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> The water is returned to the environment a few hours after it's ingested.

Just like the water that comes out of my showerhead or toilet, but the state still places big restrictions on each of those.

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I'd argue in your favor that the water coming out of your showerhead or toilet gets used a lot more efficiently than the water going into cattle. In the case of residential water, most of it pretty efficiently goes to treatment facilities which then reuse it again for municipal landscape watering or non-potable purposes.

In the cattle case, most of it goes to the superficial surface of the ground, and since so much of the beef and cattle operations in California don't have the luxury of grass or anything green on the ground, it just evaporates away.

The difference is that animals drinking water is part of the natural cycle, showers are not. There's essentially no difference between the water usage of cattle on unirrigated native prairie and the water usage of the bison that preceded them.

Of course, cattle in California isn't raised on unirrigated native prairie, like they are in Texas or Montana.

Lots of cattle are raised on grasslands in California, but not in the San Joaquin Valley, because that would be a waste of prime land. You can find grazing lands in Marin, Sonoma, San Benito, and other hilly counties.

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