Yeah, I mainly only see snakes and turtles in New York state. This figure shows four reptile species in a tropical forest in Puerto Rico, and three of them are anole lizards. The fourth, Sphaerodactylus klauberi, also seems to be quite small.
I’m unsure whether an anti-insect-farming charity can offset potential wild-invertebrate harm from reducing beef/etc production (though it’s worth remembering that the sign of those side effects of meat isn’t super clear). Rowe (2020) says: “There are currently between 79 billion and 94 billion insects alive on farms globally on average on an average day.” The number of arthropods on a single hectare of pasture can be in the hundreds of millions, so 1000 hectares of arthropod-dense pasture could have as many arthropods as all insect farms. (BTW, apparently a beef cow tends to require a bit less than 1 hectare of pasture.) However, most of these pasture arthropods are mites and springtails, which are vastly smaller than mealworms, crickets, or black soldier flies, so probably each mite or springtail matters several times less (maybe tens or hundreds of times less?) than a farmed insect.
BTW, there may be ~10^10 = 10 billion nematodes per hectare of soil.
If only around 10x as many wild land vertebrates are affected, I think it’s pretty reasonable to believe that the effects on farmed land vertebrates are more important without thinking too much about the specifics, given how bad chicken lives seem to be on average.
Yeah. I like to separate beef from chicken in these discussions because I worry about people taking away a message like “the side effects of meat in general are large and unclear, so don’t worry too much about eating meat”, given that until we have more clarity on the side effects, it seems good to err on the side of not causing lots of chicken suffering. I feel less worried about people feeling uncertainty regarding beef because it’s so much less bad in terms of direct suffering per calorie of food (though beef cows still endure some awful things, like castration and slaughter) and because in some cases it’s plausible that beef reduces net wild-animal suffering (though I remain pretty uncertain about that).
Yeah, I mainly only see snakes and turtles in New York state. This figure shows four reptile species in a tropical forest in Puerto Rico, and three of them are anole lizards. The fourth, Sphaerodactylus klauberi, also seems to be quite small.
I’m unsure whether an anti-insect-farming charity can offset potential wild-invertebrate harm from reducing beef/etc production (though it’s worth remembering that the sign of those side effects of meat isn’t super clear). Rowe (2020) says: “There are currently between 79 billion and 94 billion insects alive on farms globally on average on an average day.” The number of arthropods on a single hectare of pasture can be in the hundreds of millions, so 1000 hectares of arthropod-dense pasture could have as many arthropods as all insect farms. (BTW, apparently a beef cow tends to require a bit less than 1 hectare of pasture.) However, most of these pasture arthropods are mites and springtails, which are vastly smaller than mealworms, crickets, or black soldier flies, so probably each mite or springtail matters several times less (maybe tens or hundreds of times less?) than a farmed insect.
BTW, there may be ~10^10 = 10 billion nematodes per hectare of soil.
Yeah. I like to separate beef from chicken in these discussions because I worry about people taking away a message like “the side effects of meat in general are large and unclear, so don’t worry too much about eating meat”, given that until we have more clarity on the side effects, it seems good to err on the side of not causing lots of chicken suffering. I feel less worried about people feeling uncertainty regarding beef because it’s so much less bad in terms of direct suffering per calorie of food (though beef cows still endure some awful things, like castration and slaughter) and because in some cases it’s plausible that beef reduces net wild-animal suffering (though I remain pretty uncertain about that).