Forests teeming with rare forms of plant and animal life explode in flame in Costa Rica. Water tables fall and fossil fuels are wasted in the United States. The numbers and impacts of livestock have swelled along with human population and affluence. There are now three times as many domestic animals as people on the Earth. Ruminants, along with pigs and poultry, also eat feed and fodder raised on one-fourth of the cropland.
Livestock exert a huge, and largely unrecognized, impact on the global environment.
Unsustainable grazing and ranching patterns of impoverished and affluent regions alike sacrifice forests, drylands, and wild species. Multiple forces have disturbed traditional pastorialists' ecologically sound livestock systems, leaving herders to crowd with their animals in areas where the land is quickly laid to waste. Complex economic and social forces lead to mismanagement of herds, causing extensive and sometimes irreversible degradation of drylands and destruction of forests. In countries such as Botswana, cattle are esteemed not just for monetary reasons, but as a yardstick of social prestige. In India, Hinduism preaches a reverence for cows that, together with the animals' economic value to poor households, helps account for the world's largest cattle population.