Cows, our diets and climate change
Dear Dr. Fox: With all due respect, I need to disagree with your position about cows being a problem. As a veterinarian, you should know that cows are just one of about 200 species of ruminant animals, all of them methane emitters. In my area, the white-tailed deer population has grown to the point that they are obnoxious vermin, chewing on anything green in addition to emitting methane.
All around the world, there are people dependent on water buffalo, reindeer, yaks, goats, sheep and other animals for their entire livelihoods. Elimination of domestic cattle would hardly make a blip in the total methane emissions into our atmosphere, the majority of which comes from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, oil and gas leaks, garbage dumps, volcanos – and, of course, wars.
Ever since the dawn of humanity, we have been meat-eaters. Many times, the only thing between humans and starvation was a chunk of wild animal meat. Some think that meat consumption enabled us to develop larger brains. If anyone wants to be a vegetarian, fine, go ahead. But the strident demands for all of us to convert to vegetarianism are ridiculous and probably impossible.
Most of the people making those demands are of the pampered class who have never been hungry, never produced one bit of their own food and have no idea of what food production requires. With widespread hunger around the world, those same people are blind to the irony of being able to ponder over their choices for each meal. And those hoping to make meat-eating into a moral issue are running counter to Christianity, Judaism and Islam, all of which recognize meat-eating.
The new artificial “meats” lack flavor, are too expensive and may be up to 15 times more damaging to the environment than real meat. It is impossible to grow, harvest, collect, transport, manufacture, distribute and cook artificial meat ingredients without a huge environmental impact, including water usage.
I do not like factory farms any more than you do. Those places are the result of economic forces and the constant mergers of ever-larger corporations that have driven the smaller farms out of business. Cows free to graze on pasture are the ideal situation, which in many ways replicates the effects of the millions of bison that once roamed North America. But farm commodities are subject to prices mostly controlled by large corporations. Only a few companies control meat production, five corporations control world grain prices, and milk processors are continually undergoing mergers. We have laws to limit monopolies, but our government seldom enforces them.
Here is a simple fact: Given a choice, people are going to eat what they like. The militant vegetarians, the new moralists and our medical establishment have all refused to accept that fact. – D.D., Niles, Michigan
Dear D.D.: As my friend the late Nobel Prize-winner Konrad Lorenz would say, “I could not disagree with you less” – that is, regarding many of the points you raise!
However, I do regard vegetarianism, and ideally veganism, as ethical imperatives for those who do have choices. The estimated 800 million people around the world who are malnourished have no such choices. Using good agricultural lands to raise feed for factory-farmed animals, rather than people, is ecologically absurd, socially unjust and a major cause of the loss of biodiversity. India has millions of undernourished people, yet is a major exporter of meat.
Monopolistic corporate control of agriculture, as you observe, is part of the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of “progress,” decimating rural communities and the nexus of family farms, as I documented in my 1986 book “Agricide: The Hidden Crisis That Affects Us All.”
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