By Bob Long

I notice someone running advertisements saying that as livestock are greenhouse emitters, we should all become vegetarians.

But this business about blaming livestock for greenhouse gas emissions is nonsense. It’s true that livestock do emit CO2 and/or methane (CH4) – but that’s only part of the story. From where does the carbon come that comprises that CO2 or CH4? From the food that the livestock eat. That is plants, which extract CO2 from the atmosphere. So animals don’t generate carbon products – they simply recycle them. In short, livestock are already carbon neutral. Likewise, so are humans (as far as our eating, burping and farting goes) – we eat either carbon neutral animals, or plants.

In fact if the vegetarians claim livestock are bad with respect to greenhouse gas emissions, then becoming vegetarian makes themselves no better than those animals, because livestock are vegetarians, too!