this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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I feel like a reasonable but controversial answer to this is cows
Cows are awesome. Go pet a cow sometime, they're extremely affectionate and just super chill.
Lol, they can be, they can (and do, several times a year in the UK alone) also stampede and trample a human/s to death quite easily (but also very deliberately. Edit to clarify - the stampede part is deliberate, I don't think the cows are necessarily homicidal lol).
Sure, they normally only do this when they feel threatened, but all it takes is a small dog nearby, or for the cow to have a calve you might not even see, and it's in defence mode.
I'm not trying to frame the cows as the problem, but this idea that they are docile animals you can just do whatever around (like people are literally paying money to "cuddle" cows) is wrong and dangerous. They are wild animals that are bigger and stronger than us, and should be treated as such.
But why cows?
It's an understandable answer that kind of misses the point. Cows are an incredible strain on the environment because of how fucking many of them humans breed in order to abuse and murder. But deleting cows would just prompt people to breed and abuse a different animal so it wouldn't help that much
What do you think we'd use? Just out of curiosity. Horse? Deer? We have the infrastructure and such for horses. I don't know why we haven't domesticated deer for meat production but I'd imagine they're next. Horses have much less utility in the modern world so I can definitely see them being the go-to.
More farming of pigs and goats probably.
Bison, most likely.
Yeah I honestly think they'd just reinvent the cow.
I don't kniw why but for some reason the phrase reinvent the cow is so funny to me.
Methane and total acreage needed per cow
But why male cows?