Is there any merit to this argument against veganism? I’ve heard of hunting deer for population control, but I’ve never heard of the rest before . . .
by marshallfrisbee
Is there any merit to this argument against veganism? I’ve heard of hunting deer for population control, but I’ve never heard of the rest before . . .
by marshallfrisbee
8 Comments
How many acres of land are covered with food for livestock?
“Today only 55 percent of the world’s crop calories feed people directly; the rest are fed to livestock (about 36 percent) or turned into biofuels and industrial products (roughly 9 percent). Though many of us consume meat, dairy, and eggs from animals raised on feedlots, only a fraction of the calories in feed given to livestock make their way into the meat and milk that we consume. For every 100 calories of grain we feed animals, we get only about 40 new calories of milk, 22 calories of eggs, 12 of chicken, 10 of pork, or 3 of beef. “
‘The Future of Food’ National Geographic
Edit: answered my own question.
Raising meat is what requires massive swaths of land that already eradicates ecosystems.
Plants consumed = just that plant is grown
Meat consumed = all the plants that animal ate in its entire life
Those animals aren’t eating native grasses, they’re eating crops that are produced at much higher rates than those that go directly to people.
“Twenty-six percent of the Planet’s ice-free land is used for livestock grazing and 33 percent of croplands are used for livestock feed production.”
“Globally, there is enough cropland to feed 9 billion in 2050 if the 40 percent of all crops produced today for feeding animals were used directly for human consumption…”
[source](https://www.fao.org/3/ar591e/ar591e.pdf)
“If we combine global grazing land with the amount of cropland used for animal feed, livestock accounts for 80% of agricultural land use. The vast majority of the world’s agricultural land is used to raise livestock for meat and dairy.”
“Meat, dairy, and farmed fish provide just 17% of the world’s calories, and 38% of its protein.”
[source](https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture)
[Non-lethal Population Control of Deer](https://portal.ct.gov/CAES/Plant-Science-Day/2002/Non-lethal-Methods-of-Controlling-Deer-Population-Growth)
I presume that the person who wrote this is vegan except for animals they personally harvest and those animals are only the result of population control methods. Or roadkill.
In short, their arguments are bullshit. Or horseshit. But def shit.
This a very, very old, and very, very tired claim/argument that’s been roundly debunked times to numerous to count.
If people want to eat animals, the intellectually and morally honest thing to do would not include inventing bogus ‘scientific,’ ethical or environmental reasons for doing so.
Others have addressed crop land, even the deer hunting thing is ignoring that the better option is to return natural predators as Hunters mostly kill the healthy, strong animals, instead of the weak, young, old, sick animals predators naturally kill. Killing the healthiest and strongest have very real effects on evolution, herd disease, and over population (all effects being bad). Many will claim you can’t return wolves everywhere, and that’s true, but most places people hunt can as they aren’t usually hunting in suburbs. We should also do a better job of driving deer out of towns, where I am people feed them which is just really dumb on our part. Hunters spread lead throughout the forest, which is terrible for the ecosytem, and the system in place just helps to make money for political causes and those in power, which is never a good idea with humans…
Dawg people make up lies about veganism all the time. It’s called cognitive dissonance. Just ignore this and move on. Otherwise you’ll spend half your life listening to this garbage.
I suspect I will be downvoted to Hell for this, but I don’t care.
I started eating a WFPB diet for environmental reasons. Aside from the risk of CWD jumping to humans, I, personally, have no problem with hunting deer for meat, etc, if they are causing environmental destruction due to overpopulation – which is, in fact, a major ecological problem.
I live in an area with wolves, bobcats, and coyotes. Unfortunately, the environment in my region can’t support high enough populations of natural predators to actually keep deer populations in check.
I am all in favor of protecting predators and the ecosystems that support them. I am not a “hunter type” or a rancher. I am just being realistic. I do not support measures to increase deer populations so that they can be hunted for sport. The reality is that hunters do more to control deer populations, in my region, than wolves, etc, possibly could.
As for the rest… No comment. It’s been discussed a million times before, and I have nothing to say that hasn’t already been said. I think this person is mostly trying to baselessly justify their existing beliefs and preferences.
As a rule of thumb, it takes about 10x the biomass to support each level of the food chain. So whatever calories and nutrients you get from livestock, you could get from 1/10th of the plants you feed the livestock.
44% of land in the contiguous US is used for livestock or growing livestock feed. Cut that to 1/10, and you could free up land equivalent to the entire Mountain and Pacific time zones for other purposes. Rewild it, restore wetlands and prairies and forests. Take 2% of it and you could build enough solar panels to power the entire world.
Not only is that argument entirely wrong, but if we’re gonna talk about catastrophically inefficient land usage, livestock is the real problem.