“The scoop on poop” or “Are cows better alive or dead?” ***

To produce one kg of meat takes the same resources as is required for about seven kg of beans.

Cows belch a lot of GHG (greenhouse gases), besides embedding a bunch of these gases in their gaseous and solid excretions. But we can anaerobically digest poop, to capture methane.

So overall- the Kamadenu - a cow that gives milk that can be used for making butter, ghee, cheese etc. and whose poop is a good source of fuel (whether solid or digested anaerobically to produce fuel gas) - is worth more alive than dead, assuming you can live on one pound of beans after feeding the cow five pounds of fodder, now you even have one extra pound of fodder and a slightly emaciated cow.

If you just slaughter it, you are wasting all the food you gave it, getting nothing out - even range cows that do not do much help a lot by landscape management- calculations of methane release from grasslands show that cattle grazing helps.

And the bulls, I guess our good cows, need to have some fun once in a while, so spare the bulls also, so once in a while they can hit the stock markets...

Holy cows are good alive...the ancient Indian practice of using cow poop as fuel was a sustainable practice.

(plagiarised from my old friend "Shagaraj")