Summary
Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, with most of this used to raise livestock for dairy and meat. Livestock are fed from two sources – lands on which the animals graze and land on which feeding crops, such as soy and cereals, are grown. How much would our agricultural land use decline if the world adopted a plant-based diet?
Research suggests that if everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops. The research also shows that cutting out beef and dairy (by substituting chicken, eggs, fish or plant-based food) has a much larger impact than eliminating chicken or fish.
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It‘s not all or nothing, if you had clicked the link actually you would have seen a lot of “it‘s not all or nothing” in there, I‘m not gonna cite it all, but here is one example:
And fair enough, maybe you won‘t be convinced ever and happily chow down on beef burgers until the bitter end, but if it can convince some people to at least choose chicken instead or even just reduce their beef use as much as they can live with, then it‘s a already a useful study regardless of the holdouts.
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They aren’t useless. It can often be useful to know what the extremes are, as a middle-ground approach would lie somewhere in between. Like, if switching wholly away from animals would free up 3 billion hectares, would switching about halfway free up about 1.5 billion hectares?
Obviously it’s not necessarily that simple but still, knowing the statistics at various extremes allows you to weigh your options, so you can compromise by combining various approaches at varying degrees and hopefully get a “good enough” outcome. The researchers here aren’t necessarily saying “all you meat lovers need to just give up meat already, look at how much land we can free up!”, rather they’re saying “hey policymakers, if we reduce our reliance on animals by around a third, we can free up a billion hectares of valuable agricultural land.”
Why are you on a vegan community, then?
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Just because you don’t actually do the murdering doesn’t mean you are not responsible for the murder. Those animals that you eat are murdered to create supply for the meat demand that you contribute to. If you stop eating meat, demand goes down by one meat-eater which will decrease the number of animals that are killed. Even though you aren’t slaughtering animals, you are still responsible for the deaths caused by the meat you eat, kind of like how a mob boss is still culpable for murders that they order. Or how the global leaders that send armed forces out to murder people in other countries are considered murderers even though they never personally pull the trigger.
And before you assume I’m a vegan, I’m not, but I feel quite a bit of guilt for the animal lives that I’m responsible for taking. I’m reducing my meat intake (no meat 2-3 days a week) because every little bit helps to reduce demand for meat and the deaths it directly causes.
Okay. I don’t really care about any of your excuses written here. If you aren’t a vegan, and don’t want to be a vegan, and have negative opinions of vegans, then why do you subject yourself to looking at vegan discussion spaces?
Go outside.
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Hope you don’t mind if I hang your beloved pets up by their feet, cut their throats, and tear their bodies apart. They’re just food so it does’t matter.