this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (3 children)

What a loaded question.

Outside of the fact that a single cows life provides about 900 meals for humans, and the scraps left over make boots that last for a decade and also feed our cats and dogs. Plus, it's delicious.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Imagine how many people you could feed if we would just eat what we fed the animals!

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago

Ah yes, good old hay ... delicious!

[–] [email protected] -2 points 4 months ago

We can't live on hay and corn. Cows need several stomachs to do it.

Also, getting enough protein and creatine and other vitamins as a vegan is a hell of a lot of work and doesn't taste as good.

Humans are animals, and the type of animals we are is omnivores. Not herbivores.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It's delicious, therefore we should torture it and eat it. People are the worst.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

There's no need to "torture" cattle to get meat from them. Indeed, meat from animals that are experiencing stressful conditions tastes worse. Not to mention simply having lower productivity. A farm with happy cows is going to be more profitable than one with stressed ones, all else being equal.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago

Guess you didn't get to grow up watching the discovery Channel before all their shows were about crab fishing and animal rescue. Would you rather I go rip a gazelle apart and start eating it's insides while it keeps trying to stand up with only two front legs?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Yeah so, the amount of meals is correct. But that's about it. I mean, I can't say about the taste, to each their own, but one kg of cow meat needs two dozen kg of grain.

That's about as inefficient as it gets.

As for the leather, the industry doesn't like products that last a decade, so it isn't actually using the leather in such a way. Industrial leather boots last a year tops.

Finally, pet food is made out of discarded cuts of meat, the uglies, etc. But also lots of cereals, and vegetables.

So we could really afford eating less meat. It isn't good for anything. Not for us, not for the other species (certainly not for the cows, that get often half assed butchered in a hasty way because of quotas and profit), and absolutely not for the ecosystem.

But I guess the taste is all that matters.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Industrial leather boots last a year tops.

With respect, you're buying awful boots.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Cows are not all fed on grain. A lot of cows are ranched on land that would not be suitable for growing grain crops.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Whatever their food is, 1kg of beef requires 24kg of grain's worth of energy. This is something they teach in high-school biology now. The higher the food chain, the more energy is lost. Stopping such production would be pretty beneficial to the environment, but whether we should is a complicated question.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

But as I pointed out, many cattle are ranched on land that cannot grow grain. They can't grow the sorts of crops that humans eat, only the sorts of crops that cattle eat. If cattle weren't being ranched on those lands they wouldn't be producing edible grain instead, or any other food that humans could eat. So the inefficiency is moot when it comes to the amount of nutrition produced, removing the cattle from that land would simply reduce the total amount of food we have available.

Sure, if you remove the cattle then wild animals could come in to replace them, but we should make sure that's not going to result in starvation and poverty if we do that. Many areas of the world have subsistence ranching by the locals.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Interesting. However, a search says that feeding all the grass (or whatever) to cattle takes that food away from existing ecosystems in dry areas and potentially allow exotic weeds to take over land. So we probably don't want this to expand to the point where we intrude on dry ecosystems.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 4 months ago

It's just a matter of land management. Many of those grassland areas used to have other large grazing animals on them, so as long as the cattle herds aren't bigger than those old herds it should be sustainable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

And of course the land couldn't be used for anything else... like natural ecosystems.

Just because land exists doesn't mean it needs to be pillaged to feed our desires.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago

Most ranchland is, in fact, a "natural ecosystem." They just send cattle out to graze on it.

The point I'm making here is about food efficiency, though, not about land use.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Billions of trees every year get cut down to make space for cattle pastures, now tell me how destroying entire ecosystems that have been there for potentially thousands of years is worth some particular meat.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 4 months ago

And billions of acres of pasture could never support trees

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Inefficient?

Cows eat grains that humans can't digest, or if they can, it takes energy to transform them to something human can eat.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

we use some of the most fertile lands in the midwest that could be used to grow literally anything else to grow vast amounts of soy and corn for cows.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago

And in those specific cases, sure, you could do more efficiently by getting rid of the cattle.

The point I'm making is that there's plenty of cattle raised in places that aren't like that.