Modelled estimates of the environmental impact of dietary choices often fail to reflect true dietary practice. This study links a dietary dataset from 55,000 UK consumers with food-level data on GHG emissions, land use, water use, eutrophication and biodiversity to compare the environmental burden of different levels of meat consumption.
This is a poor example. In the West, we don’t eat dog meat because of cultural reasons only. Other cultures consume dog and it’s not different from eating e.g. pork.
What we’re debating here is reducing consumption of animal products to reduce personal environmental impact. It’s not about cultural taboos. It’s about ethics and survival.
By the way, I respect vegans’ choices but I’m not an advocate of veganism as I believe asking the public to completely give up all animal products is unrealistic.
@tetraodon you’ll hear from the oil industry that quitting oil is unrealistic as well. You just say that because you’re engulfed into the meat industry, but meat is not oxygen, it’s not necessary to live
I completely agree, but (most) people don’t eat meat to survive. They do it for cultural and personal reasons which are often beyond negotiation.
Personally, I’m vegetarian for strictly environmental reasons. But I realize I’m a minority, and vegans are a minority within a minority.
And since not even able to wean off my wife off meat, I do not believe that vegans preaching can make humanity completely abandon animal products.