this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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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.
deontological ethicists aren't concerned with the consequences, only the action itself.
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
I don't think that you Uranium contains any calories.
A calorie is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature one kg of water by 1°C, so uranium has quite a few, hard to digest though.
Edit: I was curious so I looked it up, 1 gram of uranium has 20 billion calories
Microdosing time!
I don't think you understand what calories are.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie
Food calories and scientific measurement calories are different. It's literally in the first paragraph of the article.
My comment specifically says "pure calories".
What does
/smean? Does it mean back by science? Does it mean I should do this?? Please answer quickly, I have a piece of uranium here and I'm dying to eat itYes, science has confirmed that Uranium is perfectly edible and that it'll provide you enough energy for the rest of your life.
Wow!! Thanks
i don't know of any divine command theory that says anything like that
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most pastures also planted, fertilized, and watered? You're also assuming infinite land here - I don't know shit about farming, but the first google hit I got suggests that cows need about 1.8 acres of pasture per year.
1 cow, consuming 1.8 acres of land, produces on the scale of 0.5 to 1.4 million calories, according to this estimate
However farming produces up to 18 million calories per acre, so if you were growing potatoes you'd have 32 million calories. On the same land that produced up to 1.4 million calories via grazing cow.
no. they're grasslands, and hilly terrain or rocky soil is a common feature of land designated as pastures because of the difficulty of working the land.
no, i'm not. i was comparing the work done to plant a field of potatoes against raising an equivalent amount of cattle. i'm making no sweeping policy proposals.
Great, in a vacuum, and assuming efficiency of land does not matter, you are correct in saying it takes less work to produce less calories.
not just in a vaccuum but literally any time you have the option to plant a field or put a cow in it, it will always be less work to put a cow in it.
so? the work of lettin a cow eat what grows is still less work than planting, tending, and harvesting.
if you ask a seed salesman whether you should buy his product for your pasture, he'll try to sell it to you. but no, for the most part pasture management is very low intensity: repair fences and deter predators. these have direct analogues in raising crops though in warding off pests that would eat the crops.
Did you miss '/s' or do you genuinely believe that?
Cause if it's the latter, you should go to your school and ask for a refund.
I don't think youve ever planted a field if you think I'm wrong
And I don't think you've ever considered the amount of food and water required for just a kilo of meat.
Hint: It's exponentially more than a kilo of veggies or grains.
you haven't been reading what I'm writing.
buy a cow. put it in a pasture. come back in 18 months.
OR
buy seed. till. plant. water. feed. harvest.
the time investment per calorie is vastly different.
Yeah good luck with that when 8 billion people start doing that. Moron.
the discussion is about effort, not scalability.
We've got machines for that stuff.
running machines still takes effort. letting a cow live doesn't.
making food is a good use of land.
most of the crops fed to animals are parts of plants people can't or won't eat.
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.
if the land is unsuitable for crop production, you can often still raise cattle on it.
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.
you can feed cattle silage and crop seconds from food grown for people. you don't need to plant crops just to feed cattle.
why, though? making food is a good use of land.
Yay, deforestation is such a cool thing
that's not what I said: it's a straw man
wrong.
often, it is. as i said, most of the crops fed to animals are parts of plants people can't or won't eat.
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).
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.