this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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Science Memes

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submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

aren't sheep about as bad as cows for the climate?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don't think so. But I think that that's going to vary a lot based on how you want to measure "badness for the climate".

My instinct is to look at Feed to Gain Ratio, which is the measure of food eaten to weight gained. This will vary animal to animal based on the animal's purpose (meat cows vs dairy cows, meat lambs vs wool sheep, etc) and the type of food they're fed.

Still, there are reliable bands for estimating for each animal. According to This Article, it looks like sheep can fall into a 4:1 to 6:1 ratio while cows are closer to 12:1 (this is a bit higher than I was taught in high school biology, but not by much). Of course, the higher these numbers, the "worse" the animal is for the environment.

[–] AlligatorBlizzard 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They might have been asking about methane production, that's a big topic for cattle because it's a very potent greenhouse gas and having a lot of cattle produces a lot of methane - and it's a byproduct of how their digestive systems work and all ruminants, sheep included, have that problem to some degree.

I wasn't able to find a definitive answer, but per animal sheep aren't as bad, but it's due to their smaller size and if western countries kept eating the same amount of meat but ate more sheep (due to it being cheaper from the demand for sheep condoms, lol) instead of beef I'm not sure it would be better. (Replacing chicken with sheep would definitely be worse though.)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

So what I'm hearing is that we just need to selectively breed people to have smaller penises so we can just use chicken intestines for condoms instead?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

About as bad as any of the animals that can eat grass, wild or farmed