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Originally Posted by Savage Clone
I hope you're joking about this. The raising of meat livestock is incredibly inefficient and wasteful when compared to vegetables and grains. Not to mention the methane gas issue, which I believe contributes even more to the greenhouse effect than CO2 emissions from human activity.
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Hmmmm.... this is more suble than it seems - livestock are quite diverse, but if we're talking about ruminants, they can digest plant material that we humans can't (cellulose, lignin, etc....), which make up a large portion of the plants used for human consuption. For instance, the soybeans used to make tofu are only a fraction of the plant itself, same for cereals. Ruminants can make use of these and metabolize these components, which in turn can provide meat, not to mention other grasses, hay, thorny shrubs even for some species. Indeed, a lot of vegetable byproducts (such as corn husks, soybean meal, etc) are sent back from the processors to the animal feed market. For these reasons they are extremely valuable to those living on marginal land where most crops can't be grown. However, your argument is absolutely correct when applied to, oh say, clearing forests to raise livestock, or industrial-size feetlots, which indeed makes up a huge proportion (if not over 95%) of the meat produced today in the developed (ha!) world. Actually, byproducts from plant processing (ethanol, vegetable oils, tofu, cereals, cannery wastes) are a source of cheap feedstuff for feedlots, which helps to keep the price of meat down to some extent. I'm not sure if any numbers exist though, as this is often done on a case-by-case basis.
As for the CO2 emissions, you'.re right, though methane, while 30-odd times more potent than CO2 to trap gasses, pales in comparison to N2O, released from water-logged soils. Not to mention that a helluvalot of methane is released from rice fields as well. Whether one option is better than the other is hard to figure out, I'm sure that many reports have been done on this with conflicting results. Guess it all comes down to one's preferences and ethos, I suppose.
And for the original question, I guess I all comes down to whether vegans see humans as animals or as removed from this realm. From this perspective, if humans are considered animals (in a metaphysical or ethical sense, not biological), then I guess not.