Meat industry strips wildlife of key habitat
By making small changes in our diets, we can make the world a kinder place for wild and farm animals.
Last week, the White House unveiled a long-awaited plan to save pollinators, such as the monarch butterfly, but the effort doesn’t go far enough to protect them from their greatest threats.
As the iconic species continues its annual journey across America — passing through Texas just this month — fewer butterflies are making the trip, thanks in part to the world’s growing taste for animal products.
Monarch caterpillars are losing their sole source of food, milkweed, to pesticide use in industrial feed crop production, robbing them of the chance to become butterflies. As a result, this species’ numbers have dropped precipitously over the past two decades.
They are just one casualty in what scientists call the “sixth mass extinction,” a mountainous spike on a 450-million-year timeline. The forces driving the trend are no mystery: habitat destruction, climate change and direct killing, all at the hands of humans.
Our food choices matter
One of our most basic daily actions underlies all three. When we sit down to eat, we make a choice between sparing imperiled species or sentencing them to nonexistence — depending on what we put on our plates.
In the pursuit of feeding ourselves, humans have altered most of the planet’s natural habitats. Our single-largest use of land is for pasture to raise animals for food; this accounts for an area roughly equal to the size of Africa. The secondlargest use of land is for crops; for this we use a chunk of the globe the size of South America. And almost half of the calories from those crops are fed not to people but to farm animals.
Put those chunks of land together, and this adds up to 45 percent of the Earth’s land devoted to raising and feeding livestock. The United States is no exception; nearly half of the land in the lower 48 states is used to produce food for cows, pigs and chickens. As meat consumption skyrockets in rapidly developing countries like China and India, even more habitat will be converted into cropland and feedlots.
Animal-based agriculture is already the leading cause of deforestation worldwide, and cattle ranching alone is to blame for 91 percent of forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon. Wooded lands act as the Earth’s giant carbon sinks, keeping climate change in check. But burning forests to make way for cattle and their feed releases hundreds of tons of carbon per acre into the atmosphere. Combine this with methane emissions from farmed animals’ waste — as well as even more carbon emissions from the mechanized systems that bring meat from feedlot to fridge — and it’s easy to see why the livestock industry is a top contributor to climate change.
Livestock and feed crops are displacing wildlife, forcing them to abandon or adapt to habitats altered by humans and a warming world. As once-verdant lands turn to homogenous pasture, cropland, or desert, native flora and fauna perish in droves.
Millions of animals killed yearly
But wild animals aren’t just collateral damage. The meat industry also directly targets native species — hunting, trapping and poisoning them to prevent them from preying on farmed animals or competing with the herd for food and space. At the behest of farmers and ranchers, government agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services deliberately kill millions of animals annually. Many of these are top predators and keystone species like bears and wolves, animals without whom whole ecosystems are vulnerable to collapse.
Earth’s remaining wild animals and places are threatened by the pressure of our rising numbers and growing appetite for animal products. Dozens of unique species go extinct each day. Kitchen knives in hand, we are cutting the filaments in the web of life that supports all species — including our own.
We can’t restore these threads once they’re gone, but we can take action to prevent future losses — including the monarch butterfly. The United Nations and the federal government’s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee both now urge a shift toward plant-based diets to reduce pressures on our planet and its inhabitants, and hopefully the final 2015 Dietary Guidelines will also include the expert recommendations to eat less meat.
Simple steps we can all take — such as eating meatless on Mondays; replacing animal-derived meats, milks, and other products with plant-based alternatives; and encouraging others to do the same — will help create a kinder world for wildlife and farmed animals alike.