Roasting the Planet: Big Meat and Dairy’s Big Emissions | IATP
We must all ban all pet dogs and cats as they consume 20-30% of most individual country’s meat supply. We need to ban meat animals because their stomachs emit methane gas as part of enteric fermentation digestion. It is not eating meat that is the problem – it’s the animals themselves and their belching methane gas, and hence, they need to be eliminated because livestock produces 30% of global methane emissions.
Now for the converse argument – while livestock produce emissions, they have in many cases replaced previously wild animals grazing in the same areas. In the U.S., think of buffalo and deer herds that were much larger in number in the past – before we replaced them with livestock. We shifted from wild animals to domesticated animals. Eliminating livestock and the land they graze on might merely return to the original wild populations – and make no net difference in methane emissions. (See Comparable GHG emissions from animals in wildlife and livestock-dominated savannas)
