Where do the cows go?

Eathrin wrote: »

Huge amounts of animals become endangered or go extinct every year, in no small part due to animal agriculture. On the whole, the world going vegan would see huge amounts of land returned to nature and animals would flourish in such an environment.

You mean poor land management, plenty of destruction of nature due to all kinds of human activity including producing plant based food.

Can't see how me keeping a few cows causes any kind of extinction event. Farms are full of wild life much of which depends on grass land.

If the beef market collapsed in the morning and everyone said they were no longer eating beef a certain portion of cattle would be maintained for markets like petfood.

The rest of the world's 1 billion cattle would be very quickly shot and the land they graze on would be used to produce something that would give its owners an income. Any other scenerio where humans keep 1 billion cows as pets is a fairytale.

Danthemanhere wrote: »

I'm just wondering, if everyone becomes vegan, where do the cows go? What do we do with them? I'm not trying to be antagonistic, I'd be interested in becoming a vegan but I've just never figured out what happens to cattle if they're no longer needed for food?

They won’t exist, why breed animals that will cost you money to keep...some will have to be born for cows to produce milk but not as many as now.

Effects wrote: »

I'm a vegan farmer, of course I believe that.

Can't be sure these days I've seen a lot of crazy beliefs on here recently, ranging from "it's unatueral for a female animal to be constantly pregnant" to "dairy cows being worn out and spent at 5 years old" getting hard to distinguish between sarcasm and not a clue about animals

BDI wrote: »

Ok beef is done with tomorrow.

All the cows are shot.

What is the best thing to do with them for the environment. Should we eat them until they are gone or let their carcasses return to the earth by rotting?

Would a million rotten cows lead to a new virus or evolutionary change in something?

Is there an end game?

But that's not what's going to happen. Everyone is not going to go vegan overnight. It's something that MAY happen over decades.

In that case beef farming will gradually become unprofitable for even the most low cost operations and will gradually die off. No mountains of cow carcasses to dispose of, no mutant viruses etc.

seamus wrote: »

Cows are a domesticated version of a family of animals, many of whom live wild. We don't really know the full history, but what we know as a modern cow has probably been in existence as long as the domestic dog.

That is, it didn't arise normally through evolution but through human-led selective breeding. As such, the decline of this species is of little concern since very little co-evolution will have taken place with it.

The domestic cow as a species would likely continue to be kept by some people around the place, but as a whole you wouldn't see many of them living wild.

Cows were bred from aurochs not any living bovine today. There is actually very little difference between aurochs and modern cattle except for the size nothing like the difference between modern dogs and wolves. There is a fairly detailed history of modern cattle dating back thousands of years there genome has been traced back to 2 separate parts of the world it is believed they were domesticated simultaneously from the 2 areas. If cattle farming ended tomorrow cattle would change from being one of the most plentiful animals on the planet to the endangered list. But the small sanctuaries that might exist to keep cows would need to cull them often to control their numbers from overcrowding the sanctuaries land caussing starvation.

Effects wrote: »

For protection.

Not sure if serious.

Protection from what?