Moreover, livestock rearing is a very water intensive process and given the well documented issues in our hydrosphere, humans and animals might well be vying for water soon. Overgrazing by livestock, deforestation, water withdrawal for crop irrigation as well as rearing of livestock, slaughterhouse waste are all further contributory factors to the degradation of the environment caused by meat production. High usage of fertilisers, machinery and transport for feed production and manure storage and processing constitute the bulk of emissions which are largely in the form of CH4 and N2O. Feed production and manure management are the largest sources of emissions that can be pinpointed to the industrial form of production. While animal byproducts are significant contributors, they are out of our hands and can only be minimised to a limited extent. Poultry and pigs are the most widely consumed non-ruminants and have relatively low emissions. Within these animals, beef production produces the highest emission per unit of product followed by dairy cattle, and meat and milk from small ruminant animals. Ruminants animals are cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, elk, deer, etc - primarily herbivores.
The reason for this division is that ruminants produce a large amount of methane in their digestion process and thus, raising of ruminant animals as livestock for dairy or meat is more harmful than that of non-ruminants as methane is a greenhouse gas that contributes severely to global warming. They eat their food, regurgitate it and then chew it again. To refresh your elementary biology, ruminants are those animals that digest their food in their four-compartment stomach instead of in their intestine. Within meat, we must bifurcate the type of meat into ruminants and non-ruminants. How then do we deal with the impending issue of climate change caused by our meat consumption?īefore moving on to solutions, we must look at the sources of the harmful effects in the meat production process. Thus, claiming veganism as a superior form of consumption is devoid of context. Moreover, practicing veganism is expensive and for most of the population, it is unfeasible. Communities can and often are blamed for their eating habits and ostracized on that basis. Further, meat consumption is also a socio-cultural issue. However, veganism cannot be the answer on a large scale because it is near impossible to change the taste and preferences of approximately 90% of the world’s population. The shift to veganism by a substantial number of people can be equally attributed to environmentally friendly consumption as it can be to moral reasons. While there remain an alarmingly high number of deniers of these effects, there have been winds of change. With increased consciousness of consumption, especially in younger demographics, the harmful effects of producing and consuming meat have been under the microscope. Industrial meat production and its sustainability has been one of the most divisive topics in recent years.
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