Post by @forkranger

🤯 This changed my perspective of Earth: Chickens weigh more than all elephants, bison, zebras, and all other wild land mammals *combined*. One of the biggest ways in which humans have changed the surface of the Earth is through farm animals, particularly cows. A field with cows might not look like a big impact but each of those cows requires 60 kg of food per day. And that requires a lot of space, about 1-3 football fields of grass per year, per cow. But space is limited on our planet, and so forest is cut down to make space for grassland. This is why beef is the leading cause of deforestation 🪓  We don’t notice this in Europe or the US because all the deforestation for grassland happened a few hundred years ago. Yes, in some places grazing cows makes ecological sense and we don’t have to ged rid of all of them. But cows now weigh 3x more than all wild land mammals ever used to weigh, so clearly they’re not just ‘the bison of today’… There are just too many of them and it causes real damage. SOURCES Bar-On, Y. M., Phillips, R., & Milo, R. (2018). The biomass distribution on Earth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(25), 6506-6511. Amount of meat: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025) [The numbers are for 2014 because that’s the year of the data in the other study]