#vegans

I’ll admit, I worded that sentence wrong. What I should’ve said was, “If everyone on earth became vegan, we’d be overrun by animals, although it would happen after hundreds—if not thousands or millions—of generations.”

If everyone on earth became vegan, the number of animal-derived products would decrease to nearly zero, which isn’t really a bad thing, until you realize that that would cause overpopulation of livestock, because they’d be released into the wild, and while they’d still have natural predators, like wolves, bears, etc etc, those animals don’t kill prey as often as humans do, so the livestock would still overpopulate eventually.

Another thing; large numbers of herbivores would overgraze land, which would destroy ecosystems. This can lead to soil erosion, desertification (the process where land loses its ability to support vegetation or wildlife), and loss of plant biodiversity, which is something many other species depend on.

Predators rely on herbivores for food. If the population of herbivores gets really high, the same could happen to the population of predators. Or, if herbivores overgrazed & destroyed their habitat, that could lead to a decline in both predator AND herbivore populations. If the second possibility happened, that would cause competition for food, water, and other necessary resources, which can lead to mass starvation, disease outbreaks, and eventual extinction of those who can’t adapt quickly enough.

All of this would cause human intervention to be necessary in order to stop the extinction of all these species. Humans would probably do things like creating artificial habitats, or reintroducing predators so that the herbivores wouldn’t be able to overgraze.