Environmental arguments and meat

Environmental arguments can never be arguments against meat eating per se. Eating meat, i.e. preditors like us eating prey animals, is irrevokably a part of a healthy environment. Instead they are inevitably arguments against eating meat, or even organic veggies, in a manner which damages the environment.

Ultimately such arguments are arguments against over population since environmental harm is directly tied to population pressures.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

James, I wouldn't say billion every day. Perhaps thousands everyday, maybe even tens of thousands, but billions ?

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Meat eating doesn't product greenhouse gasses.

Raising significant numbers of cattle might be producing slightly more green house gasses than the ungulates they displace, however that is not significant compared to disruption of the tundra in terms of methane or combustion by products in terms of overall impact.

And whatever impact it does have could be avoided by switching to less flatulent meat sources and/or reducing demand by reducing population pressures.

Eating meat is irrevocalbly a part of the ecosystem. Any particular person can make a choice, but as a species we are a part of the food chain and the spot we occupy is top preditor and large prey animals depend on us to eat them. If we don't they over populate and savage the ecosystem, destroying their food sources and then fall prey to starvation and disease.

Abdicating our responcibility has been tried before and the results are an animal holocaust. The landscap stripped. Piles of dead animals rotting while emaciated diseased survivors desperately try to find anything at all to eat.

Nature cares not one whit about your morality.

 

I see.. I misunderstood that

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

No. The specific overpopulation of cattle, and in particular using certain feeding techniques, can produce methane. However this is not unique to cattle, all ungulates have this issue including the ones the cattle have supplanted. Are millions of cattle more or less flatulent than millions of bison? Is this a real issue because traditionally grasslands have been covered in grazing ungulates, so is there actually a net gain in methane release?

Sheep, goats and pigs however definitely are less flatulent. Switching from cows to pigs would eliminate the problem because meat eating doesn't product greenhouse gasses, cows do.

You humanocentric people amaze me. Did you really think all that nice grazing land was totally unused until we invented cattle?

As do all grazing ungulates. There are actually far more trees in the great plains than when the bison were in charge of it. Grass and grazing animals have been fighting the trees since grasses came into being. Life is way more complex than you seem to realize.

No it wouldn't. All those cows would still need predators. I suppose we could just kill them and let them rot. Is that your suggestion?

Also we are neither separate nor exempt from the ecosystem, nor is it just about us. Meat eating is an innate part of the ecosystem. Repeat it until it finally sinks in. Predation occurs from the smallest microbes to the biggest whales. Prey and predator are interdependent. Suddenly remove 6 billion top predators and you will wreck havoc.

Longing has nothing to do with it, cows being eaten by predators is how the system works. Break the system and you have real problems instead of just moral ones.

I believe I already mentioned that population pressures are the source of most of the current issues.

I've thought it out more than you have apparently. Also what exactly is it you think I'm suggesting?

 

I can't believe that the "cow farts cause global warming" pseudoscience caught on at all.

 

My comment was on topic and relevant. Why do you threaten and belittle me?

 

The United States:
96,669,000 head of cattle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle
An estimated 60-100 million head of Bison in the mid-19th century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Bison

Note the Bison mainly occupied the great plains and the cattle are spread through out the US.

 

OK, "vegan meetup" is hardly an ubiased source of facts. However what exactly are you seeking to prove? I've already said cows aren't a great source of meat for the environment and acknowledged they produce methane (actually mainly from burps). That cows are a bad source doesn't mean that meating eating itself is a problem.

So what you are proposing is very efficient warehouse farming of more efficient and less polluting animals like pigs. Of course its cruel and in humane, but very environmentally friendly, particularly when the effluent is recycled. By the way I don't for a second believe your vegan numbers.

Or its not an either/or situation. The fact is we are currently top preditor and we have yet to show that we are a viable species in the long run.

 

Ok, considered and rejected.

 

James, I am not convinced everyone becoming a vegetarian will solve the problem. Where do we grow all the soy beans ? And I read somewhere that growing soy beans on a commercial scale produces at least as much greenhouse gases as keeping livestock for consumption.

 

Looking at the worlds population and where they live and how they live seems to indicate that the majority of them don't eat meat much if any at all. seeing that over 70 percent of the Earths population are living without electricity, clean water or other basic necessities and not much land that animals could graze on, it looks like their only means of survival is with vegetables like rice and other vegetables.

 

The global warming and ozone scares mess up the works nicely which is why activists insist on using them. They are advocates of the animals who tell us that animal farts are destroying the planet? That story is hard to swallow and I won't try.

I am not even going to try to remedy cow farts. They are the result of the decay of organic matter and that organic matter was created in the first place by taking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, including methane. Not that I accept the greenhouse gas theory, but this is consistent with the idea that some portion of the carbon in the atmosphere should be kept out of the atmosphere.

 

Plants do not take methane from the atmosphere.