this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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"You ever plow a field? To plant the quinoa or sorghum or whatever the hell it is you eat. You kill everything on the ground and under it.
You kill every snake, every frog, every mouse, mole, vole, worm, quail… you kill them all.
So, I guess the only real question is: how cute does an animal have to be before you care if it dies to feed you?”
-John Dutton
Cows and chickens gotta eat too, and that food is coming from fields as well.
By reducing meat consumption also way less critters will end up dying.
Are you from a farm town?
A supermajority of animal feed comes from the waste product of crops we that were being grown anyway, or grass from a fallow field that needs to be harvested anyway (not enough the latter due to logistics, but my local farms all do). That whole "8 to 1" calorie to cow thing leaves out the part that it's 8 calories of landfill material to make 1 calorie of beef. Nobody has an "animal only" corn field. And nobody is using harsh animal-killing chemicals on the fallow fields.
And cows are still being fed things whether you eat them or not. We need their manure and it's overall better for the environment than synthetic fertilizer. Without some form of fertilizer, we need much more farmland, which means more animals killed per calorie. All compared to 700,000 calories in a cow.
Unfortunately, nobody has ever demonstrated in a defensible manner that a horticulture-only scenario would be anywhere near as efficient on animal lives as what we have now. It's one thing to cut animal intake 10%, entirely another to try to rebuild our farming industry without animals.
According to the Alberta Cattle Feeders Association, 80% of the feed is composed of corn. According to the USDA itself half the corn grown in the US was used for animal feed, and 78% of the world's soy production is made for animal feed.
Is the waste product of corn and soy included in these numbers?