It's not that simple. Large herbivores are necessary for many environments and useful agriculturally even if we didn't eat them. Desertification caused by removing trees and grazing without replenishing, nutrients lost because sunlight and wind are scraping the bare soil, monoculture deserts and insecticides killing off pollinators and destroying ecologies... It's the factory farming and profit-motivated short-termist resource extraction that's a problem, not the cows and pigs. We can transition to sustainable methods without decreasing food variety.
replysome ruminants are good because they can turn inedible biomass into calories. However the scale at which we farm them is orders of magnitude beyond those levels.
replyI'm fairly sure there weren't 1.5 billion cows in the world before humans.
replyThere were many other large mammals, but we've destroyed a lot of biodiversity already.
replyYes, but there weren't that many large grazing animals because most of the world was covered in woods, not pastures. Trees are the most successful large creatures and we've probably reduced their habitat by 50%.
replyThat's the actual tragedy. Forests contain a lot more like per cubic km than pastures do.