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Comment by 6d6b73 | Hacker News Reader

Not all cows are used for meat. Bison, and pigeons are just two examples, but as you can imagine, all over planet there were billions of animals that are not either extinct or close to being extinct. How about european bison, aurochs, wild pigs, and many many more. Cows are just one example of the bovine family.

I don't claim that farmed meat does not contribute anything, but it's not the only, or even main problem of the climate change. Start a garden, and see for yourself how much resources it takes to grow enough plant food to feed your family,and compare that to a number calories you can get from one cow.

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No offense, but you appear to be just making up your numbers and inventing the conclusions from whole cloth. Nobody would dispute that the biosphere was richer and more diverse in the past, but all of those animals were part of a global equilibrium (at least on the order of 10s of thousands of years, nothing is permanent).

Currently, the animals in our food system are not. I do garden extensively, and I know how difficult it is to produce food for a whole year. I also know that feeding carbon intensive corn to cows to eat is a thermodynamically loosing game calorie-wise. If you want to pay for regeneratively raised, grass fed beef from farms with integrated waste management, good for you. If you think your 99c hamburger at a fast food restaurant isn’t part of a climate and ethical catastrophe, I think you’re being willfully ignorant.

Personally I’m a vegetarian, but the main thing I care about is that people eat less meat, which was more sustainably and ethically raised.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C16&q=cow...

>all over planet there were billions of animals that are not either extinct or close to being extinct There used to be more diversity amongst animals but that doesn't change the fact that there is 3 times more cattle in North America now than there used to live in the wild.

>I don't claim that farmed meat does not contribute anything, but it's not the only, or even main problem of the climate change. Climate change does not have a "main problem", it's multiple minor causes that each need to be addressed (and agriculture is a big one).

>Start a garden, and see for yourself how much resources it takes to grow enough plant food to feed your family,and compare that to a number calories you can get from one cow. Are you implying the cow doesn't need to be fed? Cows need a lot more water and land per gram of protein or per calorie than fish, poultry or legumes. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014Natur.515..518T/abstra... https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987

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