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Letter: I’ll keep eating steaks and hamburger

Reader from Cremona intends to continue enjoying steaks and burgers as long as they're available
opinion

Climate fix idea: Tax livestock owners for the methane their animals produce.

Mr. Bill Gates says we have to stop eating beef and using bovine dairy products and have all cattle gone by 2026 to save the planet from being overheated by the methane that cows produce. 

Sheep and goats produce methane too but he doesn’t seem aware of that or he really likes lamb chops. And what about buffalo and yaks? They produce methane as well as do most other foregut fermenting ungulates? 

Oh Bill guess you didn’t know about them. How that can be accomplished in that time and not cripple our farming and ranching industry and its major contribution to a country’s economy is beyond me.

And what is to be a suitable protein food replacement? Not tofu I hope. However apparently New Zealand has bought into the concept and plans to reduce livestock numbers and their methane production by taxing all livestock owners for the methane each of their animals produce. 

How they are going to determine the methane amounts produced by each animal to be taxed is not yet clear. Nor is it even realistic. I just can’t picture all New Zealand cattle and sheep with bags over their heads and some methane meter attached.  

It would stop the methane production as they would not be able to eat grass. No grass to digest in their rumen, no methane produced. A little inhumane, don’t you think, to have to watch cows and sheep slowly starve to death?

They would be better to spend their time trying to transplant kangaroo macrobiotics, into cattle and sheep instead of banning beef. Kangaroos are gut fermenters like cattle and sheep but due to a different gut micro-biome, don’t produce methane. 

Or we could just switch to a kangaroo meat-based diet. Can’t you see it all now? Alberta grasslands full of hopping kangaroos. It might be better than having to pay tax on cows for methane production.

And now Health Canada seems to have bought in as well, as they are going to designate ground beef and ground pork as an unhealthy food, due to their high fat content. Maybe there are some vegans working for Health Canada.

Possibly a better way to help our planet avoid warming further would be to stop airplane traffic. Airplanes increased the atmosphere CO2 by 30 per cent over the last six years where all other sources only added four per cent.

But then Gates and his rich elite buddies wouldn’t be able to fly to Davos for the World Economic Forum each year like they do, where they come up with these stupid ideas that are of no benefit to anyone but themselves. Like the Big Reset they are proposing for the world. (Prime Minister Justin) Trudeau agrees with them on the Big Reset. 

They don’t care how much we, the rest of the world’s people, might have to suffer if that were ever implemented

It’s a conundrum, but I’ll keep eating steaks and hamburger as long as they’re available. Enjoy them while you can.

- Darrel Florence, Cremona

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