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Where is there more livestock than people?
- sweetheart 4y agoThis is sad. The scale of animal subjugation and suffering is hard to comprehend.
- newman555 4y agoHave no idea why you get downvoted, but I did notice few times now how HN crowd doesn’t know much about veganism or appreciates people who think animal agriculture is cruel. Ah yeah, and also terribly destructive: https://youtu.be/LaPge01NQTQ https://youtu.be/LaPge01NQTQ
- peoplefromibiza 4y agoMaybe because it's a biased POV, that doesn't take into account that the isssue is simply being human, nobody can call themselves out or blame some activity more than others. For example many vegans and animalists own pets to "save them from cruelty" But Loss and others of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that free-ranging domestic cats (mostly unowned) are the top human-caused threat to wildlife in the United States, killing an estimated 1.3 to 3.7 billion birds and 6.3 to 22.3 billion mammals annually. And that's only in the US... Wild life is a constant threat to our life style, like it or not, being a modern human in modern society means being responsible for animal suffering even if you don't personally eat them. For example in my country the war on hunters (mainly by radical animalists) produced that Roughly 2.3 million wild boars roam around Italy, with roughly 20,000 in the area of Rome, according to farm trade group Coldiretti. And while African swine fever can't be transmitted to humans, it can infect and kill domestic pigs
- sweetheart 4y agoNothing about what you said is antithetical to veganism, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.
- peoplefromibiza 4y agowell, this is the reason why people downvote these comments. muslims don't eat pork, Hindu don't eat cows, every religion impose dietary restriction, doesn't mean that non believers have to follow them. Veganism is no exception to the rule: if you believe you're reducing animal suffering, good for you, go on with your religion and be happy. But in truth you aren't, vegans kill a lot of animals too, there are billions of people in the World that cause much less damages than us westerners, even if we lived only on rainwater and rocks. So you might be a "true vegan (TM)" but you aren't better for the environment or for animal suffering than anybody else. That's what I was trying to say.
- sushxbehshx 4y ago
- sweetheart 4y agoThis is a string of silly arguments. There are loads of videos debunking the points you try to make here, you should watch them.
- peoplefromibiza 4y agoThere is also a string of videos saying otherwise. I believe in science and data, not videos. I'm not into "videos that corroborate my opinions" religion. sorry.
- sweetheart 4y agolol
- sushxbehshx 4y ago[dead]
- antiterra 4y agoI don’t see evidence that the HN crowd as a whole doesn’t know much about veganism. Are you measuring knowledge about veganism via adoption of veganism? From a few years back: “Ask HN: Have you gone vegan or vegetarian?” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13985006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13985006
- giantg2 4y agoI actually see a lot of stuff about vegan and vegetarian diets on HN.
- aaron695 4y ago> Have no idea why you get downvoted The comment contributes absolutely nothing to the conversation. No definition, no solution, no relevance. If livestock is less than people is it ok then? These graphs are just hotspots it's impossible to use them quantifiably at USA levels. They only show there are a lot of "cows" "there" You are just roping your common repetitive viewpoints into the story. Why don't you care about human slavery? Do you not think that is cruel? I'm guessing because you are rich and the poor can eat vegan cake on the other side of the world? Why do vegans get to bring up veganism every conversation when so many people have such awful lives like being slaves? None of this is relevant to livestock heat maps using a measure of X times people. > HN crowd doesn’t know much about veganism It's common - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=vegan&sort=byPopularity&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... An actual solution, rather than vegans saying they are vegan, is also common on HN - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=lab%20grown%20meat&sort=byPopularity&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- cercatrova 4y agoLab grown meat is the answer. One can never convince a statistically significant amount of people to switch to meat, so one must find ways to make the meat itself more sustainable. It's thinking with the end in mind. Once you axiomatize the ends, you can then figure out the means to get there.
- sweetheart 4y agoThis is an unhinged reply. The fact that you ask why the other commenter doesn’t care about slavery really drives home the point that you don’t know what you’re talking about and you have a hard time constructing an argument. I hope you educate yourself about veganism. there are endless resources!
- h2odragon 4y agoI live beside one of the "more pigs than people" counties; pretty sure that the bulk of the pig count is one farm (with several contract barns). At least in theory, there's one person who can say those are his pigs. I'd be tempted to train them, arm them, declare the county the Free Porcine State.
- formerkrogemp 4y ago> I'd be tempted to train them, arm them, declare the county the Free Porcine State. Why stop at pigs? Why not free all of the animals at the animal farm? Are some animals more equal than others? ;)
- beepbeepcabbage 4y agoPigs and chickens too fat to walk or unable to eat with their beaks sawed off would require care until the end of their lives etc... And that's humans fault, not theirs. You can't simply throw up your hands and walk away from a century of animal eugenics
- gus_massa 4y agoIt would be nice to repeat the maps using weight. The weight of a cow is like 700Kg (1500 pounds) and the weight of a chicken is like 3Kg (6 pounds). So a cow is like 250 chickens. (Can someone with CGI abilities make a gros image of a cow made of 250 chickens?)
- sperm 4y agoOr emissions (methane?). Iirc, sheep have the most emissions per pound.
- sushxbehshx 4y ago
- colaco 4y agoOr the ratio of animal weight to human weight per county…
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoKinda like this? https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/p0qws3/self_if_you_blended_all_788_billion_people_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/p0qws3/self...
- loonster 4y agoI think it would be more useful to track weight produced. This statistic is probably hard to track... A good proxy would be to multiply the number of animals by the Animal Unit Equivalents (AUE).
- Gustomaximus 4y agoI was surprised the lack if sheep areas. Is lamb not a popular meat in USA? Just looked up wool production and didn't realise how much Australia produces: https://blog.bizvibe.com/blog/textiles-and-garments/top-10-largest-wool-producing-countries https://blog.bizvibe.com/blog/textiles-and-garments/top-10-l...
- shiftpgdn 4y agoIt’s too hot for them in most of the agricultural centers in the USA. Plenty of goats though.
- bombcar 4y agoGoat milk is relatively common, but I've not seen goat meat for quite awhile. Lamb is available most places, but usually more expensive. Walmart carries it!
- bretpiatt 4y agoA good number of places in Texas serve goat neat, it just gets called cabrito. https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/on-the-menu-cabrito/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/on-the-menu-cabrito/
- NamTaf 4y agoAs opposed to all the sheep in famously temperate Australia? :) The temperature argument doesn't stack up to me. Have you got a source?
- s0rce 4y agoI was also curious since there were historically Basque sheepherders in Northern Nevada, which is generally not very cool, although the mountain summer ranges are somewhat cooler.
- School-Cotton 4y ago> Is lamb not a popular meat in USA? It’s not exactly rare, but it’s far less popular than beef, pork, or chicken.
- burlesona 4y agoI grew up in a small town and spent a lot of time driving through cows > people counties through college and young adulthood - every visit back to my parents meant seeing lots of cattle on the way. At grocery stores I would see packaging for “grass-fed beef” or “free-range” and honestly I thought it was like a joke that farmers were pulling on city people, like “gormet hand-picked potatoes” or “premium plastic” or something. What else would cows eat?? I’d probably seen a hundred thousand cows in my life, always in herds roaming around vast pastures. Of course they eat grass. Then I moved to California, and one day had occasion to drive from SF to LA. North of Bakersfield I encountered the most profound stink I’ve ever smelled while driving, and eventually I saw the source: industrial operations with enormous numbers of cattle in fenced pens shoulder to shoulder so they could hardly move. I spent the next ten minutes slack-jawed, reconsidering my life experience.
- dzdt 4y agoEven in pastureland country, cattle typically spend winters packed together in feedlots and are fattened in feedlots on a largely corn-based diet before slaughter. Depending on who is doing the labelling, cattle which were pastured before this fattening process may still be sold as "grass-fed".
- bombcar 4y agoSometimes the packed wintercows are fed grass (those big bales rolled up are quite heavy - and expensive).
- SEJeff 4y agoIf you have enough land, many farmers will roll it for you for free, and give you enough to feed your livestock for the winter. We had 10 acres growing up and asked for 5-6 for winter for our small herd. They kept and sold the rest and we didn’t pay a dime.
- citilife 4y ago> those big bales rolled up are quite heavy - and expensive Depends what you mean by "expensive". You can get one typically for $15 - $50 / bale. Here's a website: https://allhay.com/ https://allhay.com/ Prices are much higher due to the fertilizer and fuel prices. Around me It's going for $50-$55 for a 4x5ft bale (a few years ago it was $20 / bale). That said, those can weigh quite a bit, a 4x5ft bale will be 800 - 1200 lbs depending on moisture content and field composition. A cow will eat 20-40lbs of food a hay, depending on weather (they eat less in severe cold or heat). That equates to a single bale lasting one cow a approximately month or in reality, a heard of 30 cows needing about one bale a day. Using today's price of $50/bale, that's $1.67/day per cow to feed (a couple years ago it was much lower, say $0.5 - $0.75). Given it takes 2-3 years to maximize beef production AND assuming you only need feed half the year (grass fed cattle often graze), we're talking ~$750 to feed over the 2.5 year average (assuming 2.5 years @ 180 days). In terms of meat, you're probably going to get somewhere around 450lbs of use-able meat. You have to pay a butchering fee on that as well. That's probably $700. You'll also have transportation, fees, etc (let's just say $200/head). Total you're looking at a cost of $3.67/lb of processed beef. You can then resell for $5-6/lb right now to a reseller. This is a net of around $675. If you feed grain, you can effectively expect the same thing, but: 1. Grain fed will typically be cheaper per lb. 2. Grain will create a more tender meat (it's why people finish with grain) 3. Cows fed grain gain weight, so profit can be somewhat higher (often offset by organic nature of many grass fed cows) 4. Grain-fed tastes better to most people
- formerkrogemp 4y agoDoesn't New Zealand have more sheep than people?
- potatochup 4y agoYes, but the same applies to pretty much any country with agricultural food animals.
- bombcar 4y agoWhich makes sense if you work it out - unless a country would only eat the largest animals (cows) you find that people eat more than one animal a year, and so there must be more than that. (Cow, estimated 500,000 calories, 2,500 per day recommended, cow lasts 200 days - even then if you were to eat mainly cow you'd need more than eaters because they take more than 200 days to mature; but nobody eats pure cow.) I guess in theory you could eat one chicken per 8 weeks and barely keep it balanced, as you can grow a meat chicken in that time.
- carapace 4y agoEarth! What do I win? Seriously though, check out https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/ "Land Mammals" it's one of the more mind-blowing XKCDs IMO. > Earth's LAND MAMMALS By Weight [[A graph in which one square equals 1,000,000 tons. Dark grey squares represent humans, light gray represent our pets and livestock, and green squares represent wild animals. The squares are arranged in a roughly round shape, with clusters for each type of animal. Animals represented: Humans, cattle, pigs, goats (39 squares), sheep, horses (29 squares), elephants (1 square). There are other small, unlabeled clusters also. It is clear that humans and our pets & livestock outweigh wild animals by at least a factor of 10. ]] {{Title text: Bacteria still outweigh us thousands to one--and that's not even counting the several pounds of them in your body.}}
- seanwilson 4y agoWhen people bring up "overpopulation" as a primary cause of climate change, I notice most are only counting the 8 billion humans that are on earth right now and not the 80 billion land animals [1] that are being sheltered, fed then killed each year for food. It's a mind bogglingly large number that's hard to believe and yet easy to ignore because changing it will mean changes to our lifestyles to fix. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_slaughter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_slaughter
- oangemangut 4y ago72B of those 80 are chickens, cattle come in at 325M. At least chickens are a superfood animal in terms of converting calories into food, and generally being lower impact than cattle, pork, etc.
- seanwilson 4y ago> At least chickens are a superfood animal in terms of converting calories into food Maybe compared to beef but when chickens are being fed crops they're not efficient compared to eating crops directly. 72 billion chickens is still an insane number of extra lives to support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency "In comparing the cultivation of animals versus plants, there is a clear difference in magnitude of energy efficiency. Edible kilocalories produced from kilocalories of energy required for cultivation are: 18.1% for chicken, 6.7% for grass-fed beef, 5.7% for farmed salmon, and 0.9% for shrimp. In contrast, potatoes yield 123%, corn produce 250%, and soy results in 415% of input calories converted to calories able to be utilized by humans.[4] This disparity in efficiency reflects the reduction in production from moving up trophic levels. Thus, it is more energetically efficient to form a diet from lower trophic levels."
- adrian_b 4y agoComparing food efficiencies by energy content, i.e. by calories, between vegetables and animals, is completely futile and irrelevant. For any humans it is very easy to cover most of their energy needs with vegetable food and the majority of them, for whom the expenses for food form a non-negligible part of their budget, have very strong incentives to do this, because calories from vegetables are many times cheaper than calories from animals. Animals are not eaten as a source of calories, but mainly as a source of proteins. When discussing the efficiency of using animals for food, they must be compared with the vegetables used for their food based on their protein content, not on their calories content. When vegetable protein extracts are compared with meat, all the energy and chemicals consumed for protein separation and any other additional costs must be taken into account.
- hirundo 4y agoI'm in a cow county, but here both people and cows are outnumbered many times by elk and deer. A large part of the local economy is about supporting hunters from the cities. A local rancher told me that they make almost all of their money from hunting parties in elk season. They wouldn't bother with cows except that the cows improve the foraging for the elk, improving their business. The cows are cultivating, seed distribution and fertilization devices in service of the elk herds. I think that the more wild forage we can maintain along with our domesticated food system, the better. In paradise it's the rule rather than the exception.
- bjoli 4y agoI have been thinking about this lately. In Sweden we have a huge amount of elk, held high by forresting practices (clearcutting releases a huge amount of energy for elk), virtually no predators (we have less than 500 wolves) and policies to keep the number high. Elks are by far the most dangerous wild animal in Sweden, killing about 10 per year in traffic accidents. Add to hat the cost of the elks to the forresting industry and suddenly we are left with very few reasons to keep such an artificially huge elk population. The outtake (in meat), which is already considered to be at a maximum, only covers 2-3% of Swedish meat consumption. I have started considering it a very marginal industry eith large drawbacks and very small benefits.
- Beldin 4y agoIn response to the question in the headline: the Netherlands, pretty much everywhere. Over 5x as many as people [1], even after substantial decline last year. Their droppings are causing us environmental problems, which is currently a hot(-button) topic. [1] https://longreads.cbs.nl/nederland-in-cijfers-2021/hoeveel-landbouwdieren-telt-ons-land/ https://longreads.cbs.nl/nederland-in-cijfers-2021/hoeveel-l...
- tinus_hn 4y agoAlternatively it’s a manufactured problem, designed to require the goal of halving the livestock.
- beepbeepcabbage 4y agoYes, global warming is a man-made problem and you should grow a vegetable or find something else to do besides dump nitrates into the water table.
- chrisco255 4y agoRight, you should monocrop Monsanto's latest patented seeds and douse the land with insecticide and herbicide rather than raise some ruminants on prairie land they've roamed for millions of years.
- beepbeepcabbage 4y ago
- mgrandl 4y agoThere definitely have not been billions of cows millions of years ago. There is simply not enough „prairie land“ for them. So in reality we grow the latest Monsanto monocrop to feed the livestock, because otherwise there is no way to meet the demand for all of that meat.
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- giantg2 4y ago"Where is there more livestock than people?" Earth.
- peoplefromibiza 4y agoDenmark 5.8 million people, 13.5 million pigs
- yakubin 4y agoScotland 5.46 million people, 6.83 million sheep.
- danans 4y agoThe sheep economy was forced upon Scotland by the British during the Highland Clearances [1] which followed the subjugation of the Highlands after the failed Jacobite Rebellion. Peasants who were not involved in sheep farming were forcibly evicted or killed, resulting in the sheep-centric agriculture we see today, and also triggered the earliest large Scottish peasant migrations to the Americas. According to the guides at the Battlefield of Culloden, prior to the Clearances, the Scottish Highlands had a more mixed agricultural and cottage industrial economy, but basically got turned into a sheep production "banana republic" after the British defeated them. 1. https://www.britannica.com/event/Highland-Clearances https://www.britannica.com/event/Highland-Clearances
- astonex 4y agoWales 3 million people, 9-10 million sheep
- rr808 4y agoI'm I the only one that is really bothered by the grammar mistake? In a headline too. I'm seeing it more and more often, even in the news.
- jtlienwis 4y agoWisconsin. If you get a chance, come and smell our dairy air. Or come and freeze in the land of cheese.
- solardev 4y agoDo you have cheese ice cream?
- Rebelgecko 4y agoThere's cheese custards but if you get a frozen one like at Culvers it'll be milk based
- superb-owl 4y agoI highly recommend the movie Samsara for some amazing visuals of the scale of meat production.
- citilife 4y agoA county I have a farm in averages ~2 humans per square mile. Cows, chickens, pigs (really all animals) outnumber humans. Though this map isn't entirely accurate. Every farmer seems to have a handful of pigs, cows, goats, horses, ducks, turkeys, donkeys, chickens, etc at the very least. Part of the challenge in this particular case is data collection, most of these people sell amongst each other and sell everything they can out of auction: direct, to each other, consume themselves, etc.
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- waynecochran 4y agoThat first chart is a big “screw you” if you are color blind.