Our Beef With Grass-Fed Beef
A Meat and Dairy Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM Jennifer Molidor, Center for Biological Diversity
March 2022

Unlike native grazers like elk, cattle didn’t evolve here. They’re an invasive species — and the harm they’d been inflicting was clear in overgrazed range, mucked-up pastures, manure-polluted waterways and trampled vegetation.

In a remote corner of far northeast California lies a rugged, dry landscape bordered by the Warner Mountains. A wildlife refuge traces along the south fork of the Pit River. Its dramatic and diverse forest meadows, western juniper, beautiful lakes and lava beds host species like black bears, goshawks, sandhill cranes, snow geese, otters, beavers, snakes and lizards, western toads, elk, cedar, sugar pine and western flowers. When I lived in this beautiful place, the return of wolves thrilled me.

Wolves coming back here after nearly a century marked a new era, and their survival revealed great insight into conflicts between commercial interests and conservation. I took long walks through the woods with an eye out for wolf tracks crisscrossing the tracks of foxes, mountain lions and deer. I also noticed, though, how cattle had damaged this treasured place of ecological diversity. Unlike native grazers like elk, cattle didn’t evolve here. They’re an invasive species — and the harm they’d been inflicting was clear in overgrazed range, mucked-up pastures, manure-polluted waterways and trampled vegetation.

It’s a corridor that wolves have used to cross from Oregon on a return to their ancient territories. It’s also an area where cattle graze native sagebrush ecosystems, leaving a damaged landscape behind.

....

Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE (PDF).

---

Return to Meat and Dairy Industries
Read more at Environment Articles