A popular idea floating around the vegan community is that we could solve the whole climate change dilemma (hoax) overnight if all the world’s vegan billionaires would donate a billion dollars each to buy up all the cows on earth and destroy them. I am far from being a mathematician but I did a bit of number crunching on the back of a napkin to see if the vegan’s idea would work.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization there are one and a half BILLION head of cattle on earth and let’s say each one of them was worth $1,000. According to my calculations it would cost one and a half TRILLION dollars to buy all the world’s cattle. There are an estimated 2,668 billionaires on earth but we don’t know how many of them are vegans. So far I could only find two who will admit to it. So the two vegans would have to come up with 750 BILLION dollars EACH to make cattle extinct. Not even Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates has that kind of cash laying around.
The problem with the vegan ‘solution’ is that it assumes every cattle owner would be willing to sell their bovines. Take India, for example. It’s the country with the most cattle with an estimated 305 million head. The problem for the vegan mathematicians is that cattle are revered and protected in India and the thought of killing them all would be inconceivable to them.
The United States owns the third most cattle and its billionaires are quite fond of their cattle too. Take John Malone, for example, who just so happens to be the largest land owner in the country. He owns Silver Spur Ranches, a top notch ranching and beef company that runs on 2.2 million acres and includes the Silver Spur Ranch in Encampment, Wyoming, the Bell Ranch and the TO Ranch, both in New Mexico. He also has ranches in Walden and Kiowa, Colorado. It turns out that Malone is just as good at running ranches as he was his media business that made him worth nearly ten billion dollars. I’d like to see the two vegan billionaires I was able to identify try to out-swap a tough trader like John Malone out of his cows.
Another big landowner is Stan Kroenke with 1,380,000 acres and counting. In 2016, he bought the most expensive ranch ever, the W.T. Waggoner Estate. The 510,000 acre ranch he purchased is believed to be the largest ranch behind a single fence in the country. Stan earned his wealth mostly from sports and is the owner of the Los Angeles Rams. As far as I know you can still buy a hot dog in his SoFi Stadium so I doubt Stan is a vegan and that he’s going to be a willing seller.
The vegans can cross Peter Buck off their list too. The nuclear scientist/Subway founder died in 2021 at the age of 90 but not before he became one of the largest landowners in the country. Do you really think the Buck family wants the world to be beef-free? What are they going to sell at their Subway sandwich shops without beef… bean curd and tofu lasagna?
Then there’s the Singleton Family who own 1,110,000 acres, mostly in New Mexico. Dr. Singleton was the founder of Teledyne and with some of the proceeds from the sale of his company he wanted to preserve the ranching heritage that has been around in New Mexico for hundreds of years. Dr. Singleton passed away in 1999, but his five children carry on his mission and are known for the quality of their horses and their cattle. What will their great cow ponies do without cows, mope around all day swatting flies?
And let’s not forget the King Ranch heirs. What will they run on their ranches in a beef-free-world, yaks, bison and water buffalo? They burp and pass gas too, you know?
The point I’m trying to make is the vegan idea of buying up all the world’s cows and killing them to cure the climate change hoax is idiotic but the vegans who thought up the idea could be lacking in the brain department as a consequence of eating all that kale ice cream, chickpea banana bread and garbanzo bean surprise.
