>> "...cattle occupy the same ecological niche as the bison did 150 years ago, with a similar environmental impact..."
Montana boy here. Even if I concede for purposes of argument that cattle and bison are ecologically interchangeable ungulates (debateable at best), surely we can all agree that it is not the cattle but rather the cattlemen primarily responsible for reshaping the natural environment in the American West, by bulldozing stock ponds, stringing barbed wire over the range, drilling wells, poisoning coyotes, supplanting native grasses with snakeweed and cheatgrass, and most importantly by enforcing a monoculture of cattle. Nature abhors a monoculture almost as much as it abhors a vacuum, and you would never find a bison-era Western landscape with only a single species of charismatic megafauna.
Nobody objects to a smallholder's spread of a dozen head of angus, but when millions of acres are given over to beef production alone, it's broadly disingenuous to claim that the environmental impact of cattle is isomorphic to that of bison on a systems level.
Cattle country today looks like this [0] and this [1], for miles and miles and miles.
Bison country looked like this [2].
It's hard to see how those landscapes are even approximately interchangeable.
Yes, you're right. But imagine if wheat was grown for the last 120 years rather than grazing cattle. Compared to that, cattle and cattlemen are fairly benign.
Montana boy here. Even if I concede for purposes of argument that cattle and bison are ecologically interchangeable ungulates (debateable at best), surely we can all agree that it is not the cattle but rather the cattlemen primarily responsible for reshaping the natural environment in the American West, by bulldozing stock ponds, stringing barbed wire over the range, drilling wells, poisoning coyotes, supplanting native grasses with snakeweed and cheatgrass, and most importantly by enforcing a monoculture of cattle. Nature abhors a monoculture almost as much as it abhors a vacuum, and you would never find a bison-era Western landscape with only a single species of charismatic megafauna.
Nobody objects to a smallholder's spread of a dozen head of angus, but when millions of acres are given over to beef production alone, it's broadly disingenuous to claim that the environmental impact of cattle is isomorphic to that of bison on a systems level.
Cattle country today looks like this [0] and this [1], for miles and miles and miles.
Bison country looked like this [2].
It's hard to see how those landscapes are even approximately interchangeable.
[0] http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/HA027__1MHK0-1...
[1] http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/HA030__1MHK0-1...
[2] http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/HA031__1MHK0-2...
NB. All these pictures are taken from an excellent and rather relevant piece of journalism that ran in Harpers here (paywall): http://harpers.org/archive/2015/02/the-great-republican-land...
And I stole my list of rancher's sins from Ed Abbey.