EquALLity wrote:Does this guy have a point, or is he bullshitting?
Does feeding cows grass and killing them save more animals because of the animals killed for harvesting grains?
It's bullshit. I don't see where he said that, I guess it's above where you cropped it, but there's no reason to believe that.
The argument is parroting an article by Steven Davis from 2003, which has been repeatedly debunked.
Here's a diagram, and explanation of the methods:
http://www.animalvisuals.org/projects/data/1mc
1.7 animals per million calories for beef, based on slaughter alone
1.56 animals per million calories in harvesting for grain
And that's based on Davis' numbers for harvest, and ignoring ALL associated animal deaths with managed grazing land.
Which is something not even Davis' does (although he does ignore the difference in land use between the two)
animalvisuals wrote:Davis estimates that 15 wild animals per hectare per year are killed as a result of harvesting annual crops, and guesses that maybe half that, or 7.5 animals per hectare per year, are killed on grazed land with managed perennial forage.
Based on the animals dying in managed grazing land from that guess alone, beef still kills many more animals, because it requires more land.
Here's another good article, which is a little easier to read:
http://www.theflamingvegan.com/view-pos ... for-vegans
Based on the studies, animals killed during harvesting are almost all just temporarily displaced, or killed by predatory birds. The difference there, as compared to a grassland, is mostly going to be that it happens all at once in a huge event, rather than gradually over the year (where in grasslands, predatory birds STILL kill mice constantly).
Are more mice killed per season by predators on farmland than would be over a year on 'natural' grassland?
This is not even clear, and so there's no reason to claim it is. It's just an ignorant assertion without a shred of evidence presented. And even if they are, and even if it's a HUGE difference, beef still loses.
idiot wrote:and a more efficient use of the land.
It's not more efficient. Grain production produces more calories per acre by far than grass. And in either case, cows as middle-men for those calories yield far less still.
It is for this reason that massive tracts of rain forest are burnt down to make room for cattle to graze.
We don't have enough land to be wasting it all grazing cattle, and pretending like that's going to feed any meaningful portion of the world population -- it simply is not, and can not.
There are a few kinds of land that are not suitable for growing crops, due to being too rocky, bad soil, not enough rain, etc. which can grow grass. These kinds of land can be fixed in various ways, and become more productive, but people in third world countries usually don't have the knowledge or ability to do that -- and so they are only able to raise, for instance, goats on that land, because that requires less infrastructure investment and knowledge.
That's not an excuse for those of us in first world countries, who have plenty of perfectly fine farm land, and the ability to build the infrastructure to make non-productive areas productive. We have no need or excuse for relying on such primitive practices.
And none of that is to even mention the many serious health and environmental ramifications of animal agriculture