• Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    Under literally any ethical system you choose.

    Forget harm to the animal for a moment.

    Breeding animals to slaughter is more water, land and time intensive than growing crops, and produces substantially fewer calories for even more land area. Breeding animals to slaughter also generates far more CO2 then crops, either from the animal directly or from transport and butchering processes.

    • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Under literally any ethical system you choose.

      deontological ethicists aren’t concerned with the consequences, only the action itself.

    • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Under literally any ethical system you choose.

      i don’t know of any divine command theory that says anything like that

    • LufyCZ@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      If it’s pure calories you’re after, might I suggest Uranium? It’s pretty cheap considering what you can theoretically get out of it.

      ^/s

    • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      letting a cow graze a field and killing it next year takes way less time than tilling and planting and fertilizing and watering and harvesting.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        Not relevant. The field that is used to grow food stock for animals could have been used to grow food stock for humans. Potatoes have a high calorie count and are not particularly difficult to grow.

        You’ll get far more calories out of the field of potatoes than a field of cows, unless you’re packing them in at the same density as the potato plants which I’m assuming you’re not.

        • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          You’ll get far more calories out of the field of potatoes than a field of cows,

          if the land is unsuitable for crop production, you can often still raise cattle on it.

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            1 year ago

            You still need to grow food to feed the cattle, if only for winter stock, so you have to find a fertile field to grow food stock, so that field could be used for growing crops and the field that’s unsuitable for anything else could just be, well not used. There’s absolutely no scenario where cattle are going to be more sustainable than crops.

        • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          The field that is used to grow food stock for animals could have been used to grow food stock for humans.

          often, it is. as i said, most of the crops fed to animals are parts of plants people can’t or won’t eat.

    • DaBPunkt@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Much more land can be used for growing animals than for growing crops. And without animals there would be no dung so the only way to let crops grow would be chemical fertilizer (which is made of oil).

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        You’re talking about a different issue which is food shortages.

        There is absolutely no shortage of arable land on earth, the problem is it isn’t evenly distributed but that’s an easy enough problem to solve if we actually wanted to solve it. The solution isn’t cattle.

        It’s obviously not the solution because if it was the solution there wouldn’t be world hunger, you can’t feed millions of people on cow.