If you are vegetarian for humane reasons, can you help me think this through?!
Currently, I try to gather as much food as I can from the wild and from gardening. I do hunt, and take a whitetail deer every year. I've been doing some figuring on the impact of taking that deer as opposed to replacing it with vegetarian food. I calculated the protein that one large deer provides is equal to the amount of protein you would get from black beans or pinto beans grown on 4000 square feet of cleared land. In that same 4000 square feet of land, you could have at least 10 mature hardwood trees and many forbs, grasses, and bushes, providing food and shelter for countless insects, birds, small mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and a portion of the covered range needed for larger woodland mammals... such as whitetail deer.
So, from a purely philosophical perspective, is taking the one deer per year (and the home it provides for a few parasites like ticks and fleas) really worse than wiping out that much forest and life that depends on it to grow the beans I would need to replace the protein from that food source?
Answers:
Well forest is always more biodiverse than savannah, and savannah will be more diverse than an area cleared for cultivars. But the trouble is you are comparing a modern agricultural practice with a traditional hunting practice, if you were to compare the two on a more level playing field you would be talking about an area of land where as many different crops are grown as possible. If permaculture is used this actually enhances biodiversity and the field could be even more diverse than a typical savannah. The land will not be used up and cleared then replanted, rather some things are taken at one time and others later, a microcosm of a fully functioning ecosystem.
This is a far more realistic scenario as it is unlikely you will substitute your meat with only those two types of beans. Of course if you were to buy plant foods off the shelf without thinking about it you could have some serious environmental impacts and this would be less desirable than your single deer. Indeed, hunting deer may be considered necessary in some cases. Many people justify their hunting of megafaunal vertebrates by pointing out that they overpopulate and can damage an ecosystem, and hunting keeps their numbers down in areas where natural predators have become extinct. This is sound logic as long as you wish to apply it to other overabundant species, such as humans. And really, the impact a human has on the environment is much greater than any deer hence using one for food has a much greater influence. Of course they don't weigh as much, so maybe take a couple of smaller ones instead before they grow old enough to do so much damage.
As you can see the logical implications of using animals takes you to some uncomfortable end points. You must then make a subjective decision to not consume the animal where removal does the most for the environment since there are certain legal ramifications. Hence the most logical solution is to go for a plant based diet where your impacts are minimised as much as possible by actively seeking the most sustainable produce you can. This can still include forest products, so you won't have to miss out on all that nice time out there in the bush; you can still get fresh air foraging for edible herbs and fungi and still get a cheap feed from the forest if you are willing to learn how. Not as easy as shooting a deer, but if you wanted easy you would just eat McDonalds and would never have thought this much about the influence of your diet in the first place.
vegan biologist
we can lessen our impact, but it never goes away, we always impact everything, and it impacts us
thats the way of life
allthe calculations you do wont change that you cant help but affect something or someone
worse/better isnt thepoint, if you are doing something and feel its worth it, thats the point
we can lessen our impact, but cant stop it
Do you know how many percentage of people in this world Vegetarian??..Just 3 to 4%...
For the better ecosystem being a non vegetarian is the must....
Some peoples calling all the peoples should become vegetarian,why dont they call the wild animals like tiger,lion,snakes,etc to become vegetarian???
Some peoples in India considers those who are eating non-vegetarian are dirty peoples...Idotic thoughts..
Basic Instinct
I dont see that theres any problem with hunting one deer a year. I dont think of it in terms of "better" or "worse" then planting the beans, cause you could go back and forth all day with that.
do you eat the deer all at once? if not, don't plant the beans so you harvest all at once.
more to the point, i think the environmental impact most talked about is in commercial animal farming. wild animals do not cause the kind of damage that commercially farmed animals do. they degrade the earth, create large amounts of pollutants, and with being pumped full of antibiotics and hormones like they are; they are causing health issues. if your concern is environmental impact, and all the meat you eat is 1 deer that you hunt in the wild each year, *i* don't think the change in your personal environmental impact, or carbon footprint, would change drastically by becoming vegetarian.
people tend to go on a global scale with questions like this. however, you are looking for a personal level. and you are only looking for the environmental impact, you are not going for humane reasons if i am reading this correctly. you, personally, with 1 animal you hunt in the wild are making a greater positive impact by eating locally than you could by giving up that one animal. you are making an incredible impact by eating locally, especially growing yourself.
Well if you are looking for a "less impact" on the ecosystem, vegetarianism would be the way. The key in this statement is to realize how inefficient energy transfer is between different levels of the ecosystem (around 10%)
If you are eating a plant, you are retaining 10% of the nutrients from that plant. However, animals have to eat too, and they too receive only 10% of the nutrients from that plant, and therefore only 1% of the nutrients the animal obtains from the plant is passed on to the human. Therefore, being vegetarian is more efficient from an energy transfer perspective. For humane reasons, think of it this way- for the same amount of land that it would take for you to get your nutrients from plants, it would take 10 times as much land for you to get nutrients from animals.
material related to my major at university