Boverty is the human impact of too many bovines overwhelming the local biosphere’s ability to feed them … the bovines are usually cattle and more than a few African countries have precisely this problem. Their livestock is a millstone around their necks and helping to keep them poor. Well-meaning aid organisations often contribute to the problem.
The ecosystem impacts of cattle spread far and wide but it may not be the owners of the animals who suffer the impacts. Indeed, the animals can buffer their owners against the worst impacts of boverty. This is analogous to the way that drivers of large SUVs do well in collisions with smaller vehicles. The entire community suffers from the presence of the vehicles, but the owners may be the least affected.
But these conclusions are just the end point of a longish discussion. We need to start at the beginning. But before we get to the beginning, here is a MODIS satellite firemap of the planet during the last days of December 2009. The sub-Saharan cattle countries are ablaze.
This post surveys the impacts of livestock, firstly at a very general level on the biosphere due to its domination of global biomass consumption, proceeding through the cattle-specific annual planetary conflagrations as people ignite the world’s grasslands to prevent reforestation. Lastly, we look at more intimate and sometimes more indirect bovine impacts, like the accelerated degradation of arable soil, the tens or hundreds of thousands of children killed by cooking with dung, and the global increase in respiratory and heart disease from ozone increases caused by rising methane levels.
Cattle are a major causal component in all these problems. The planet’s 1.4 billion cattle have a liveweight biomass exceeding that of humans and dominate many of our adverse impacts on planetary eco-systems.
