The ethics of eating red meat have been grilled recently by critics who question its consequences for environmental health and animal welfare, but if you want to minimise animal suffering and promote more sustainable agriculture, adopting a vegetarian diet might be the worst possible thing you could do.

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Published figures from CSIRO and other sources in relation to Australia suggest that producing wheat and other grains to service a vegetarian/vegan diet results in at least 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein, more environmental damage and a great deal more animal cruelty.

Full Paper - https://doi.org/10.7882/AZ.2011.051

TLDR: Meat results in 25x less death per kg of protein vs plant based protein sources.

  • jet@hackertalks.comOPMEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    This is much more drastic then the napkin figures I did last week! the externalities fan out exponentially!

    https://hackertalks.com/post/26934762/15567269

    For a 3kg/day whole food well balanced plant based diet it’s one vertebrae death per 2-9 months. Depending on which published estimate you use.

    Add in more for logistics fossil fuel, shipping plants around the globe, etc.

    If you include invertebrates it’s every 5 days.

    Using this paper’s figures instead it would one vertebrae death every 20 days (0.6 months)

    This paper doesn’t take into account bioavailability, they are using crude protein (which favors pbf)