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Vegans cause animals to go extinct?

AmandaM

Critical Thinker
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I keep seeing a statement like this in comments on Mother Jones articles: if we switch to an all vegetarian diet, our former food animals will go extinct.

What's the logic behind this?

I can almost see it being true for larger land animals like cows, but we don't eat horses and they aren't extinct. For the most part we don't eat dogs or cats and they aren't extinct.

???
 
We ride horses. We keep cats and dogs as pets.

What is going to be our motivation to keep breeding cattle, sheep and pigs if we aren't going to eat them?

They may not become completely extinct, but their ability to survive in the wild is not great - dairy cows couldn't do it at all. What might survive would be adapted strains rather different from the animals we know. And if most of the land is being intensively farmed for food crops, where are they going to find a niche to survive anyway?

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
We ride horses. We keep cats and dogs as pets.

What is going to be our motivation to keep breeding cattle, sheep and pigs if we aren't going to eat them?

They may not become completely extinct, but their ability to survive in the wild is not great - dairy cows couldn't do it at all. What might survive would be adapted strains rather different from the animals we know. And if most of the land is being intensively farmed for food crops, where are they going to find a niche to survive anyway?

Rolfe.
Click to expand...

Well, just because we're not eating cattle doesn't mean we can't use them for leather right?


Right?


:boxedin:
 
OP mixes vegan and vegetarian.
There are plenty of cows in India where they are not eaten as meat. Cows, sheep and goats are all kept for dairy.

In a vegatarian world, it's likely pigs would be the big losers. They'd likely be reduced at least to very small feral populations.
 
There have been plenty of domesticated species quite happy to roam places like the Australian outback. Goats, camels, buffaloes and pigs.
 
Cavemonster said:
OP mixes vegan and vegetarian.
There are plenty of cows in India where they are not eaten as meat. Cows, sheep and goats are all kept for dairy.

In a vegatarian world, it's likely pigs would be the big losers. They'd likely be reduced at least to very small feral populations.
Click to expand...

Really? I'd have thought they were some of the best survivors, being able to eat almost anything. There are some rather big feral pig populations in Australia.
http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2006/s2015328.htm
 
For leather, fine, but it's hard to know how many cattle might be kept solely for that purpose. It would be a very expensive product if the meat wasn't sold. Also, don't vegans prohibit the wearing of leather too?

Dairy, indeed, but the thread title is explicitly talking about veganism, which doesn't use dairy products.

Cows are kept in India because they are sacred to Hindus, I believe. I don't think Christians, Moslems, Jews, Shintoists, Buddhists, agnostics and atheists are all going to suddenly decide to keep sacred cows. So again, a small rump population in one area.

And just how much outback is there going to be for these feral populations? Maybe in Australia.... Certainly not here. There might be small populations on the hills.

Probably not complete extinction, but reduced to tiny populations of selected strains that wouldn't really be the animals we're familiar with.

Rolfe.
 
The basic issue is that we've spent thousands of years breeding animals to our purposes, to the point where they're simply incapable of surviving on their own in the wild. Dairy cows, for example, will get sick and die if a human being isn't there to regularly milk them.
 
Cleon said:
The basic issue is that we've spent thousands of years breeding animals to our purposes, to the point where they're simply incapable of surviving on their own in the wild. Dairy cows, for example, will get sick and die if a human being isn't there to regularly milk them.
Click to expand...
I once went to a seminar with an animal telepath who denied this.
 
Sheep would likely have problems carrying heavy fleeces. I wonder how long it might take for something like that to breed out.
 
AmandaM said:
I keep seeing a statement like this in comments on Mother Jones articles: if we switch to an all vegetarian diet, our former food animals will go extinct.

What's the logic behind this?

I can almost see it being true for larger land animals like cows, but we don't eat horses and they aren't extinct. For the most part we don't eat dogs or cats and they aren't extinct.

???
Click to expand...

If we don't eat them, who cares if they go extinct?
 
Even if WE don't eat meat, the cats and dogs still do. Despite pet food companies doing their best to wean them off of it.
 
And ferrets. Ferrets are completely domesticated and do not survive in the wild (not counting the black-footed ferret, which is an almost completely different beast). And they're obligate carnivores. They cannot survive without animal protein.
 
Shirley Vegans don't use leather either do they?

Ironically given that we know vegans are all a bunch of flowers-in-their-hair hippies one of the major consequences of everyone going vegan is no flowers because we won't keep bees for honey and keeping bees for honey is evil and therefore there will be fewer pollinators of plants and flowers.

Maybe we'll all die out.
 
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