I'd argue in your favor that the water coming out of your showerhead or toilet gets used a lot more efficiently than the water going into cattle. In the case of

I'd argue in your favor that the water coming out of your showerhead or toilet gets used a lot more efficiently than the water going into cattle. In the case of residential water, most of it pretty efficiently goes to treatment facilities which then reuse it again for municipal landscape watering or non-potable purposes. In the cattle case, most of it goes to the superficial surface of the ground, and since so much of the beef and cattle operations in California don't have the luxury of grass or anything green on the ground, it just evaporates away.