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Comment by bborud | Hacker News Reader

This is a good opportunity to read up on the balance of livestock to wild animals in terms of sheer numbers and have a good think about what this means.

(And in case someone thinks I'm a vegan here to lecture: last night's dinner was Boeuf Bourgignon cooked for 5 hours)

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For the sake of the undercaffeinated among of us, could you elaborate a bit more on what it means?

I'm guessing they mean that the population of livestock is orders of magnitude greater than the population of wild (mammals and birds) animals on this planet. I forget the exact figures and am lazy to Google them, but I remember that cows, pigs, and chickens far outnumber even the population of people on this planet.

I've seen various estimates over the years as well as various ways of measuring this. I think that the most useful is to look at the resource draw, which roughly is about biomass.

I didn't post any numbers on purpose because I don't believe in just throwing out numbers that require a lot of context. I was being sincere when I said that "This is a good opportunity to read up...". One should spend some time trying to understand our footprint.

But yes, our food completely dominates the picture. Many places in the world most mammalian wildlife is little more than a footnote.

If this comes as a surprise to anyone, this makes me a bit upset and worried.

Yes, not the OP but Beef Bourguignon is a beef stew braised in red wine, often red Burgundy, and beef stock, generally flavoured with carrots, onions, garlic, and a bouquet garni, and garnished with pearl onions, mushrooms, and bacon.

I usually skip the bacon.

https://xkcd.com/1338/ It's got it's own XKCD.

> Earth's LAND MAMMALS By Weight

> A graph in which one square equals 1,000,000 tons. Dark grey squares represent humans, light gray represent our pets and livestock, and green squares represent wild animals. The squares are arranged in a roughly round shape, with clusters for each type of animal. Animals represented: Humans, cattle, pigs, goats (39 squares), sheep, horses (29 squares), elephants (1 square). There are other small, unlabeled clusters also. It is clear that humans and our pets & livestock outweigh wild animals by at least a factor of 10.

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