Incidentally, I’d love to see the Great Plains return to huge roaming ruminant populations, and find a way to build our meat industry around that.
And maximize how they're fed in the last months of their lives in feedlots.
They were certainly not killing 30 million bison each year.
The only answer here is less meat production, especially feedlot-finished, no matter how people try to twist it.
The ecology of it, including emissions, isn't really that bad if you're American. We're very efficient at beef production. It's really the global south that's most of the novel emissions, and that's mostly from counting land-use changes.
In natural environment, they cohabitant with other animals. They migrates.
When we farm them, we remove anything not our primary product.
In places like Ireland, where cows have existed for 6000 years, they're also part of the ecology by any meaningful metric. There are a lot of more recently arrived species considered native! Mice, hedgehogs, rabbits, and red deer all came later.
This is how cattle is kept in the US: https://www.hcn.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/sucked-dry-th...
I'd love to read your definition of "natural ecosystems", is it something like "a system in nature", with "nature" meaning "on planet earth"?