, while apparently trying to stand on the alter of that very discrimination.
My son is fine, he is well loved and he knows it - I teach him compassion and understanding while still standing up for himself. I'm sorry you live in such a black and white world lacking nuance. It must be a struggle for you such that you need to tell an internet stranger how little he loves his son.
“[born with] no preexisting moral guilt” — Is that some attempt to re-frame ignorance?
I have teenage kids and they sure as hell have been raised to understand, from a young age, that while they are in an unfairly advantaged group today, a few generations ago and they would have been rounded up, stripped of everything they worked hard for, and put in camps. And yet, even that fate was objectively better than other groups at the same time. What you call “moral guilt” I call empathy. Maybe this is simply what you mean by “virtue signaling”, but I want my kids to always look for those around them who are stumbling, unable to get back up, or who may just not have enough, and then to give help. But they won’t see them without empathy for those situations, and they won’t have that empathy without an understanding of the struggles.
Not true. Ruminant grazing animals (like cows) use land that generally is not fit for farming plants that humans would consume. They make land productive that otherwise would not be. Also, farming for the staples of plant-based diets annihilates animal life. In order to farm soy beans or whatever plant you eat, you have to tear up the soil and in doing so you will kill every ground squirrel, ground nesting bird, snake, vole, groundhog and rabbit that lives in that plot. Then you have to spray chemical pesticides that will annihilate anything you haven't already mechanically killed with the combine. Not to mention ruminant grazers enhance the soil through their compaction, manure and urine while plant farming has to constantly add external fertilizer to maintain yields.