Grazing herbivores can improve biodiversity, but do they need to be livestock?
A recent story in the BBC describes how cattle are helping the rare pearl-bordered fritillary butterfly to thrive in a Scottish forest. By grazing coarse grasses, the Belted Galloway cows, so named for the wide white stripe around their middles, make room for the wildflowers favoured by the butterflies to flourish. While large grazing herbivores do play a role in keeping some ecosystems healthy and supporting other species, do they need to be ones that will end up on someone’s plate?
The purported benefit of grazing cattle to biodiversity is one of the arguments that is used by those who insist animals must be part of sustainable and ecological farming, broadly captured by the term regenerative agriculture, as pointed out by a new report on creating a plant-based food system by the Vegan Society and Alex Lockwood, lecturer and Surge contributor. Indeed, new reporting by DeSmog reveals that massive meat producer Danish Crown claims that the high greenhouse gas emissions of beef cattle are compensated for by the benefits to biodiversity of grazing cows. In the UK, groups such as the Sustainable Food Trust and Pasture For Life are leading the effort to position cows in particular as the solution to both the climate and nature crises.
“The assumption at play here is that the types of animals people happen to like eating are the best ones for the job of boosting biodiversity. Is this assumption warranted?”
Cattle and other domesticated grazers are used as a proxy for the wild grazing animals that originally helped to create habitats for different species. As an advisor for Forestry and Land Scotland told the BBC, using animals like the Belted Galloway “is using a natural system which would have been there in the past as well." While some of Britain’s large grazing herbivores, such as moose, aurochs, and bison, died out a long time ago for reasons ranging from climatic changes to hunting and losing habitat, some do remain, including wild horses and deer. The problem with wild herbivores now, of course, is that their populations can get too big due to their natural predators also being extinct in the UK. Lynx died out about 1,000 years ago, while wolves were persecuted to extinction in the 1700s.
In place of some wild herbivores, we have farmed animals, and in place of wild predators, we have people. The lack of predators and potential for herbivore populations to explode if left unchecked, as has occurred with deer, is one of the reasons that some people will insist that eating the animals that are helping to restore habitats is necessary (with the additional justification that farmers must be able to make money for grazing and therefore improving the land). The assumption at play here is that the types of animals people happen to like eating are the best ones for the job of boosting biodiversity. Is this assumption warranted?
Wild versus domestic herbivores
All herbivores graze selectively, eating only some kinds of plants and not others, so different herbivores help to create different assemblages of plants. Herbivores also come in all shapes and sizes, from large animals like moose to birds, hares, squirrels, and insects. The evidence that grazing by cattle improves biodiversity-ecosystem health is mixed and depends on to what it is being compared. This meta-analysis of 109 studies found that “Across all animals, livestock exclusion increased abundance and diversity.” This study of Southern Africa’s grassland ecosystems found that a range of wild native herbivores was better for increasing insect biodiversity than livestock. By contrast, this study focusing on North and South American rangelands argues that “Livestock grazing is not inherently incompatible with maintenance of biodiversity,” and that cattle grazing can actually facilitate grazing by wild herbivores.
Moreover, cattle and other grazing livestock may not be good proxies for wild herbivores. Livestock, writes ecologist George Wuerthner in CounterPunch, “uses the landscape differently than native herbivores. Native herbivores tend to be widely distributed over the landscape during the growing season. The chances that a plant cropped by an elk or bison will be regrazed again in any year, much less for years, is remote” whereas livestock “tends to graze plants repeatedly often during the growing season.”
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He also argues that the claim made by some livestock grazing advocates that plants “need” to be grazed is incorrect. Most plants “have adaptations that allow them to “tolerate” and defend themselves against the worse [sic] damage” and “expend vast amounts of energy, protecting themselves from herbivory. Thorns, prickles, chemical inhibitors, thick bark, and other adaptations are all mechanisms used to cope with herbivory. That is, there is a “cost” to herbivory for plants.” In light of this, the idea that the animals that are most beneficial for biodiversity just happen to be the ones people like to eat seems rather suspect.
Grazing livestock being beneficial for certain species in certain contexts also does not mean they are necessarily beneficial for the biodiversity of the ecosystem overall. Many wild animals, herbivores and carnivores alike, are often unwelcome in places where livestock are grazing. As Nassim Nobari of US non-profit Seed the Commons points out, ranchers in the US “tend to prioritize their own commercial interests”, supporting a yearly bison cull in Yellowstone “to protect cattle from disease and competition” and lobbying for the culling of elk in Point Reyes National Seashore, where they are already excluded from cattle grazing land by eight-foot-high fences. In countries like the US that still have predators like wolves capable of taking down cows, those predators are also highly persecuted for their perceived threat to livestock.
In the UK, farmers have objected to proposals to reintroduce lynx, and in Scotland, many have found themselves unable to coexist with reintroduced beavers, which are herbivores. Other wildlife which is routinely persecuted because of their perceived negative impact on animal agriculture include moles, badgers, and foxes.
“At worst, relying on livestock to bring biodiversity back to our nature-depleted land is a perverse solution to a problem created largely by animal agriculture.”
At worst, relying on livestock to bring biodiversity back to our nature-depleted land is a perverse solution to a problem created largely by animal agriculture. Habitat destruction is the biggest driver of biodiversity loss globally, and habitats have mainly been destroyed to make way for grazing land and growing crops to feed farmed animals. If we are going to undo that damage, we need less animal agriculture, not to turn more of our wild spaces into a resource for the meat industry. Of course, farming practices must become more nature-friendly, but farmers who practice regenerative agriculture which nurtures the soil and biodiversity don’t necessarily need livestock to do so; as Lockwood’s new report argues, vegan organic (veganic) agriculture is an underexplored but viable alternative to animal-based farming.
At best, livestock-based nature conservation is a half-measure. Environmental researcher Nicholas Carter notes that even if better grazing methods improve biodiversity and lower the greenhouse gas emissions of cattle, the question is: compared to what? Compared to conventional farming, or compared to rewilded land? Saving our crashing wildlife populations from extinction requires actually leaving significant chunks of land - and water - aside for nature. “The protection of land from conversion or exploitation is the most effective way of preserving biodiversity,” write the authors of the recent landmark Chatham House report ‘Food System Impacts on Biodiversity Loss’, “so we need to avoid converting land for agriculture. Restoring native ecosystems on spared agricultural land offers the opportunity to increase biodiversity.”
Biodiversity could benefit in some contexts by some grazing, as the meta-analysis cited earlier notes, but there is no reason the grazers then need to be sent to the slaughterhouse. See, for example, the rescue donkeys now helping to restore an endangered wildflower in Devon. As long as commercialised animals are used to fill the ecological role of herbivores, conservation will be about saving species that are compatible with the human taste for meat.
Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.
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