Dead Cows Pass No Gas

Another study has come out indicating that mass farming of cattle isn't going to end well, in terms of climate.

Fine. Let's kill all the ones we have and switch over mainly to supplementing our protein needs with moderate amounts of chicken (mmm, chicken) and eggs, or with other small land animals. What? No one's going to pay to have them kept as pets, that's for sure.

I can hear the chorus now, 'Oh, but it's ridiculous to talk about there being no more cows.' Yes. Yes, it is. My point exactly.

But if you're pointing to cow flatulence as an actionable item in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, there's only one way to go about realizing those reductions. Because, and let's be clear, it isn't the eventual disposition of cows, such as eating them, that causes their methane effluvia. It's their very existence.

The longer our current world population of cows continues soodling around their barns and pastures, the more methane they will emit. Even if they're being cared for as a companion animal by a loving, Hare Krishna family. If any cows continue to live, they will continue to produce above average methane emissions for their total biomass weight.

They really can't help it. They're cows. So this is a binary cow/not cow question.

Let's not obfuscate the fact that 'eating less red meat,' or 'no red meat,' again, is only immediately useful to our climate predicament to the extent that existing stocks of cattle are slaughtered and not replaced.

Human beings, on the other hand, have a number of ways in which we can change our emissions profile. Including not being vegetarian, because omnivorous diets produce less human flatulence. In the words of advice columnist Cecil Adams: "Oh, sure, let's quit having the ruminants pass gas all day in distant fields so we can do it ourselves at close range."

Cows have a limited range of activities that include eating, sleeping and excreting. There's no real room there for behavior modification, except that if they eat mainly grass, they can help plant communities store more carbon in the soil and in fact do produce less methane. We also don't have to breed as many of them, which isn't a solution that would seriously be suggested for any creature that can be said to have rights in the same sense that humans do.

Humans though, as I alluded to, engage in lots of unecessary and stupid greenhouse gas causing behavior that could definitely be changed without having to radically infringe on the total amount of animal biomass (including our own) that the planet can support. For example, we cut down trees to wipe our backsides with because some of us are too posh for recycled toilet paper. Cut down primary rainforests to produce biodiesel. Tear up unbroken range land to plant soy. Cut down rainforests or coffee plantations to graze cattle. Own lots of individual cars and refuse to pay for public transportation. Engage in factory farming. Mix our own bodily wastes with fresh water and toxic industrial materials so they can't be sterilized and returned to the soil. Cover agricultural land with high-carbon-footprint suburbs. Resist or do not perform weatherization of buildings. Buy most of our food from far away places. Refuse to grow food and raise small food animals in cities. Expose peat soils to decomposition. Replace trees and/or native landscaping with lawns. Allow industrialists to use our common sky as a sewer. Encourage farmers to grow food on marginal, easily desertified land.

Etc., etc., literally ad infinitum.

Are we going to have to have fewer cows in order to meet the goal of a sustainable future? Yes. But then, I'm not making an ethical case about that, except to the extent that I consider a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to be a positive outcome, and the factory farming of animals to be cruel and unusual punishment for all involved. Or as Jill Richardson said the other day when she wrote about the ethics of meat eating and the ideal of sustainable, local meat production, "Of course this model will mean that people can have less meat."

In fact, I don't know of anyone in the sustainable food movement who would disagree with the statement that 'people in developed nations, particularly the US, should eat less meat.'

But as far as I'm concerned, saying that it's the cows' fault that the climate is destabilizing is like blaming whales for the decline in fish stocks. Our Anthropocene-era problems are not the fault of dumb animals, they are the fault of our poor land management and out-of-control industrialization.

Yet if we're going to do something about our livestock's contribution, if they're going to die for our climate sins, well, I don't see any ethical difference between killing them and eating them or killing them and letting them rot. Except that I oppose wasting food. Though if your goal is not to have them killed at all, then don't complain about their emissions like that can be solved during their lifetimes.

(Photo credit: law_keven on Flickr.)