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this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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You can't eat anything in the modern world without killing animals. A combine harvester harvests wheat and mice. A hundred meat eaters are responsible for a single cow death, and the cow lived on marginal land, drinking from streams - you couldn't grow other food on the land (sure some are grown on perfect fertile land, they don't need to be)
Not saying I'm a meat eater, I don't care about mice, but there's blood on all our hands
Statistically, that cow had a short and miserable life in a factory farm before being killed at a small fraction of their potential lifespan. They were fed a grain-based diet that caused far more mice deaths than it would have to use the land to grow crops to feed humans directly.
Even in the situation you've presented, which again is an exceedingly small percentage (<10% globally, <1% in the US), land is being used which could be rewilded to promote biodiversity. The cow in question is still contributing to GHG emissions and will again be killed around 16 months of age.
A quick google gave me
So maybe you should revisit the idea of 'marginal land' that 'couldn't grow other food'
Of course, but livestock require even more agriculture to maintain than the same caloric/protein intake of plant based. So if the choice is 50 animals or 100 animals then the choice is easy.