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[andrea]

milk! I didn't think of milk!

oh, the terribleness. meat I can sacrifice, but milk and cheese? that would be a terrible life.

[andrea]

it helps that most of the world population can't drink milk. But they still have cheese.

keeping that fraction of cows might not be ideal for environment, but it is a sacrifice to be made, for the sake of parmesan ( the one from parma, not the generic american term [insert rant]), cheddar and all the other!

[smjjames]

Also nut-based milk.

Ew. That stuff's worse than low-fat.

Soy milk I can get behind though, but it's very different from cow milk - I wouldn't want to miss either.

In theory dairy production could be transferred to another animal anyway, but since none of the existing livestock species have been bred to the extent that cattle have for milk there'd probably be an overall decrease in production for several decades if we switched over to goats/reindeer/camels for milk.

Those types of milks don't taste the same though.

I wonder what whale milk is like...

How even are you going to be able to milk a whale though? lol

[andrea]

through great difficulty.

sheep and goat milk make good cheese, however.

[Orange Wizard]

How even are you going to be able to milk a whale though? lol

I imagine by strapping some absurd milking apparatus to it and keeping it in a pond.

[Helgoland]

Mind controlling a whale baby and continuously pumping out its stomach through a hole you've made in its belly.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It's times like this that I realize the mermaid bone farm incident was a far more normal reaction then we'd like to tell ourselves.

[Arx]

Whales are unique among mammals in that they actually pump out the milk, so harvesting should be pretty straightforward.

[Flying Dice]

Or, y'know, goats. They're already good animals for both milk and meat because they're fairly low-maintenance and don't need prime grazing land.

[wierd]

They are also a ruminant, and will have the same problems with belching and farting that cows do.

(Better solution: Engineer stomach germs for cows and goats that produce far less flatulence than natural ones. Feed it to the animals in their food. Big problem with greenhouse gas emissions solved.)

(Production of alcohol instead of CO2 in an anaerobic environment would solve much of this problem. It would also increase the "food value" of the food the animals eat-- at the expense of having them be fall-down drunk all the time.)

[Graknorke]

Pretty sure that you get more energy efficient as you go for smaller animals. That's why people keep hyping up grubs and bugs as the future of meat.

[wierd]

Switching to goats for milk production, over cows, only mitigates the greenhouse gas emission problem. It does not solve it. (less IS better, but is not the ideal, of none. See how expensive Lamb is in the chart. Goat would be similar.)

The issue as to WHY those animals have such a high footprint, is because they are ruminants. Ruminants have those funky stomachs with all those crazy chambers in them. This allows some very complex symbiotic chemistry with microbes to break down the cellulose and other indigestible starches/sugars present in things like... Grass.

We are already working on a biochemical solution to this problem, but for fuel synthesis. Cellulosic source ethanol.  Adapting the microbes in question to live inside a cow, instead of a chemical plant, would permit cows to turn grass into alcohol, which is readily absorbed by the animal's stomach lining. This prevents it from being converted straight into greenhouse gas, and belched out.

Since ethanol is very high energy, and fairly easy to metabolize into useful energy, the cattle will require less food for the same return. The consequence is that they will be drunk all the damn time.

[martinuzz]

Oh, for those who advertise global full vegetarianism to help the climate... You do know it would mean we'll have to kill or let starve all your cute little kitties and puppies too, right? There'll be no more food from them if the meat industry shuts down.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Of all the worthless strawmen arguments, that might be the most frayed and filled with straw blight.

[andrea]

uh.. who ever said anything abut saving the cute little cows and bulls? the topic here is climate change, not the ethics of meat. The reason vegetarianism and veganism were discussed is that cows are a significant factor in greenhouse gas emissions and a reduction in their number would be beneficial to the climate.
You are, so far, the only one who tried to bring the cuteness of animals in the discussion, martinuzz.