- cross-posted to:
- vegan@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- vegan@lemmy.world
Dairy cattle in Nevada have been infected with a new type of bird flu that’s different from the version that has spread in U.S. herds since last year, Agriculture Department officials said Wednesday.
The detection indicates that distinct forms of the virus known as Type A H5N1 have spilled over from wild birds into cattle at least twice. Experts said it raises new questions about wider spread and the difficulty of controlling infections in animals and the people who work closely with them.
“I always thought one bird-to-cow transmission was a very rare event. Seems that may not be the case,” said Richard Webby, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
I mean in the mix I have the food conversion link and that data as I said is industry data so im not sure if that suffices. I think we just sorta went on a tangent with the one paper. Its the most straight forward anyway for the vegan vs meat reduction. vegan being 1/1 usage of plant matter and chicken 1/3, pork 1/6., beef 1/14. I mean that as averages and there is variability especialin in beef but even in chicken worse case to beef best case it wins out and average conversion your looking at four fold efficiency so bascially if you can get X number of people to be vegans getting 4X people to limit themselves to chicken should have the same effect and anything more is gravy. My point way back with militant vegans is they will harras the idea of reducing meat because everyone should become vegan but from my experience limiting meat intake to chicken and/or reducing meat in general is much more likely with folks and much more likely to get in large numbers so they are sorta working against themselves. I mean americans eat a rediculous amounts of beef. All meat really but mainly due to fast food a lot of beef. To give a real world example my wife and I are not vegan but we do eat mainly chicken and pork and now we will split a chicken breast between us in a typical dinner. Compared to what we ate two decades ago or I think even worse when we were young and unmarried and like a dozen of our current selves would have to go vegan to get the same effect. None of that is obviously and exact thing as im averaging and using a bit of guestimating but I hope the gist comes out.
assuming this is true, which I haven’t looked into the methodology, broadly speaking, we don’t feed animals plants and parts of plants that we want to eat. beef cattle graze most of their lives. soybeans are pressed for oil, and the byproduct is what is fed to livestock. sure, we grow alfalfa and feed corn, but I’m just not convinced it’s a bad use of resources: making food is good, and I don’t see anything wrong with eating beef or chicken or pork.
ok so the link I have uses industry data. So take that for what you want but for the second part you don’t need a paper. The amazon rainforest was logged to create grazeland for cattle. Sure if the only cattle we ever raised were in areas that are natural grassland it would be a bit different but beef production really screwed the pooch there. Im very suspect of the mostly by product and not feed products given we grow a ton of feed. I have never seen any numbers to support most of their lives grazing. I have seen one year grazine and few years in the feed lot. More importantly you have to take into the weight difference from birth to feedlot and start of feedlot to end of feedlot. Im 100% that animals are inefficient as we do them now. as the same goes for chickens which become much better if they are basically just scavengers. There is absolutely no way the level of meat, cheese, and eggs could be supported on animals just eating and using land in a natural state though.
ok. whether I eat it though, or not, won’t change whether the industry grows or shrinks.
ok we are getting into economics but it certainly does. food production is not to throw in landfills its to sell to humans. humans who buy create the market to make.
production happens before purchases and an event in the future cannot cause an event in the past. ipso facto, consumption cannot be the cause of production.
oh man you do not understand how business/capitalism works. production is based on consumption. no iso facto. its just how it works. companies that make things that are not consumed lose money and go out of business.
this couldn’t happen if production is caused by consumption. this means that companies that go out of business because the product isn’t consumed are companies that were always operating on the risk of the product might not be consumed. in fact, all companies fit this description. All production is made without a guarantee of return. we can’t say that the return causes it.
alright. look. I have put way more into this than I intended to begin with and this argument you have here is just broken from reality and im not going to go further with this discussion.
it’s only a few months on a feedlot. beef cattle don’t usually live more than 18 months
I have seen estimates of one to several years but its possible the one is rounding up. As I said before the big stat is basically pounds of cow created on grass vs pounds created by feed. The reason the cow is moved to the feedlot is they reached the age where they can pack on the pounds.
dairy cattle live about 5 years, and then become beef, but a beef operation doesn’t keep the animals that long because there’s no point if they can graze them for a year and put em in a lot for 6 months.
regardless the point is its pounds on one feed or another so maybe dairy beef ends up being a bit better but I think its pretty irrelevant in the long run for what we are talking about.
this is bad. it doesn’t make eating beef bad.
its the demand for beef that caused this. it most certainly does. it would not have happened if folks had embraced the hippie era and reduced consumption back in the 60’s
I don’t see how it could have caused it. people chose to slash and burn the forest of their own volition. they have full agency in their decisions. if they’d have asked me, I would have said “don’t do that”. I can’t possibly be responsible for their choices
it caused it by creating the demand. It was done to sell to people who consume it. Without the consumption the activity would not have happened.
you can’t prove a counterfactual