Environmental aspects of Animal Liberation:
Real conservationists don't eat meat
by Geoff Russell, prepared for a vegetarian conference, Adelaide, March 1997
More recent information on meat and the environment is contained on the Vegetarianism and Climate Change page.
Some conservationists like to point fingers at other people: frequently large corporations for creating pollution and toxic waste, feral cats and rabbits for killing native animals, or mining companies for habitat destruction. All too often they continue to eat a traditional Australian meat centered diet without considering its environmental cost. But if we really want to minimise our harmful impact on the ecosystem, we must critically examine our daily behaviours -- and no behaviour is more important than what we eat. This talk will compare the environmental impacts of a meat centered diet with that of a vegetarian diet.
Introduction
This talk is about environmental aspects of vegetarianism. Animal Liberationists are, or aspire to be, vegetarians. This means they don't eat animals. They don't eat fish, they don't eat "white meat", they don't eat animals. Some vegetarians also exclude from their diets animal derived products like milk, and eggs, and sometimes honey. These people call themselves vegan.
This talk will focus on the environmental effects of our decisions on what we eat. If you decide to walk into a butcher shop and buy some lamb chops or a chicken, what are the consequences? Not just the consequences on your wallet, and not just the consequences to the recently killed lamb, but also the consequences on land use patterns, on wildlife habitat destruction. We want to trace the impact as far as it goes.
Measuring the impact of actions is usually difficult, but even when it is possible you will also need a framework within which to judge what you find. I'm not value free, and I don't want to be. I aim to be judgemental and to judge some actions good and others bad. Traditionally when Alaskan eskimoes hunt bowhead whales, they harpoon them multiple times with harpoons attached to inflated bags. The whale gradually tires from pulling the bags and eventually is killed. The whole process can take days. Sometimes, of course, the harpoon comes out, or the bag comes off and the injured animal escapes. I would never excuse such cruelty merely because it is the traditional practice of a native people. Such cruelty can only be excused when the alternative is starvation or perhaps massive deprivation. I don't care much for ethical relativism.
Likewise, torture of humans is bad. Amnesty International is correct in continuing to criticise torture in countries that claim to have "different" human rights standards. Oppressive regimes usually have different human rights standards from the people they oppress. Likewise, animal expoiters generally have different notions of animal rights and welfare from the animals they exploit. I don't regard cock fighting as any less cruel and obnoxious when practiced in Indonesia, where it is common, than in Australia, where it is not.
I also believe however, that it is necessary, when making judgements, to spell out your moral principles as clearly as possible, and to try to be consistent in your judgements.
Let's consider some principles that might be used by different people for judging the environmental impact of food choices. I'll present 4 such principles. I'll criticise 2 of them as being immoral. Of the other 2, whilst I'll make my preference clear, I'll argue that both principles will lead to the same conclusion with regard to food choices: vegetarianism.
Principles used to judge actions:
- Short term gain
- Sustainability
- Minimal resource utilisation
- Minimal suffering and resource utilsation
-
Short term gain
Suppose bilbys tasted really good. If they did, there might be a lot of money to be made out of exploiting them. There's not a whole lot of bilbys out there, but, what the heck, when the bilbys are gone we'll find another little critter to wipe out. Because there are so few bilbys and they are small, you should be able to charge big money. Even if bilbys don't taste good, you can probably convince somebody that some part of the bilby anatomy is good for curing cancer -- this will attract Westerners, or pronounce some other part good for increasing sexual potency -- this will attract Asians.
Perhaps you think I'm a little fanciful with this example, but sharks are being "mined" for supposed anti-cancer drugs and tiger penises fetch a massive price in Asia.
Fortunately, the environmental movement has -- in the west at least, won a major part of the battle to save endangered species. Most people shudder at the thought of wiping out a species for nothing more than a gourmet dinner or an aphrodisiac (real or imagined). Unfortunately, it only takes a very small number of people to wipe out a species.
There are plenty of people whose total ethical framework is governed by this kind of principle. Common questions for them include: What can I make from this action? Is it legal? If not, can I get away with it?
I won't bother to criticise this class of ethical principle. Most of its adherents don't admit to following it and you can't argue with them anyway.
-
Long term sustainability
Next comes a more respectable ethical group. The sustainability mob. These people think that eating animals -- and usually anything else -- is fine if it is sustainable. Many senior members of
the aptly named Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) think this way. For them ducks are a resource, emus are a resource, and bilbys are a resource. If bilbys ever became numerous, then one of the first barbecues they'd grace would be a DENR barbecue. But while they are comparitively rare, DENR will fine you as quick as look at you for killing one -- unless of course you are a researcher at a University who has ethics committee approval. As I said, bilbys, to DENR, are a resource.
I regard this approach to the environment and its animals as "old style" conservation. It is still common, but, hopefully, dying.
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Minimal resource utilisation
Here is what I think is part of the emerging conservation ethos. Lifestyles are ranked according to their levels of resource utilisation. Low utilisation is good, and high is bad. This principle still regards animals as resources.
- Minimal utilisation and minimal suffering Here is what I hope will be part of the emerging conservation ethos. It is similar to the preceeding criterion but doesn't count animals as resources. Harm and suffering to animals should be minimised. There is plenty of room for factions and argument in this, as in the previous criteria. For example, when a mouse plague seriously threatens your harvest, what do you do? Sure, you try to avoid such situations. How hard you try, and what you do when they nonetheless occur, will delineate factions in the adherents to this basic principle.
I've outlined 4 guiding ethical principles above. These are criteria by which we judge and choose our actions. As I've said, the first is abhorrent and not even worth attacking. The second, the sustainability principle, is a serious problem. I'll devote some time later in the talk to it.
The last 2 are important principles. It may be that minimal use of resources also turns out to yield optimally humane and reasonable behaviour. I don't know. What I do think is true is that vegetarianism is implied by which ever of these 2 principles you opt for.
So, here's the claim. Provided you are genuinely concerned to minimise your resource utilisation, then you should be vegetarian , even if your feelings for an animal are no more than your feelings for a rock.
Efficient Resource Utilisation
Lets begin with a few statistics. All these stats come from the 1996 Year Book of Australia . Approximately 60% of the Australian continent is listed as "agricultural" but only 4% of this 60% is cropped. These crops include everything from garlic through to potatoes and wheat. Almost 1/2 of our crop land is devoted to wheat and about 90% of that is exported. What about the remainder of the 60% of Australia used for agriculture? It is sown pastures or rangeland. We export about half of the animal products we produce. In round figures, meat eating requires that about 30% of Australia be used for grazing -- either of natural or sown pastures. If the whole of the Australian population were vegetarian then less than 1% of land would need to be cropped.
Traditionally, animal agriculture in Australia was "free range". You can still see sheep and cattle grazing on paddocks around the country. As we have seen, they graze a massive area while we crop a relatively small area. But intensive animal production is taking over. It is already the norm for pigs and chickens. In 1996, feedlots had space for 850,000 cattle.
Under intensive systems, cattle, for example, are no longer free to wander and graze but are confined in feedlots and fed on specially formulated mixtures of various crops. Control what goes into an animal and you control its body composition. Produce high fat meat for one market and lean meat for another.
The effect of this move to feedlotting is to decrease the amount of land used for grazing, but to increase the amount of land cropped. This is because you need to crop land to feed the animals. We live in a world where 38% of the world's grain is fed to animals. It's a simple but horrible system. Rich people want meat, so it frequently makes better financial sense to feed grain to animals which are then sold to the rich, rather than selling grain to the poor.
The figures on the massive waste of the world's food resources from feedlotting animals are well known, I first came across them over 10 years ago and they'd been around for a while then. But the younger members and carnivores in the audience may not realise that it takes 7 kilos of grain to produce a kilo of beef, 4 to produce a kilo of pork, and about 2.5 to produce a kilo of chicken. In some industrial countries, 40% of calories people consume come from fat. It is recommended by many health authorities that this be reduced to 30% for health reasons. If this were to happen globally, it has been estimated that it would release enough grain to feed the worlds population increases for the next 5 years.
Whenever you mention figures like that, South Australians tend to defensively point to some cow in some paddock somewhere and claim that our animals are not intensively raised.
So this defence has some merit with respect to beef, but almost all pigs and poultry are intensively reared.
Lets take a quick look at our extensive animal industry. Typical stocking densities in South Australia for sheep are between about 5 sheep per hectare in the South East and 1 sheep every 10 hectares in the far north of the state. For beef cattle, you divide stocking densities by about 8, and for dairy cattle, by about 10. A 1000lb animal will eat about 2% of its bodyweight in a day -- 20lb per day, 600lb per month. A 1500lb animal will get through 900lb per month. Feedlot cattle destined for the Japanese market frequently have carcasses over the 300kg mark, locally destined extensively raised animals tend to come in with carcass weights in the 200kg region.
Lets look at the protein you get per hectare from beef. I'll assume really good land and high stocking rates such as is found in the South East of S.A. Five sheep per hectare, is 0.625 cattle per hectare, producing a 200kg carcase after 2 years. That's 125 kg per annum. At 21% protein, this is 26kg of protein per annum per hectare, tops. Wheat, on the other hand, yields about 2 tonnes per hectare per annum. At 11% protein, this is 220 kg of protein per annum per hectare.
Forget what the Anti-Rabbit Research Foundation keeps telling you, if you want to find the major culprits who have degraded and destroyed the Australian environment, then go to your local supermarket and look at the people buying beef and lamb. These are the people who want meat and who want it as cheap as possible. These people are the true cause of environmental degradation. Rabbits are a minor player.
Efficient Water Use
While I'm talking about land use, I should also briefly mention the impact which eating animals has on water resources. The figures come from a summary of a US study. I don't know the methodology behind them but assume they are probably accurate enough for ranking water utilisation of different foodstuffs. A kilo of feedlot beef takes about 50 times the water to produce as a kilo of soya beans or rice. Even chicken, the most "efficient" modern meat industry uses twice as much water per kilo as soybeans or rice.
| Potatoes | 500 litres |
| Wheat | 900 litres |
| Alfalfa | 900 litres |
| Sorghum | 1110 litres |
| Maize | 1400 litres |
| Rice | 1910 litres |
| Soya beans | 2000 litres |
| Chicken | 3500 litres |
| Beef (feedlot) | 100,000 litres |
Population
What is the population of Australia? What should the population of Australia be? What population can the unique Australian environment sustain?
At the 1996 ANZAAS conference prominent scientists argued that Australia's current human population was already consuming nearly all available resources. They predicted an inevitable drop in living standards as an increasing population competed for decreasing resources. Personally, I think more bicycling and less meat is an increase in living standards, but their message is clear. It is the same message that has been heard around the world for quite some time. The world is overpopulated and the tensions are well and truly evident. They are evident in fisheries disputes, in genocides (Diamond lists 11 genocides in which more than 10,000 people were killed -- and there have been more since his book was published), in water disputes, in mass refugee movements. It's pretty easy, here in Adelaide, to turn a blind eye to the symptoms of world overpopulation which occur daily. But they are there.
| Species | Number |
Sheep
equivalents |
|---|---|---|
| Sheep | 120 | 120 |
| Dairy cows | 3 | 36 |
| Beef cattle | 16 | 128 |
| Calves | 7 | ~28 |
| Humans | 19 | ~38 |
Changes must be made and a move to vegetarianism is one useful change.
More Ethics: Hunting and Gathering
I've just sketched out an argument that says that meat eating is environmentally very costly. It's based on very simple assumptions about land areas required to supply a vegetarian versus a meat centered diet. Some people have romantic and false notions about hunter gatherers. Lets discuss this topic a little.
In his book "The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee", Jared Diamond states: " Population densities of hunter-gatherers are typically one person or less per square mile, while densities of farmers average at least ten times higher . Diamond actually sees agriculture as a double edged sword. Because crops bring huge quantities of cheap food, they have traditionally allowed populations to rise, which causes or enables higher living densities, these in turn create thethe right conditions for many diseases to flourish. Hunting and gathering, in contrast, by their precariousness and tendancy to be nomadic, make large communities difficult to sustain and lead to a more diverse diet.
At this point we need to clear up some complexities. Hunter/gatherers don't get the bulk of their food from hunting. This is a common myth. To quote from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution: " Historical records of 58 hunting, gathering and fishing societies show that ... such societies derived at least a fifth of their diet from hunting mammals, and, in general, about a third of total food came from this source. " Only in societies above 60deg latitude did hunting supply the bulk of food.
Jared Diamond tells a significant story about accompanying a group of hunters in the New Guinea Highlands. Having heard their campfire stories, Diamond imagined these real hunters made many and frequent big kills. He goes on:
" I still recall my first morning in the New Guinea Highlands, when I set out with a group of a dozen men, armed with bows and arrows. As we passed a fallen tree, there was suddenly much excited shouting, men surrounded the tree, some spanned their bows, and others pressed forward into the brush pile. Convinced that an enraged boar or kangaroo was about to come out fighting, I looked for a tree that I could climb to a perch of safety. Then I heard triumphant shrieks, and out of the brushpile came two mighty hunters holding aloft their prey: 2 baby wrens, not quite able to fly, weighing about 1/3oz each, and promptly plucked, roasted and eaten. The rest of the day"s catch consisted of a few frogs and many mushrooms. "
Gathering -- usually by women -- supplies most food in what should be called GSH (gatherer/scavenger/hunter) societies. Until the advent of modern weapons, hunting was just a way of men avoiding the more mundane but productive chore of gathering. Hunting should be seen for what it is: a contest between men for status, prestige, and women.
One last point about GSH -- sustainability. Plenty of things are sustainable with a low population density. But as the population and the population density increases these same activities cease to be sustainable. If the general Australian population switched from chicken meat to kangaroo meat, there would soon be no kangaroos. In fact, as a lifestyle GSH is well past its use-by date.
Farming Wildlife: Sustainability
I said earlier that I'd talk a little about "sustainability". It's a nice word but carries a hidden sting.
There have been recent meetings and conferences around Australia devoted to discussing the sustainable utilisation of wildlife, so it is timely to critically consider this notion of sustainability. For some people it seems to be the sole yardstick against which our activities should be judged.
In "The Future Eaters", Tim Flannery describes, among other things the early history of New Zealand. How the Maori arrived in about 1000 AD and annihilated the wildlife, wiping out 12 species of moa in the space of about 400 years. As they degraded their environment, they embarked on a history of frequent warfare and cannibalism. The bodies of those killed in war were a prized ource of food. This lifestyle persisted for some hundreds of years prior to European arrival, so I will presume, perhaps mistakenly, that it was sustainable, or nearly so.
Lets examine the merits of this lifestyle using sustainability as our yardstick. First, frequent warfare can control populations. Some indigenous people manage to fight a lot with relatively few deaths -- witness the American Indians before they were given guns. But the Maoris seem to have solved this "problem". Flannery recounts a raid by one chief Te Rauparaha in which some 1500 people were killed.
Second, a diet based on the bodies of your victims will be high in saturated fat, thus ensuring a shortened lifespan and reducing the economic burden from the aged. Third, killing with clubs is very energy efficient, especially if you conduct your raids on foot. In a time of smart bombs, defoliants, and huge flying bombers guzzling fuel and spewing out huge polluting plumes, it is easy to forget the simple truth that warfare can be cheap, simple, sustainable, and environmentally benign. Warfare can be green.
But perhaps you are uneasy about endorsing a lifestyle of such barbarism, despite the promise it holds for being thoroughly green and sustainable. Perhaps you are a little slow and puny and feel somewhat unsure about enrolling in a "Club Wielding for Beginners" course, or perhaps you have gone beyond that magic buzz word of the 90's, sustainability.
Anyone who has watched the panic and terror in an animal as it attempts to escape a hunter, who has seen or tended the crippled and wounded escapees, knows that sustainable utilisation of wildlife is just barbarism dressed in a collar and tie. It is thoroughly inconsistent with the often voiced exhaltation by conservationists to "tread lightly" upon the earth. Or does that phrase really only mean that you should tread lightly so as not to disturb your quarry so you can empty a shotgun into its guts? I think not.
So when we choose how to act during our lives, lets ask a lot more than "is this action sustainable?" Lets ask, for starters, "Who or what will this action affect?", and "Do I really need the product of this action?"
Habitat Destruction
We've talked about the waste inherent in the meat industry, now lets turn to habitat destruction in various forms.
Australia's 26 million cattle and 120 million sheep represent a massive environmental burden on the country. Let me put this in perspective. There has been much publicity over the past couple of years about the "rabbit problem". These pests are said to exist in the hundreds of millions, compete with native fauna, and destroy habitat and native flora. Typically, 1 sheep eats as much as about 10 rabbits. So our 120 million sheep are equivalent to about 1200 million rabbits in terms of what they eat.
Our cattle are, collectively, an even bigger problem.
Now previously in this talk we looked at protein production from beef. During that exercise we considered cattle in good country. But what about cattle on "poor" land? Much of our arid lands run cattle -- remember the map shown previously. A study in the late 1970's gives you some idea of this type of farming. Consider about 170 square km with between 400 and 800 cattle near Alice Springs. That's 3% of a cow per hectare. It hardly seems worth it. The cattle were followed around for 5 years and were found to graze very unevenly and selectively. They grazed for 10 hours per day and walked for 2 hours. They have dramatically changed their environment. Researchers estimated that the productivity of the flood plains is less than half what it used to be.
Jeremy Rifkin in his 1992 book "Beyond Beef" has summarised a great deal of information about the damage being done to world rangelands by cattle. The clearing of the rain forests of Central America to provide cheap hamburgers in the U.S. and elsewhere is well documented. He estimates that some 60 percent of the world's rangelands have been damaged by overgrazing in the past century.
In Australia our cattle population peaked in 1976 at 33.4 million. Drought in the early 1980's reduced the population but it has been growing steadily again since 1989 to its current level of about 27 million.
Sheep and cattle production should be viewed as a conscious choice to destroy native animal habitat in exactly the same way as paving a parking lot or digging an open cut mine. But unlike parking lots and mineral mines, the areas involved are absolutely massive, there are no EIS statements and revegetation is voluntary and almost non-existent. All too often, so called environmentalists make this choice unconsciously.
If our aim is to live frugally with as little resource utilisation as possible, then clearly meat eating is a very expensive indulgence.
Whilst on the topic of habitat destruction and rabbits, I should wander from the topic just a little to mention the link between rabbits and cats in Australia. Cats have become public enemy number 1 in the eyes of some conservationists. There is a none too subtle inference in some quarters that all cat owners are environmental vandals who dump kittens in the bush and exacerbate the problem. As it happens, the reason we have a cat problem in outback Australia is that in the days prior to the introduction of myxomatosis cats were bred in their thousands and deliberately taken to rabbit infested areas and released to kill rabbits. During the past decade, use of satellite images has enabled CSIRO and others to firmly sheet home the responsibility for ecological damage on our arid lands. I don't have any satellite images but here is a figure from the Year Book. In a 1994 article David Moreton of CSIRO's Centre for Arid Zone Research is quoted as saying: " The land has been repeatedly overstocked ... it has been mined, not farmed. " Moreton also considers that cats, foxes, and rabbits wouldn't have had such a devestating impact without the introduction of sheep and cattle.
A similar point is made by DPI officer Gary Twyford: " Sheep made a considerable contribution to the spread of rabbits throughout Australia, as the sheep's habit of grazing made the feed the ideal length for the rabbits to eat. Rabbits do not like long grass; in fact long grass is the greatest deterrent to the increase in numbers and spread of rabbits. " He goes on to describe the dual rise of these 2 herbivores. " [sheep] were grazing everywhere, opening up country that would have been unsuitable for rabbits before the sheep arrived. "
Our extensive sheep and cattle industries are an environmental disaster. Perhaps intensive industries might be better? Lets look at animal industry pollution.
Pollution
Paul Watson was a founding member of Greenpeace and later of the Sea Shepherd Society. The Sea Shepherd Society believes in direct action -- actions as direct as sinking and sabotaging whaling ships, for example. One of Paul Watson's more humorous direct actions was to lob stink bombs onto the decks of drift net fishing boats. It's probably hard to think of what you could possibly do to a fishing boat to make it smell worse, but there is something. Butyric acid -- often described as the essence of smelly socks. It is one of the all time most potent stink agents. You can smell this stuff at a concentration of 1 microgram per cubic meter of air. Ok, now guess what one of the components of pig effluent is? Yep, butyric acid. But there's not only butyric acid, pig shit contains a veritable cocktail of stink agents. Piggeries stink.
But the stench of piggeries is really a minor problem. Disposing of the waste is a major problem. You might think that here is a piggery by-product that should be worth something -- manure. But the stuff is too rich. It must be treated in fancy ponds by microbes with long names before it can be used. And if you use too much, or if you use it at the wrong time of year or in the wrong place, it will pollute your groundwater. Leeching from the treatment ponds can pollute groundwater.
| Waste source | Numbers | Phosphorus | Land needed | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Raw | Treated | |||
| Piggery | 100 sows | 2.74 tonnes | 304 hectares | 41 hectares |
| Broilers | 10,000 chickens | 0.75 tonnes | 83 hectares | - |
| Laying hens | 10,000 hens | 2.04 tonnes | 227 hectares | - |
| Sheep yards | 10,000 sheep | 9.12 tonnes | 1014 hectares | - |
This is not a hypothetical problem. A 2,000 sow piggery at Naracoorte in the south east of South Australia was destocked in the middle 1980's precisely because the groundwater had become contaminated. A second example from a similar period is pollution of the Peel-Inlet Harvey estuary in Western Australia. In this case the major culprit was phosphorus but again the source was primarily intensive piggeries. There is a large ongoing project to reduce these pollutants and clean up the area.
In Holland in the late 1980s, it was calculated that intensive animal industries were producing 94 million tonnes of manure per year, but could only safely use 50 million of it as fertiliser. I've never seen a summary figure of this nature for Australia, but the pig farming journals frequently carry articles on the problem, as do water quality management journals.
Of course it can also happen that groundwater can get polluted from using lots of fertilizer to grow crops. One water quality article commented on the massive number of fertiliser trials around Australia demonstrating improved yields from fertiliser, but the trials don't measure or mention the pollution problems. My interpretation is simple. The pig farmers (and feedlotters generally) are working hard to build a market for their waste, without bothering with adequate safety testing. This is normal. Their prime product -- meat -- is a health hazard when taken in typical doses. Their secondary product -- waste -- will be likewise.
If I may be permitted a nutritional aside, I sit on the animal experimentation ethics committee for the Department of Primary Industries. This committee recently approved a protocol where pigs were used to model the human gut. Pigs are often used to model humans in many research areas. Pig farmers are really fussy about the diets of their pigs -- and they don't feed their pigs meat.
Taking Responsibility?
Let's summarise. Eating animals is an amazing waste of resources if we first feed them food that we ourselves could eat. So pigs and chicken are out if you care about waste. But if we extensively graze them we either do it on delicate marginal land and gradually destroy it, or we do it on good land that's better to use for something else anyway. I'd like to see grazing totally eliminated over the next 10 years from the arid zone. I've ignored fishing but most of the world's fisheries are in trouble anyway. The world's population will have to do with far less fish per capita in the future anyway. Long line fishing kills millions of innocent bystanders (birds) each year, and driftnets are even worse. "Collateral damage" is fishing's middle name. From an environmental viewpoint, fishing is a disaster. Enough said.
What we shouldn't do is point fingers at farmers. Farmers are now, and always have been, pawns of huge retailers, and a fickle, bargain loving public. Their failure to unionise and organise has left them more exploited than most. Under severe pressure they do what most people do -- pass on their costs. Pass them on to animals, pass them on to the environment. No, don't blame animal farmers for the environmental problems of their industry: blame the consumers. If you are a consumer, then stop. If you find stopping difficult, then buy your meat at top price from a health food shop that keeps "free range" meat. If meat were priced at a price that truly reflected its environmental cost, then it would be a rare indulgence indeed.
Mind you, there are plenty of good health and moral reasons for not eating animals in any event. You will hear the health reasons later in this conference and I've hinted strongly at the moral reasons throughout this talk.
I would like to see References for this document on meat and the environment.