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@fabfouremily (good to see you here), the problems of the contribution of animals to climate change is an interesting one.

Cows are often cited as they produce so many gasses. So, it is often suggested we cut down on beef consumption. The implicit suggestion is that if we eat less beef, there will be less need for the cows that cause the problem.

There is one country in the world has a cattle population of 281,700,000 (which is 28.29% of the world total). That country is not one of the big meat producers like the United States (96,669,000), but India, where cows are sacred and not slaughtered.

This problem is often portrayed as being the fault of meat eaters, demanding more meat all the time. Whereas you could argue, meat eaters provide a built-in cull to the amount of cattle. Farmers try not to produce than they can sell as that crashes the price.

More of a problem, it seems to me, are those countries, like India, that do not control the numbers. And that has nothing to do with meat consumption, but religious belief.

I am not suggesting it is more of a problem, just that it is a part of the problem, and a part of the problem that is often ignored. India was the example, but the situation is similar in many other countries with large – or majority – Hindu or Jain populations. The reality is that somewhere between 30-40% of cattle in the world are in countries where they considered sacred, with little or no control put on their numbers.

I would suggest, so far as domesticated animals go, for any one country to have approaching 30% of the world total of that animal is huge. I can think of no other domesticated animal where such a large percentage of the world population is concentrated in a single country. And it has to be remembered, the cattle population in India is always growing, some die but more are born.

I was making the point that it is often simplistic to look at one cause for something. If beef were to be banned tomorrow (and I used cattle as my example purely because of the fact they are the big gas emitters of the domesticated animals, and the animal most often cited in these arguments), followed by a cull of all cattle farmed for meat across the planet, and those countries where the cow is sacred carried on as they are, we would be back to the current world population of cattle we now have by the end of the century.

If cattle emissions are a problem, and I accept that they are, there is no difference between the problem created by sacred cows versus meat cows, and it is sacred cows that have the growing population, while meat cows are maintained at roughly the same numbers.

@Starr Shine? said
^ even if we eat less beef Thai are still a lot of animal by products like milk, Cheese, and gelatin. What would happen to the people whos livelihood depends on cows? If people stopped eating beef the cows would still be around for their by products

Beef cows, while gelatin is harvested from them at time of slaughter, do not produce milk or cheese. There are meat herds and dairy herds. Here I have been talking about meat herds. Gelatin can be, and is, harvested from dairy cattle at slaughter, though the animals themselves do not enter the food chain. There are also vegetarian replacements for gelatin.

The effect on those who rear cattle for meat is a valid one, but hasn’t that always been there when it comes to the production of goods. And it gets more-so as technology moves on. Is there any car factory that employs the same amount of workers now to produce, say a thousand cars, as they did in 1950? Even farms have employed less and less people as technology has marched on. Dairy herds were once milked by hand, which took many hands, and now it is done by machine. Harvest used to about many hands, the school summer holiday was fixed around the children being needed for harvest, but now it is largely industrialised.

The world changes, jobs disappear, new jobs appear. That has always been the way of it.