Teresa Platt, executive director of Fur Commission, USA, a fur industry group, recently wrote an excellent article defending animal agriculture from the claims made by animal rights groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Platt dug up some succinct quotes about the importance of animals as a food source from Oklahoma State University’s Department of Animal Science:
Only about one-third of the land area of the world is classified as agricultural. Thus, roughly two-thirds of the land area of the world is not suited for any sort of agricultural use because it is covered by cities, mountains, deserts, swamps, snow, etc. Of the 35 percent that can be devoted to agriculture, less than one-third can be cultivated and produce plant products that the human can digest. The remaining two-thirds of the world’s agricultural land is covered by grass, shrubs or other plants that only ruminant animals can digest. Thus, the inefficiency of animals is not a major concern since they represent the only way these plants can be converted to human food. As the human population of the world increases, it is likely that we will be forced to depend more and more on ruminant animals to meet the increased demands for food.
As Platt notes near the end of her article, if PETA and other animal rights groups are serious about obtaining all human-edible food from plants, they should acknowledge that the environmental changes such a transformation would entail would likely rival the changes that took place with the massive worldwide clearing of forests and other ecosystems for farmland in the 18th and 19th centuries. (Of course one way to get around that would be to use genetic engineering, but the activists are opposed to that, too).
Source:
Let Them Eat Cake!
PeTA Sees Foot-and-Mouth Disease as the Final Solution. Teresa Platt, Fur Commission USA, April 24, 2001.
Breeds of Livestock. Department of Animal Science, Oklahoma State University, Factsheet, undated.