Michaela Go
English 11000
Prof. Creaney
September 23, 2019
Animal Agriculture: Its Great Impact on Our Lives
Animal Agriculture has slowly been degrading the value of our lives. It has greatly affected our environment and our health. It has been studied that livestock is a major contributor to climate change. If meat production continues to progress, humans will have to make the necessary changes to ensure we don’t do further damage. Awareness alone can make all the difference.
In a website article titled Cars or Livestock: Which can contribute more to climate change?, Anne Mottet and Henning Steinfeld compare the contributions of transport and livestock in the emission of greenhouse gasses. Mottet is a Livestock Development Officer with the FAO Food Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome. She has gained 15 years of experience in research, quantitative analysis, and in the consulting of the agriculture sector. Steinfeld is the head of the livestock sector analysis which was also part of the Food Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Like Mottet, Steinfeld has 15 years of experience in his work in agriculture and livestock policies and environmental issues. Their work shows that they are not just showing us their opinion, but also have the information to back up their statements. In this article they made it so whoever is reading can find the importance in the article. The very first sentence of the article was “What we choose to eat, how we move around and how these activities contribute to climate change…” (Steinfeld). The authors made it so their audience can be anybody. The tone and language of the article is very informative. The authors emphasized the fact that livestock can have a great impact on climate change mitigation and can affect the security of our food. They needed to have a compelling tone to make sure that their point is not taken lightly. The purpose of this article is to inform the reader that livestock has a huge impact on our carbon footprint. Many have started to depend on livestock for financial stability, but fail to see that livestock is harming them in the process. Mottet and Steinfeld stated that it takes more resources to produce livestock because of the amount of land that is required, and feeding it takes to tend to the animals. Both land use and feed production combined, results in higher gas emissions. Furthermore, the authors mentions that Enteric Fermentation, which is the digestive process of an animal, produces a large amount of methane. To prove that this is detrimental, studies show that methane has a “higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide” (Mottet). It is safe to say that the authors want the readers to become more aware of the contribution of livestock in climate change. They believe that animal agriculture has a bigger part in gas emission than people may think.
Time Magazine published an article called The Triple Whopper Environmental Impact of Global Meat Production by Bryan Walsh. Walsh was a TIMES International Editor as their energy and environmental correspondent and worked as the Tokyo bureau chief reporting on health, environment and the arts. Walsh is very credible based on what he has done. This shows that he knows what he is talking about in his article. Under the title of his article it says “Livestock production may have a bigger impact on the planet than anything else” (Walsh). Right off the bat we know his viewpoint on the topic. Walsh goes on to talk about just how much goes into animal agriculture and the resources it takes to even maintain it. His audience, just like the article by Mottet and Steinfeld, has a very general audience. You can see this in how he addresses the reader, Walsh says “You may think you live on a planet” in the very beginning of the article. “You” can be anybody reading his article. I found the tone of this article very interesting. It shifts from a sarcastic tone to more of an informative tone. In the beginning of the article, Walsh is basically saying you may think you live on a planet but really you live on a big farm where the resources all go into animal production. It was stated that 30% of the ice free land is used to support chickens, pigs, and cattle. After setting up the mindset in the reader that a lot of our resources are used to support the livestock, Walsh goes on to list some “comprehensive assessments” about the livestock industry around the world. Walsh lists statistics that prove just how much it takes to raise and produce livestock and what can come out from it. For example, Bryan mentions that globally livestock cna produce “586 million tons of milk. 124 million tons og poultry, 91 million tons of pork” and more a year. It takes about 1.3 billion tons of grain to feed the animals. Although we are getting a large amount of product, it calls for the use of a large amount of resources to produce. Walsh states that 75% of the global emissions come from cattle and other ruminants and 56% of the global emissions come from poultry and pigs. He predicts that if livestock production increases, then the world would eventually need to make a change in their lifestyle. Walsh wants the reader to realize that we may not feel the effects of animal agriculture right now, but eventually we will come to see its impact on our environment.
James and Suzy Amis Cameron published a newspaper in The Guardian called Animal Agriculture is Choking the Earth and Making us Sick. We Must Act Now. James Cameron is a filmmaker, deep-sea explorer, and environmentalist and Suzy Amis Cameron is the founder of Muse School in California. Even though both have jobs in other fields, they contribute in studying the environment and discussing environmental issues. Their title has a call to action “We must act now”, which tells me that they want to persuade the reader to take action (Cameron). Their audience, while it can be very general, seems to be a little bit more specific. In the first paragraph of the article it says “we can ask out local leaders-from city mayors to school district boards to hospital management” (Cameron). Why do they want to target those who can reach out to leaders and influencers? They want their audience to be those who can get a hold of them because if word gets out that someone influential is supporting the cause the more change there will be. They want the reader to reach out to climate leaders and get them on board about the impact of animal products. Once awareness on just how livestock contributes to the world’s climate change is spread, the chances of improvements being made increases. The Camerons stated that eating meat and partaking in dairy “increases our risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes…,cancer, and obesity”. They also said that raising livestock for a variety of products alone causes 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This makes it the top generator of greenhouse gas emissions, having all transportation combined following it as the second highest source of emission. To avoid further damage, the authors want the reader to try plant-based diets. They want children in school and workers in an office to have access to a plant based diet. This is because if meat consumption is reduced by 50%, it is equivalent to taking 26 million cars off of the road. Greenhouse gas emissions would lessen tremendously. The authors, throughout the article, had very hopeful tones. They give the reader hope that if they take action, their quality of life would be way better than it is now. They used their own personal experiences. The authors bring up a time when they felt hopeless, but eventually they made the necessary changes. They made the issue about climate change feel relatable for the reader.
A scholarly source titled “Livestock and climate change: impact of livestock on climate and mitigation strategies” by Giampiero Grossi, Pietro Goglio, Andrea Vitali, and Adrian G Williams, provides in depth studies about the impact of livestock on climate change. Pietro Goglio and Adrian Williams are from the School of Water, Cranfield University, Cranfield, United Kingdom. Andre Vitali and Giampiero Grossi work at the Universita della Tuscia in the field of bioscience and agriculture. These individuals have worked together to present the impacts livestock has on climate change. Their article is targeted towards other scholars, as they would like others to critique the information they have formulated. They weren’t looking to persuade anyone to take a certain action but looked more to inform whoever was reading. The tone of the source was very straightforward, right to the point. They wasted no time and said what they wanted to say. Right away they introduced the two most important greenhouse gases that are associated with animal agriculture which are methane and nitrous oxide. Methane is usually produced through enteric fermentation or the digestive process of an animal and by the storage of their manure. Nitrous oxide is produced from the use of manure, such as in fertilizer. The language in this source is much more educational compared to the articles analyzed previously. The other articles had a much easier vocabulary to get around, whereas this source takes some time to understand what point they’re trying to make. This source was written and revised by scholars so it was bound to have some difficult vocabulary here and there. Words such as “gigatonnes” and “reticulorumen” were very foreign to me and required a google search or two. The vocabulary used in the source was very sophisticated. Their stance or viewpoint was that a majority of greenhouse gas emissions come from enteric fermentation and the maintenance of livestock. Combined they contribute up to 84% of the gas emissions compared to transportation which is only about 16% . The authors of this source not only presentes statistics in paragraph form but also used graphs and figures to show case information. This was very effective in keeping the reader engaged and interested. Usually, a reading that is constantly just paragraph after paragraph can get quite irritating. It was a smart move to include visuals in their work because now not only does the reader read the information being presented, they can now visualize it as well. Visualizations help the reader to fully understand what is being presented to them. The authors also broke their source down into sections. Instead of having the reader assume that the text is now talking about a different area in the topic, they broke the source down into sections like “Enteric Fermentation” and “Manure Storage”. Breaking it down into sections was effective in the way that it keeps the reader informed on what they are about to read next.
Animal agriculture has deceived us for a very long time. While we think it’s great and delicious, it has been destroying the environment around us and degrades our personal heath. As the demand of animal agriculture increases, more and more damage has been done. One day we will eventually need to make major changes in the way we live. Climate change has worsened due to the CO2 and methane output from livestock. It is recommended to consume more plant based diets rather than meat products. There is a sufficient amount of studies and research that supports the claim that animal agriculture has a great impact on our lives.
Work Cited:
@bryanrwalsh, Bryan Walsh. “The Triple Whopper Environmental Impact of Global Meat Production.” Time, Time, 16 Dec. 2013, science.time.com/2013/12/16/the-triple-whopper-environmental-impact-of-global-meat-production/.
Cameron, James, and Suzy Amis Cameron. “Animal Agriculture Is Choking the Earth and Making Us Sick. We Must Act Now | James Cameron and Suzy Amis Cameron.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 4 Dec. 2017, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/04/animal-agriculture-choking-earth-making-sick-climate-food-environmental-impact-james-cameron-suzy-amis-cameron.
Grossi, Giampiero, et al. “Livestock and Climate Change: Impact of Livestock on Climate and Mitigation Strategies.” OUP Academic, Oxford University Press, 12 Nov. 2018, academic.oup.com/af/article/9/1/69/5173494#129532828.
Mottet, Anne, and Hennings Steinfeld. “Cars or Livestock: Which Contribute More to Climate Change?” News.trust.org, 18 Sept. 2018, 8:36, news.trust.org/item/20180918083629-d2wf0.
