Vegans and vegetarians can move along and enjoy their day. You're cool already, and off the hook.
Cows are ruminants. That's a group of animals that are specially adapted to eat nutritionally-useless grasses. That's their whole deal. If you're living in a pastoral or premodern farming society then that's great because you can't eat grass and you can eat cows, so it's free food. But instead you live in a society (insert meme) where we grow food specifically for cows then ship it to cows. Again, the animal that's specialized in eating things that have no nutritional value, so we're going out of our way to grow plants with no nutritional value, and then ship enough of it around to feed an animal anyway.
What does that mean? It means by whatever metric you choose, cow meat is worse than half as efficient as other common sources of animal protein.
Feed conversion ratios. Enough feed to make a pound of beef is enough to make 2.5 pounds of pork or 5 pounds of chicken.
CO2 per calorie. 1000 calories of beef costs 13.8 kg of CO2. 1000 calories of pork costs 4.45kg CO2. 1000 calories of chicken costs 3.37kg CO2. Also note lamb topping the charts, which will be a running theme. (Also an extra reason not to use broccoli as your primary calorie source, if eating 13 pounds of broccoli a day wasn't a good enough reason on its own.)
Land use per year per calorie. How much land did that 1000 calories take? You'll need 119 square meters for beef, 7.26 square meters for pork, or 6.61 square meters for chicken. Note lamb topping the chart again. (Also apparently prawns can be farmed super dense, that's something interesting that I didn't know.)
Why do sheep show up so high on some of these charts? Because they're also ruminants. Don't eat sheep either.
I just hate when people make this kind of argument. "Doing something good i.e. not eating meat doesn't count if you don't do all the good i.e. also not eating dairy." It's in my view extremely unfair and mostly used to cynically dismiss anything good being done at all and used as an excuse not to.
53% of cows are killed by the dairy industry, so UHM AKSHUALLY you’d be better off eating beef and quitting milk and cheese
Those type of arguments are also counterproductive in the extreme. Want people to go vegan? You're going to have better luck getting vegetarians to take that extra step than you are talking to people who eat meat.
If you'd ever talked to a vegetarian, you'd know that's not true. Most of them are vegetarian precisely because they "can't give up cheese". It's honestly harder to talk to a die-hard vegetarian than a clueless omni.
Vegetarian is the furthest I'd ever go if I stopped eating meat. So hearing vegans shit all over that just makes me think even more that they are just holier-than-thou assholes.
Don’t use vegans attitudes as a reason to spitefully continue eating meat. If you want to be vegetarian that’s fantastic.
I don't, I have other reasons to continue eating meat (although I have been eating quite a bit less since living on my own). The holier-than-thou attitude just poisons any discussion about vegetarianism and veganism, turning most people off from engaging in the discussion in the first place, or forcing meat eaters (and even potential vegetarians) to defend themselves from someone who sees animals as somehow equivalent to humans.
Well do you have any defense for eating animals?
Nothing you would accept. We have a fundamental disagreement on the "meat is murder" thing. Animals aren't sapient, it isn't morally wrong to eat them.
They feel pain just the way we do. What's the difference?
Would you not care if you saw me slitting a dogs throat?
Like I said, nothing you would accept. I've already discussed elsewhere in the thread about dogs being evolved to be our companions.