Just out of interest, do you think that every group of activists who have ever tried to convince the world that a disenfranchised group should have rights were ‘cult-like?’ Or is that only the case when you disagree with the cause in question?
Regardless, it takes far more plants to provide for your average meat-eater than it does to feed someone on a plant-based diet. That is because animals take in far more calories in crops than they will ever give out in meat, and on top of that they need land to be grazed or housed on and water to drink. This makes sense if you stop to think about it; it is fairly intuitively more efficient to grow crops to feed humans directly than to grow crops to feed farmed animals, who will then be fed to us.
To get into a bit more of the detail on that last point, livestock use about 40% of global arable land, and 80% of total agricultural land is devoted to animal agriculture, including feeder crops and grazing land. 1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2kg for monogastrics. If the world adopted a plant-based diet, we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 billion to an estimated 1 billion hectares. That is a conservative figure, but even according to the lowest estimates, there is no scenario in which a global transition away from animal agriculture increases land or water use. In fact, plant-based replacements can produce 20-fold and twofold more nutritionally similar food per cropland than beef and eggs, the most and least resource-intensive animal categories, respectively.
As for this overpopulation thing, out of all the anti-vegan arguments out there, this is the one I struggle to understand how anyone arrives at without dismissing with a chuckle as soon as they’ve thought about it for a couple of minutes and realise how obviously silly it is. In what possible sci-fi fantasy would everyone go vegan overnight and we would just release 100 billion animals to roam free? Think about that for a minute - it is an absurd idea at its foundation.
What we would almost definitely see is a slow transition away from animal agriculture, therefore fewer animals would be bred over time. As demand decreases, so would supply. Those farmed animal species who remain could live out their lives in sanctuaries, as the fortunate few already do. Nobody is stupid enough to just continue to breed animals to produce products that nobody wants to eat anymore, or just release billions of selectively bred, domesticated animals who have no place in our natural ecosystem.
"Moderation" is certainly better than overconsumption, but purchasing and consuming a product that is exploitive, environmentally catastrophic and requires excessive land and resources to produce is still not a good thing. We can’t "moderate" our way out of trillions of animals being killed every year to feed our insatiable appetite for their flesh, milk and eggs. Animal products are just demonstrably worse than a wisely chosen planet-based product by almost any meaningful metric that you want to use for comparison.
By all means, reduce your consumption if that is all you are in a position to do; that is a hugely positive step. Even if you don’t care about animal suffering or the workers traumatised to inflict it on them, we simply cannot sustain current levels of demand for animal products while keeping a liveable planet. The climate science is undeniable on this point. That is why everyone who is able to should be completely boycotting this incredibly harmful industry, not just funding the destruction of our planet and the slaughter of trillions of sentient beings "in moderation."
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