Are you under the impression that grazing land is habitat? It isn’t - grazing land is privately owned land, farmed for profit. When cattle ranchers cut down trees in the amazon to make room for grazing land, they aren’t creating habitat - they’re erasing it. The WWF’s own report condemned meat-based diets as one of the leading causes of habitat loss and subsequent species extinction. Cattle grazing is notorious for it’s negative impact on the land, from soil degradation and over-grazing to waste run off making it’s way into local rivers. Grazing land is environmentally catastrophic - even the industry themselves know this.
If we weren’t grazing billions of animals (and using 2/3 of all arable land on earth to do so) we could use that land to grow crops to feed humans, which provides far more food per acre than animal grazing does, which would be pretty great considering how many people are starving to death so that we can feed our crops to farmed animals. Or we could re-wild that land to combat globat warming and re-introduce species, we could give it back to the indigenous people it was originally stolen from to manage, we could build national parks, housing, solar energy facilities - the list goes on.
Experts agree that we cannot combat climate change without addressing animal agriculture, and land use is a huge part of that. We use a third of all ice free land on earth to either graze farmed animals, or to feed them. Gaining all that land back, turning it from barren grazing land into productive, wild or properly managed indigenous land, would have enormous social and ecological benefits. What benefits does leaving it as grazing land have, given that it is far less efficient than growing crops directly, aside from feeding our insatiable appetite for animal products?
As for the animals themselves, I’d just remind you that we’re not talking about wild animals here. Most modern livestock, cows, chickens, turkeys etc. do not (and indeed could not) exist in the wild - we have intensively bred them to maximise profit, some get so large so quickly that they can barely stand up. Besides, there is no reason to assume that they’d be extinct. Animal sanctuaries exist now - why, in a vegan world, would they stop existing, considering the fact that it is the vegan farm sanctuary charities who maintain them?
If the world moved away from animal agriculture, as the UN recommended in their seminal report, it would be good for literally everyone except those who directly profit from animal exploitation. The idea that we would see more habitat destruction if we used less land for grazing, has no factual basis whatsoever.
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