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Originally Posted by wdevauld
I'm not saying that I eat meat because of the need to keep herbbie population down. I eat meat because I like it.
My problem is in the argument that we should stop eating meat because of the 'footprint' that an animal requires to be rasied. What should we do then? Erradicate all cows from the planet so that we can use their space and eat their food. Might as well get rid of the rabbits, chickens and fish while we are at it, because they take up room too, and so does the food they require. If overpopulation of the human race is a problem, deal with overpopulation as the problem, don't push it off to the fact that my food takes up more space than yours.
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Cattle, chickens, et cetera, do not naturally exist in the numbers or densities that they currently do, nor over the vast areas they now inhabit. We have artificially inflated their numbers and range by protecting them when they breed, until we decide to slaughter them. If we all stopped eating domesticated meat, their numbers would drop drastically as they were predated upon, struck with disease, and so forth, and our use of vegetation as our sole source of nutrients would reduce each person's biological footprint substantially.