On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 10:35:25AM -0500, frank theriault scripsit: > On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 8:40 AM, Graydon <[email protected]> wrote: > <snip> > > So I wouldn't particularly say the twelve to eighteen months is cruel; > > it does matter a lot how the animal is killed, though, and the > > conditions of its life up until that point. > <snip> > > All factory-farmed beef cattle being killed at that age is cruel. > They never get the chance to live longer. We've artificially, for our > own purposes, determined that they all die based on economic > principles. That's not exactly letting nature take its course and > (what bothers me the most) the cattle certainly have no say in this! > <snip>
Why is that not letting nature take it's course? We're part of nature. I mean, you can make an ethical argument about domestication, that there's a difference between making a deal with the bovid genome to propagate many, many copies of the domestic strain in return for not having to take the risks involved in hunting aurochs with spears, and the hunting aurochs with spears method of getting beef, but in either case it's not like the cattle get "a say", or could. Cattle are really not up to long term planning. > > That's "livestock counting mechanized agriculture in toto, including > > fossil carbon sources for fertilizer production"; the methane load from > > cow farts is part of that, but very far from the major part and you're > > still stick with the issue if you're running truck gardens on that > > basis. (Which we, as a species, obviously ought not to be.) > > There is much truth in that, but raising animals for meat still has a > much much larger ecological footprint than growing plants on farms. Depends on how it's done. The guy ranching elk near Whitehorse is doing it on land that can't support a farm and would support elk (or similar ungulate) anyway; not quite as many as he's got without the management, but the ecological footprint is hard to determine. Feedlot beef has a large ecological footprint because it's driven by maize growing, which has a byzantine and complex set of subsidies driving it in the States. I mean, this is the traditional economic explanation for pastoral cultures; you can graze your herds places you can't farm. You are eating higher on the trophic web and that does change the efficiency in terms of converting sunlight into food, but that's not a determination of the fraction of the available sunlight you're converting into food. Plant farming that converts 50% of the available sunlight (at the basic initial 1%ish max efficiency of photosynthesis) gets rid of half the extant ecosystem (or more; consider California strawberries and bromine) where grazing on maintained grassland -- so short-grass prairie kept as prairie -- might not get rid of *any* of the extant ecosystem. Ecological impact has to be done with diversity and disparity counts and actually figuring out where the energy is going. It can't really be done by type of activity. (Arboriculture can _expand_ the diversity and disparity of the local ecosystem, even if it replaces a lot of the plant biota, for instance.) -- Graydon -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
