On Fri, 24 Jun 2005 12:59:43 GMT, Rudy Canoza > wrote:
>Derek wrote:
>> On Fri, 24 Jun 2005 03:17:31 GMT, Rudy Canoza > wrote:
>>>Rupert wrote:
>>>
>>>>Well, animal food production mostly requires more plant production than
>>>>plant food production. And I've linked to an article which argues that
>>>>even Davis' ruminant-pasture model wouldn't do as well as a vegan model.
>>>
>>>Wrong answer.
>>
>> Then why did you write;
>>
>> [...]
>> Not only have you given vegans a valid reason to
>> continue abstaining from meat on the basis that less
>> collateral deaths will occur
>
>No.

Your quotes which you snipped away say
otherwise, liar Jon.

<unsnip>
"If you insist on playing a stupid counting game, you'll
lose. "vegans" and a few sensible meat eaters alike
have pointed out that the overwhelming majority of
grain is grown to feed livestock. That means if you
eat meat that you bought at a store, you cause more
deaths: the deaths of the animals you eat, plus the
CDs of the animals killed in the course of producing
feed for the animals you eat.

The counting game is doubly stupid to be offered by
meat eaters: the moral issue isn't about counting, and
the meat eater will always lose the game, unless he
hunts or raises and slaughters his own meat."
Jonathan Ball 22 May 2003 http://tinyurl.com/664t2

Not only have you given vegans a valid reason to
continue abstaining from meat on the basis that less
collateral deaths will occur, you've also given them
valid environmental and economic grounds to abstain
from it as well.

"What I mean is that in terms of the resources
expended for the amount of nutrition yielded, the
U.S. could easily substitute sufficient vegetable
products to come up with the "missing" protein and
calories if we suddenly stopped raising livestock.

Meat is expensive relative to vegetable produce. All
of the major meats consumed in the American diet -
beef, pork and poultry; lamb barely registers - are fed
cultivated agriculture products as animal feed, and the
resources that produce that animal feed could instead
produce vegetable food for direct human consumption.

There is a loss of energy in feeding livestock feed to
animals. It takes anywhere from 6 to 8 pounds of feed
to yield one additional *gross* pound of beef, for
example; the feed conversion ratio for broiler chickens
is a little under 2. Note that these ratios are gross; they
do not take into account that some of the weight gain
in the animal is not edible to humans. If you adjust for
that, the ratios are higher.

If Americans suddenly stopped eating meat entirely, and
all the animals were gone, no land or other productive
resources would be devoted to producing feed and other
materials for animals. It would take only a fraction of
those resources to produce the "missing" protein and
calories."
Jonathan Ball as Rudy Canoza 31 Mar 2005
http://tinyurl.com/5xs3b