

I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly - tptacek
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/06/meat-production-veganism-deforestation

======
tptacek
The problem, as this article sees it, isn't that we eat meat; it's that we
feed animals people food, which puts us into competition with livestock while
reducing the efficiency of farms. Feed pigs scraps, feed cows grass, save the
corn for people.

Also, many of the stats cited by eco-vegans turn out not to be valid. Water
requirements for livestock are based off worst-case scenarios (California cows
fed from irrigated crops) and are off by 3 orders of magnitude in the common
case; greenhouse gas estimates for livestock conflate logging and land
speculation with faring.

------
timruffles
Seems a very valid article, and some of the non-science it debunks is absurd!

That said, the line "we could eat meat ... (albeit much less) with a clean
conscience" is a little glib, surely most people know that the ethics of
killing things just to eat them is at least an open question for reasons
beyond environmentalism?

