In the early 1800s, there were an estimated 60 million bison in North America. They were hunted nearly to extinction, and today there are an estimated 31,000 (wikipedia).
Meanwhile, there are about 120 million cattle in the U.S. and Canada (over a billion worldwide). It's possible that cattle therefore have a larger impact on the ecology than did the buffalo, but there were always large grazing herds in the world, and far more numerous prior to the Industrial Age. It's possible that there are in fact fewer ruminants today than in pre-industrial times, if the great herds of millions of reindeer and similar creatures that once roamed the plains of North America and Siberia are taken into account.
Last year I began bow-hunting for deer in my part of New England, where there is an excessive population that damage forests, endanger drivers, and spread disease. I'm also hoping to raise meat chickens and egg laying chickens in the near future.
Hunt for your own meat and stop buying factory meat that has been pumped with all sorts of hormones and antibiotics. I love a good beefsteak and I do hope such will continue to be available, but harvesting your own meat is probably the best thing for the planet and gives you a much stronger connection to (and respect for) the game animals that we eat!
Neat for you, but probably not scalable. Hunting and gathering always had that problem. For the other 6 billion people on the planet, big Ag is all that's going to feed them.
Not scalable to 7b people, but maybe applicable to a few more millions of people in North America, for example, where meat consumption per capita is very high. Imagine the impact on the meat industry if one million more households in North America decided to keep chickens in the back yard, for example.
They'd buy 1 or 2 fewer chickens per year. I don't think it'd register. You vastly underestimate the Big Ag chicken infrastructure. E.g. when McD's started serving chicken McNuggets years ago, they contracted for Every Chicken In Canada to supply the demand. Currently Americans eat 8 billion chickens a year, not to even mention egg factories. A million chickens from back yards is literally 'chicken feed'.
LOL, maybe so. But some of the homesteading videos on Youtube show people receiving shipments of anywhere from 30 to 120 chicks, which they raise as meat chickens, then after 8 weeks they slaughter them and freeze them. That's a lot of meat. Probably not for everyone. But imagine going through about 15 chickens a year, out of your own freezer, totally separated from the industry except for a breeder.
Then there's the freezer. Opting out of the (very efficient) chicken distribution system and choosing your own less-efficient freezer from whatever power grid, is arguably not going to be a smaller carbon footprint or whatever.
Its hard to beat big Ag for efficiency - that's cash-money to them and they've been at it for a century. Cottage industry agriculture is generally orders of magnitude less efficient.
Meanwhile, there are about 120 million cattle in the U.S. and Canada (over a billion worldwide). It's possible that cattle therefore have a larger impact on the ecology than did the buffalo, but there were always large grazing herds in the world, and far more numerous prior to the Industrial Age. It's possible that there are in fact fewer ruminants today than in pre-industrial times, if the great herds of millions of reindeer and similar creatures that once roamed the plains of North America and Siberia are taken into account.
Last year I began bow-hunting for deer in my part of New England, where there is an excessive population that damage forests, endanger drivers, and spread disease. I'm also hoping to raise meat chickens and egg laying chickens in the near future.
Hunt for your own meat and stop buying factory meat that has been pumped with all sorts of hormones and antibiotics. I love a good beefsteak and I do hope such will continue to be available, but harvesting your own meat is probably the best thing for the planet and gives you a much stronger connection to (and respect for) the game animals that we eat!