I'm beginning to think ruminants are often shown in a poor light by common statistics. And not due to deceit, just reliance of simplistic statistics that do not tell the whole story.
Take the graph showing a cow requires 31.7kgs of food to produce 1kg of meat. But this can be (but sometimes not) all grass which is indigestible to all the other animals here. Pigs and Chickens are at 10.2kg feed/kg meat and 4.2kg feed/kg meat, but this is generally all food which is digestible by humans. Fish are at 2.3kg feed/kg meat, but the fish humans eat almost all naturally eat animals for feed.
Another graph in this shows that maybe 60% of land in the US is used for grazing. This doesn't mean that this land could be used for growing crops. Often ruminants are grazing on marginal land that isn't good for growing other foods.
Similarly methane from ruminants digestion is considered the same as methane from a gas wells for most climate change modelling. But it seems to me that over the 20 year lifetime of methane in the atmosphere, a fixed heard of ruminants would have a fixed amount of methane in the atmosphere. While methane from fossil fuels is more carbon put back into the carbon cycle just seems objectively much more damaging.
Also a smaller portion of their feed ruminants consume would naturally turn into methane if it hadn't been eaten by farmed ruminants.
I've cut back on the amount of red meat that I am eating, but I still think that a more holistic look at ruminants would probably have them looking better than some simple statistics make them look.
My bias is that I grew up on a farm. I am fond of cows and sheep and I would be sad if they went away. I want them treated well, but don't mind them being slaughtered for food.