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I’m going to go brutally murder and deep-fry my dog just to cancel out whatever grass you ate today, you extremist vegoon! something something lions something desert island grumble grumble muh canines
Hope that serves as a warning the next time you feel like
expressing an opinion that differs from minebeing preachy.Look I get you but
points at fangs
Canines though
^ Vampire! Run for your lives!!!
Look I get you but points at gums I need dentures
not sure what the edit is for… you looking to be disagreed with? are there comments I can’t see?
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I just don’t think you have anything to apologize for. so why apologize?
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Do ypu have a source for that 4 trillion?
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There are too many cultural factors involved to get a majority of people to stop eating meat.
The best way to reduce the number of livestock killed is to reduce the number of humans.
You can shift culture, at least slowly. I think our best shot at significantly reducing animals killed is probably investing more into lab-grown meat
If you’re worried about cultural factors, you might find removing any significant percentage of the total population will likely run into even more implacable “cultural factors” than meat reduction would.
This is regardless of the method of population reduction, save perhaps “slow decline” which seems to be promising atm, but that obviously has the downside that it’ll take a few generations to really have an impact.
I’m not suggesting a method to reduce population its just an observation that there are simply too many people for basically anything to be sustainable.
Fair, we certainly won’t see any perfect or even good solutions given human nature and the large population, but I do think we can achieve mediocre success if we really work hard
I mean okay
Source?
Im gonna go out on a limb and say this is udder cowshit. Rats are mammals, as are raccoons, squirrels, and whole fucking masses of little basically unfarmable varmints. You’re telling me that there’s like 12 farm cows for every wild rat on earth?
Horse. Shit.
The source apperently takes the percentages by biomass, not by count as it seems. So small varmints will not have as much of an impact as a human or cow would.
in the comments section. straight up ‘sourcing it’. and by ‘it’, haha, well. let’s justr say. My pnas.
Which I think is intentionally disingenuous as it massively favours the large mammals over the far higher number of species of smaller mammals.
For example you’d need over 70 squeal monkeys to make to the biomass of an average American.
Humans and other great apes can be considered mega fauna, so it doesn’t seem surprising that us and the animals we consume make up a higher percentage of bio mass. Were bigger.
I don’t think it’s disingenuous. It represents the total share of resource consumption. If something has 2x the biomass, it consumed 2x the materials needed to produce that biomass (purely in terms of the makeup of the body, that is)
I don’t think count by itself is very relevant. There’s more bacteria in a glass of water than there are humans in a country, but what does that tell you, exactly?
Although I do agree the infographic should be changed to specify biomass
It would be MUCH more than 2x resource consumption, because every action that animal takes requires greater energy to move it around. The energy required to sustain larger lifeforms is significantly greater than the proportion of their mass.
Not necessarily, many small animals have an utterly insane metabolism making them eat their entire body mass in a couple of days. For example, hummingbirds eat the human equivalent of 150,000 calories per day.
Larger animals typically cannot afford to spend so much energy - there is just no large food source that has sufficient calory density.
Good point! I’d love to see a by-genus breakdown of average metabolic rate vs body mass.
Yeah the reason why biomass is used instead of number of individuals becomes rather clear when you consider the following:
- what counts as an individual? is an unborn already an individual? (that one’s a heated debate, as you can see by the abortion debate)
- if unborns are individuals, then at what age are they?
- if they are from the moment of fertilization, then some animals, like spiders or frogs (idk any mammal examples, but there might be some), might lay a shitload number of eggs, like a million or sth, and it would drive up the number of individuals dramatically. But it would be a bullshit metric, because 99% of these individuals are never gonna survive a single year on earth. so it would be utterly confusing and misleading.
Going by mass solves all of these problems because it’s more clear and more direct. And on top of that it has the nice side-benefit of also giving an estimate of land usage. Land usage is roughly proportional to biomass, so measuring biomass is meaningful to estimate land usage as well, and that one really matters as that’s the limited resource that you’re trying to distribute among all species on earth.
Quick Internet search… https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
They are referring to biomass.
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1 cow ~ 1200 lbs / 545 kg
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1 rat ~ 0.5 lbs / 0.25 kg
1 cow ~ 2400 rats by biomass
Well thats not what the infographic says. It specifies “mammals”, not “mammals by weight”.
OK so how many tons of cow are accounted for by whales?
Or does the survey cherry pick land animals too?
Why would the infographic be by number?
(I’m not dissing you, I only ask bcs I never even thought about it being my population, like, what would it compare by population in such a vast group as mammals.)Okay, so you have 240 rats and one cow in a pen on a farm. How many mammals are in the pen?
This survey would answer that the pen is 90% cow and 10% rat by weight, therefore there are 9 times as many cows as there are rats.
In reality land, where the rest of us live, we would say that there are 241 mammals in the pen and only 1 of them is a cow.
You see why I’m calling bullshit by the way this is worded?
Oh, I see now, thx.
For me (how I perceived the simplified pic) the main difference was that I didn’t think ‘in a pen on a farm’ but ‘on a planet’.
And your example also screams of ‘it’s not comparable, don’t do that, in what scenario would you need a number 241 that would made sense?’
(I really can’t think of on answer short of making a Twitch channel for each individual animal.)Also that question is leading bcs you ask how many, whereas the pic in the post doesn’t specifically say anything (which is the complaint as I gather - but we deduct the meaning of words from context all the time in all languages, if the ‘by individual’ doesn’t make sense, it’s obviously not that).
you have 240 rats and one cow in a pen on a farm
Do you not think the farmer saying he has 241 animals would be made fun of?
I’m basically saying that you can see from the context (the numbers) that it’s biomass - the same-ish as below even when/if the first thing you think about doesn’t make sense, you search for the way it does (again, not dissing, but strictly technically it is about literacy, which in this case the pic is at fault for not all of the audience not getting it, and you for not understanding it, an overlap just didn’t happen):
And yes, since this is pun-ish territory, it’s normal to feel some anger, puns are there worst.
The pic says “of all the mammals on earth”. It’s exactly as i said with the pen, just scaled up to a 3d spherical planetary sized pen. The numbers I’m talking about don’t change.
There are WAY more rats than cows. Period. They’re on every continent except Antarctica, and there might be some weird subterranean prehistoric voles huddled around a hydrothermal vent pool or some shit.
OP just needs to add a qualifier to the graphic. Anything along the lines of “with respect to biomass” right at the start
I was trying to think of some other meaning than ‘drinks dispensary’ for ‘bar’ and I couldn’t think of a sensible reason for putting a bar in your shower for quite a while until I realised metal bar.
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Not saying at all this isn’t a problem, but I hate bullshit statements that are deliberately deceiving.
These numbers are all by mass. Not actual number. Cows are huge. So are chickens, for birds. How this comic is laid out infers that there’s 60 cows for every 40 of every other mammal, and that isn’t even remotely close to true.
I think biomass is probably more important than sheer number for these comparisons. Although I would also accept ‘proportion of world’s arable land being used to sustain them’ as I suspect the ratios come out pretty similar for obvious reasons.
The problem is that the infographic says “of all the mammals on Earth”, which means individuals, not biomass. So the infographic is objectively false.
Intentionally misleading
Misleading you to what conclusion that you wouldn’t otherwise have reached?
Sadly it’s not objectively false, it’s merely vague. There’s no equivocation whereby it actually specifies that the unit of measure is the individual animal, rather than, say, kg. It’s just playing on your assumptions (I did assume biomass fwiw, but who cares).
But anyway, the point made by sheer fucking biomass imbalance is surely the thing to focus on here? Now that we know what it means, and are in agreement that the wording should be clearer, the statistic is still egregious, isn’t it? Humans have taken far too much of the world for themselves IMO. Vastly diminishing returns for us, devestatingly larger impact on the environment, the more we push it.
I’m in fact under the impression that the “number must go up” plot was played on us as well. Humans are increasing in quantity ever since the industrial revolution, but instead we should be focusing on the quality of life.
Couldn’t agree with you more. In particular, the way most state pensions are structured imply infinite exponential growth. It’s gonna be a tough drug to wean off of.
We’re below reproduction rate in most parts of the world, and likely will fall below in the rest of the world during this century, so we’re already in the ‘find out’ era :(
On top of that, it’s an annoyingly disproportionate graphic. The cow is much wider than the human so its area is much more than 60% of the area of the graphic.
The owl might be 3cm high and the hen 6cm high, but 9cm² and 36cm² would be the rough areas, even if it weren’t for the fact that again, the hen picture is much, much wider than the owl.
With 30% and 70%, the owl should just be a little under half as big as the hen, but it looks like about 1/4 or 1/5 of the size of the hen.
I don’t think this is loss. I’m ready to eat crow if I’m proven wrong, but I think the real joke is the amount of time people will spend staring at this image and trying to figure out how it’s loss
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This sounds like a way to cause an outbreak of Corvid-19.
Dang, beat me to it
Squirrel ain’t half bad.
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You forgot the citation bro.
It’s by biomass.
It’s from this article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study
Which is discussing this research: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
Title made me think they were doing some 4 levels deep “loss” meme. It almost has it but frame 3 isn’t close.
Yeah this has my pattern matching in scrambles like I can see it kinda??
Now even things that aren’t loss are loss :c
By mass.
Are pets livestock, or did they miss a category of mammals? In the US there are more dogs than children.
I believe pets are counted as livestock, but it’s not specifically referenced as far as I have the interest to read.
It’s intentionally misleading, like most vegan propaganda. It’s by mass, not population.
Biomass is the usual way this sort of data is presented in environmental science. I think calling it “propaganda” is a bit much. But yes if would have been better if that were clear on the infographic.
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birbs are only 2/3rds unreal confirmed ✅
End of the Holocene, Last of the Megafauna party.
It’s so fucking surreal to me how much megafauna extinctions have happened in the past 50’000 years.
I don’t think people realise we had like giant land birds (3+ meters tall), megasloths (elephant sized), giant kangaroos roaming round not that long ago.
The garden burned. We were best adapted.
https://www.americanforests.org/article/the-trees-that-miss-the-mammoths/
(In many places, we burnt the garden).
We’ve been shaping ecosystems through fire for so long.
That article’s on my to read list now, thanks.
It’s a good one. Add this too (audio) for the hopium.
I didn’t realise rhinos were so small. No wonder I never see them.
by number of organisms, biomass,
species count, or something else?edit: ok not species count because there’s only one species of human
That YOU know of
And yet cats kill billions of birds each year. Wild.
This is very depressing. I feel science and technology has improved a lot and now people should consume lab grown meat and lab grown milk. Humans should try to reduce their imprint in the world. Human growth has become unsustainable. We produce so much food but still there is hunger. So many kids around the world are dying of hunger. Something has to change. Otherwise I feel the system will collapse.
They forgot to mention what percentage of birds are humans smh
I know of at least 1 bird that is actually a human. That big yellow dude on Sesame Street.
