Animal, Vegetable, or Whatever

David Cavena05 Feb, 2023 4 Min Read
We've got your methane right here.

With the Climate Cult demanding we stop eating grazing animals, transitioning ourselves to fake meat (and bugs) instead of real beef, in the name of preventing the climate from getting a degree or three warmer, causing us all to die in a few years, let’s discuss tradeoffs between digesting animal protein and vegetable matter.

Those who have spent much time around horses and cows know that they almost never stop eating if grass is within reach. A horse walking across a meadow will reach out to bite off a mouthful of grass if the rider allows it. Cows will grab mouthfuls of grass and go lie down in the shade under a tree to chew their cud, moving it from one stomach to another for hours.  Until they get up and wander off to fill their bellies again with more grass.

Grazing animals eat so much grass because vegetable matter has very little protein. Protein is what makes mammal muscle. It’s why Genghis Khan hunted and herded ruminants along his travels, and why his men defeated the local vegetarians wherever they went; they never lacked for milk or meat – animal protein – that made them stronger and gave them more endurance than those lacking in animal protein. In pre-mechanical combat, individual strength was all.

Does he look like a vegan to you?

It surprises, in the 21st Century, particularly among the Greens demanding solar power, that so many remain unaware that ruminants are solar energy storage systems. Solar power causes plant matter to grow; as plants grow, they turn that solar energy into matter. Grazers eat that solar energy converted to and stored as plant matter, processing it into muscle they then store and use to move around to live, work for us, make more ruminants, and to fertilize the ground wherever they go, nurturing more grass which, powered by sunlight, grows tall, storing more solar energy for another ruminant to store and make use of.

Humans consume this stored solar energy when eating beef, venison, rabbit, etc., allowing us to move, think, live, create. Animal manure and composted animal carcasses provide fertile soil to begin the cycle again as the sun enables new vegetable matter to grow and store yet more solar energy. In essence, animals we raise for food are organic solar batteries storing energy from the sun that we eventually use to grow, to live our lives, invent, explore, create, and procreate.

Grazing animals have digestion systems evolved and specialized to digest plant matter and turn it into useful protein. Humans, as omnivores, have different digestive systems, systems less-specialized for digesting plants. We process plant matter less efficiently than do ruminants simply because we also digest and process animal protein. The more specialized a digestive system, the more efficiently the plant matter consumed as food – stored solar energy – is turned into useful muscle, bone, skin, organs, etc. The less specialized, the less efficient.

Eating vegetable matter has certain physiological consequences. Again, if you’ve been around horses or cows, or read all the “bad” things about bovine burps and farts, you know that processing vegetable matter produces methane. If, for health reasons, you have altered your diet to consume more vegetables and fruits, you understand these consequences. If you’ve spent much indoor-time with vegetarians or their more aromatic cousins, vegans, none of this is news. We are not evolved to consume only plants.

Hilarious, right?

Scientists are working on altering feed to cause cows to create less methane, which is a good thing. But that’s a long process just beginning, and runs counter to the globalists demanding we eat fake, plant-based meat, or no meat at all to stop cows from destroying our world. But is our switching to vegetable matter really changing anything for the better?

Americans consume about 70 percent of their approximately 2,500 calories per day from plant matter, and 30 percent from animal matter. If we transitioned from 70 percent to 100 percent plant matter, an increase of 43 percent, it is logical to assume our methane output also would increase by 43 percent. Moving to a plant-based/fake meat diet would increase the human-expelled methane output of the United States from 332,000,000, to over 480,000,000 liters per day.

Removing the beef industry in America also would mean putting over a million Americans out of jobs and altering our health in unknown ways of unknown magnitude as we all stop digesting the food our digestive systems have evolved to digest, switching to digestive requirements for which we have not evolved.

Mr. Olympia he ain't.

Activities involving strength and endurance – from sports to military service to jogging or walking to stay fit – would decrease, further reducing the health of Americans, as well as our entertainment opportunities and ability to defend ourselves or our allies. To say nothing of the impact on industries as diverse as shoes, coats, and car seats, industries consuming leather and producing leather goods.

Does the road to reducing methane really run through rejection of animal protein?

David Cavena is a native southern Californian exfiltrated to Arizona. An IT professional for 40 years, he has pushed cows in California, dudes and horses in Wyoming, and programmers in Los Angeles and Phoenix. An avid outdoorsman – skier, backpacker, water skier and scuba diver – David writes from Arizona.

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5 comments on “Animal, Vegetable, or Whatever”

  1. As you may know, increased atmospheric CO2 has resulted in some greening around the planet, notably the Sahara region. (and despite this, for some reason, lower trophospheric temperatures have been remarkably stable over the past 8 years). Weird. Maybe ruminants are sequestering carbon by eating more grass.

  2. I would like to offer some defense of vegans, they are not all smelly and obnoxious, cattle are vegan and are capable of not telling you about it. They are also quite pleasant and extremely delicious.

  3. Changing cows or human diets is a pointless exercise.
    Put all that effort and financing into turning the sahara into a forest like it used to be thousands of years ago.

  4. I have no idea whether the amount of methane produced by cows is really all that harmful in the general scheme of things. However, the author appears to have made a major error. The bar graph the author cites as the source of the cow population presents the bovine population in thousands, not in units. In other words, there are just under 100,000,000 cows, not just under 100,000. The USDA's estimate was 94,400,000 head on 1/1/2020. Therefore, if all of the other statistics cited by the author are correct, then cows out-produce humans in methane by at least 71 fold. (94,400,000 x 250 liters) divided by (332,000,000 x1 liter) = 71.

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