Ok, let's stop animal farming tomorrow, and all become vegetarians/vegans.
What will happen to all the pigs, sheep, cattle, goats, ducks, geese, chickens etc.?

They can't just wander around - they'll need to eat, and generally speaking will rather like eating the same cereals, fruits and vegetables that we now live on.

And what do we call animals which we can't extract any value from that like to eat our food crops? Pests. And what do we do to pests? Why, we kill them. (Aside from a few very devout Buddhists, all agrarian farmers kill pests.)

And we don't generally have much sympathy for the way we kill our pests* so I doubt we'd go to all the time and trouble of stunning them.

And, if we kill all these suddenly feral cattle to stop them eating our wheat, maize and soya, their bodies are going to just go to waste, rotting where they dropped, spreading disease etc. unless we do something with them.

Incineration isn't very green. So, we might as well just eat them, eh?

And all that manure that we spread on fields through the winter to replace some of the organic matter that's been used by last year's crop - where's that going to sustainably come from? Us? You do know we already do that with solid waste left over from sewage treatment once it's usefully free of pathogens? So unless we suddenly all start shitting more, we'll have to dig out more mineral fertilisers to use them instead - even more than we already do, bringing forward the time when 'peak phosphate' will pass, pushing up the price of phosphate fertilisers and therefore of the "sustainable" food you think we're all going to be able to live on.

The problem of eating meat is not that it is inherently more or less sustainable than a plant diet, but that trying to feed meat at every meal to upwards of seven billion people is inherently unsustainable. We could comfortably feed everyone meat with a far smaller meat industry and more humane farming methods if we in the West went back to a diet where we maybe ate meat or fish once or twice per week, raising those in the less developed world to that same level.

But ultimately it's human numbers that are the core problem, not what they eat, and my guess is were pretty close to the stationary phase of our population curve. Even if we can think ourselves to a point where we can sustain 10bn or so people, we're unlikely to be able to do that indefinitely without getting knocked back by a disease that kills us or one of our food species, by pollution or some other limiting factor. Just because we can see the strings doesn't make us any less the puppets.

So have a burger, and think a bit harder about how we can get back into some kind of balance without invoking some kind of hippy-dippy pastoral idyll that never existed and never will, even if you can humanely reduce the human population to a faction of its current level.

*Probably because it's hard to anthropomorphise a locust or a slug. Which is a problem - all farming, even organic farming, does what it can to 'control' (a euphemism for kill, usually) insect and other invertebrate or fungal pests. Nematode-infected slugs die just as dead as metaldehyde-baited ones do. Why is this ok, but killing a chicken isn't? Slugs are alive. Potato blight fungus is alive. Caterpillars and locusts are alive. Why draw a line between what forms of life are alive and which ones are dead? There's no moral justification for the distinction, so why make it?
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Mon 8 Oct 2012, 16:58, Reply)