A note to vegetarians from page 147 of Michael Archer and Bob Beale’s book ‘Going Native’:
“… clearing fields to produce more monoculture of plants to provide for vegetarians will result in millions more dead animals and plants. Even more will perish each time those fields are ploughed. In a recent study, using figures provided by CSIRO, John Kelly of the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia showed that in Australia using land for grain production results in far more dead sentient animals per kilogram of usable protein than does land for grazing to produce meat.
Here’s the arithmetic, using cattle and wheat as examples. One cow produces about 100 kilograms of boneless meat, of which 23 kilograms is protein. That translates to about 0.044 lives lost per kilogram of useable protein produced. Contrasting this with grain production, the CSIRO data indicate that on average there is a mouse plague in any given grain producing area about once every four years. During these plagues, mouse number rise to, and often beyond, 1000 per hectare. These plagues are controlled by poisons or lethal traps, which kill at least 80 per cent of the mice. This means that every year, at least 200 mice per hectare are killed to grow grain. Given that on average about 1.8 tonnes of wheat are produced per hectare, and that about a quarter of this is useable protein, 0.44 lives are lost per kilogram of protein to produce wheat. In short, growing wheat results in 10 times as many deaths as beef production.
We presume here that advocates of herbivory will not argue that a cow’s life is somehow of great moral value than that of a mouse. Each is a gregarious social mammal with a suitably sized brain and well-developed nervous system.”
No, but do we eat bread for protein? What do the figures look like if we compare, say total calories?
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Jennifer – the study apparently forgets to mention that to produce 1 kg of meat a cow consumes over 8 kilograms of plants, usually grain and soybeans. If people just ate the grain and sobeans instead of meat then 1/8 of the land would be required. Soy protein has the same as food value as animal protein.
BTW I am carnivorous.
I think the study assumed that the cattle were grazing pasture. That’s the beauty of a ruminant, it can use something that is indigestible to us and convert it into high quality food for humans. And if we must have our cattle finished off in feedlots (which I would rather we didn’t), a ruminant’s gut can only withstand a few months of grain-based diet. Most of the growth takes place out in the paddock eating pasture.