My own view is that grazing animals (cows, sheep, goats) are an excellent thing to have when you have land where human-relevant nutrition won't grow. Those sheep wandering the Scottish (and Welsh, and Lake District) hillsides, eating some of the fairly few plants that will grow in that soil (and climate) is a fairly smart thing to do (given a high level of control, given the total reshaping of those landscapes caused by overgrazing in past).
Same thing with cows and goats in other parts of the world, where they (somehow) do OK munching on plants that grow where the stuff we'd eat will not (similar concerns about overgrazing, shit production and soil damage).
It's also true of small-scale poultry production, though my impression is that you need pretty high quality soil conditions and plants to grow chickens without supplementary food.
That's a far cry from anything we have now, and tends to imply a reduction in meat consumption on a level that I don't think many Americans (and perhaps quite a few Europeans) would currently endorse.
Same thing with cows and goats in other parts of the world, where they (somehow) do OK munching on plants that grow where the stuff we'd eat will not (similar concerns about overgrazing, shit production and soil damage).
It's also true of small-scale poultry production, though my impression is that you need pretty high quality soil conditions and plants to grow chickens without supplementary food.
That's a far cry from anything we have now, and tends to imply a reduction in meat consumption on a level that I don't think many Americans (and perhaps quite a few Europeans) would currently endorse.