Quote:
Originally Posted by SmokeyTheBear
how so ? because more animals are killed for supermarket veggies than for my steak ?
not sure what there is to argue about . Do you dispute this fact or do you have some reason why killing many of the worlds smartest animals is ok for veggies but not ok to eat a cow ?
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Argument that plant consumption also kills animals
Professor of animal science, Steven Davis suggest that vegetarianism and veganism wouldn't actually reduce the number of animals killed if we used more cropland for a ruminant-pasture model of livestock production. Whenever a tractor traverses a field to plow, disc, cultivate, apply fertilizer and/or pesticide, or harvest, animals are killed. Based on a study finding that wood mouse populations dropped from 25 per hectare to 5 per hectare after harvest (attributed to migration and mortality) Davis estimates that 10 animals per hectare are killed from farming every year. If all 120,000,000 acres (490,000 km2) of cropland is used for a vegetarian/vegan diet then approximately 1.2 billion animals would die each year. If half of the cropland was converted to ruminant-pasture then Davis estimates only .9 billion animals would die each year, assuming people switched from the 8 billion poultry killed each year to beef, lamb, and dairy products.[14]
Gaverick Matheny, a Ph.D. candidate in agricultural economics at the University of Maryland, counters that Davis' reasoning contains several major flaws, including narrowing the definition of "harm" to include only the killing of animals, and calculating the number of animal deaths based on land area rather than per consumer. Because an equal amount of protein can be produced from 1 hectare of cropland, 2.6 hectares of ruminant dairy, or 10 hectares of ruminant beef, less cropland would be needed for a vegetarian diet. According to Metheny's estimates, 0.3 animals would be killed per person for a vegan diet, 0.39 for a vegetarian diet, and 1.5 in the Davis model. Matheny says that "After correcting for these errors, Davis?s argument makes a strong case for, rather than against, adopting a vegetarian diet." [15]
source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_eating_meat
