Welcome to Small Bites, Sound Bites, a midweek segment of food for thought podcast where I share short, succinct, thoughtful responses to typical questions, myths, and misconceptions related to plant-based eating, veganism, and animal protection.

You can get written transcripts of this podcast by going to joyfulvegan.com slash donate.

A common question, common statement, I hear a lot from people is if everyone stopped eating animals, we would be overrun with them.

Wouldn't that be destructive to the environment if millions of cattle are running around free?

Look, we have a population crisis. Now, the crisis isn't in the future, it's here now. The concern isn't some hypothetical scenario where billions of animals are released from their cages and confines.

The concern is now, we've created an artificial system by which we bring animals into this world only to kill them. Right now we kill 10 billion land animals every year, 10 billion, and that's only in the United States alone.

It's a disaster for the environment now. We don't have to imagine some future where there's an overpopulation of these animals. We already have an overpopulation crisis now.

We're already overrun with chickens and pigs and turkeys and cattle. Now, the only difference is that in this real scenario all of the animals are hidden in cages and in windowless buildings and in transport trucks and slaughterhouses.

In this hypothetical scenario, they're running around on the streets and the only reason this hypothetical scenario is as frightening as it is, billions of terrified animals running around, is because there are billions of terrified animals confined at this very moment.

That's scary enough. The concern about them escaping wouldn't be a concern if we weren't imprisoning billions of them now.

Once we stop, artificially inseminating these domesticated animals, i.e. stop eating them day in and day out, there will be fewer of them which is a good thing. We simply cannot sustain the amount of resources it takes for the feed and waste of animals kept for their flesh and secretions.

Raising these animals already uses three-quarters of the world's agricultural land. A third of our green crops are used to feed livestock. That's a problem now.

Worrying about what would happen to animals if we stopped eating them is a red herring and a distraction and disingenuous.

We shouldn't be afraid of a hypothetical dystopian future. We should be afraid of our very real dystopian present.

And if we are concerned about it, we know what to do.

For the animals, this is Colleen Patrick Goodrow. Thanks for listening. You can find more at joyfulvegan.com.