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Funnily enough, there used to be about 60 million wild buffalo roaming north america. We killed them off & have devoted vast tracts of land to monocrop agricult
by dilap 5y ago
Funnily enough, there used to be about 60 million wild buffalo roaming north america. We killed them off & have devoted vast tracts of land to monocrop agriculture fueled by petrochemical fertilizers.
- Retric 5y agoThose 60 million Bison lived ~15 years on average. Cattle on the other hand rarely make it past adulthood, so those 33 million cattle slaughtered every year requires significantly more food. That’s the core reason we are feeding cattle with farmed corn, you simply get more beef from the same land.
- dilap 5y agoSure, I'm shooting from the hip. But I think the broader point is true -- there's nothing wrong/unsustainable/unnatural about having a bunch of ruminants running around. That's how it used to be! What's unnatural, and, I think, unsustainable, is vast fields of intensively-grown monocrops, propped up by petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides.
- Retric 5y agoHaving ruminants running around is very stable, but if we are then harvesting them for meat you start depriving that ecosystem of various nutrients. It’s significantly more stable, but still not “sustainable” indefinitely. On the other hand if we aren’t harvesting them it’s arguably kind of pointless.
- pas 5y agoWhy do slaughtered cattle require more food? Naively I'd guess that the big adult bison eat at least as much as the young cows in the same timeframe.
- Retric 5y agoIt’s the same reason eating to much makes you gain weight. Roughly speaking a 1300 pound adult cow needs ~9,700 calories per day to maintain it’s weight. Where a 770 lb calf only needs 6,230 calories per day to maintain body weight, but growing 2.2 lb per day, requires an additional 4,130 calories per day. So, 6,230 + 4,130 = 10,360. Thus between around 700 lb and full body weight they need more calories than an adult. With feedlot cattle being both close to adult body weight and adding more pounds per day. A newborn 80lb calf doesn’t its self need that many calories directly, but it both grows very rapidly gets its calories from it’s mother which turns grass calories to turn into milk calories at about 3:1 efficiency.
- cinntaile 5y agoYou (the U.S. government back then) killed them off just to stick it to the indigenous people, since buffalos played a central role in their lives. That is so messed up. From over 60 million to 541 in less than a century according to Wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison
- dilap 5y agoYes, extremely tragic.
- ethbr0 5y agoIt's difficult to organize, fund, & perpetrate evil at scale, to the exclusion of a financial motive, so it rarely happens. I'm sure the anti-indigenous Army leaders at the time were pleased with the side effect, but the reality is that firearms + slow moving bison + horses + railroad shipping = profit. And so people kept doing it until bison were almost eradicated.
- dilap 5y agoDefinitely multifactorial, but the US army really did have a policy of killing buffalo w/ the aim of depriving the indians they were fighting of their primary food source.
- ethbr0 5y agoDo you have a citation? Because Wikipedia explicitly mentioned 'This was said, but it's not clear if implementation went beyond someone dreaming out loud.'
- dilap 5y agoMy apologies, I think you are correct! At least per Atlantic. https://archive.is/WeFj2 https://archive.is/WeFj2 They hype up the Army aspect a lot in the first part of the article, but readering further it becomes clear that commerical hunting really was the main driver.