@anotherotherone ignorant then. Get rid of all the sheep and you’ll find it much more difficult to get your oat milk and muffins. The carbon cycle is pretty basic if nothing else.
I’ll go back to managing thousands of acres of farmland though to keep you in oat milk though.
Apparently not basic enough as what you're talking about is nutrient cycling, of which animals (not just livestock) do play an important roll, and has very little to do with the carbon cycle or the biogenic carbon cycle as some now try to refer to is as (which to me is simply an attempt to separate the natural process of carbon cycling from man-made sources of carbon emissons).
Proponents argue that the biogenic carbon cycle is the natural process in which plants absorb and store carbon, which is converted into cellulose, which is eaten by grazing animals, which is then returned to the atmosphere either via methane or eventually when the animal dies. And they're not wrong insofar as that it is a natural process that would happen with or without human intervention. The problem is some are trying to argue that this means animal agriculture is part of the that natural process when in fact animal agriculture is as man made as the burning of fossil fuels.
The following is a couple of extracts from articles that attempt to argue the case for animal agriculture (primarily cattle).
"Cattle are made to digest cellulose (what plants convert CO2 into). Cattle can use that carbon, upcycling the cellulose, for growth, milk production, and other metabolic processes. As a by-product of consuming cellulose, cattle belch out methane, there-by returning that carbon sequestered by plants back into the atmosphere. After about ten years that methane is broken down and converted back to CO2. Once converted to CO2, plants can again perform photosynthesis and fix that carbon back into cellulose. From here, cattle can eat the plants and the cycle begins once again. In essence, the methane belched from cattle is not adding new carbon to the atmosphere. Rather it is part of the natural cycling of carbon through the biogenic carbon cycle." (UC Davis, 2020)
"The biogenic carbon cycle is a key part of life: feeding plants, which then feed animals, which then feed us. In the biogenic carbon cycle, carbon is recycled rather than rapidly created and accumulated. And, importantly, the biogenic carbon cycle is relatively quick, taking place over the course of decades rather than the centuries or millennia it takes for greenhouse gases from fossil fuels to be redeposited back into the earth." (Planet of Plenty, 2021)
Sounds great, except when you actually analyse things and realised more than a few inconvenient truths are being skipped over including;
The fact that animal agriculture isn't natural. 20,000 years ago (a blink of an eye in the geological terms in which the carbon cycle operates) there were grazing animals and no livestock. Today 60% of ALL mammals are livestock (and 36% are humans) meaning less than 4% of mammals are naturally occuring grazing mammals (virtually the only grazing animals in our time).
The number of animals being rear as livestock has increased massively and as such IS releasing new carbon to the atmosphere as the carbon stored in plants would previous not have been eaten. In 1960 (the earliest I could find data on global cattle populations) there were around 740 million cattle, today its 1.5 billion and extra 700 million or so chomping up plants and pumping out methane. Livestock in general is increasing at around 2.4% a year (compared to around 1.05% per year for humans).
Naturally occuring grazing animals are free to roam and generally have a much longer lifespan than is afforded to those that are farmed, unnaturally shortening the cycle.
There is a huge amount of fossil fuel related emissons involved in the rearing, managing, slaughtering, processing and distribution of animal products that you can't just pretend doesn't exist.
Methane and the subsequent CO2 from a cow doesn't know that it's from a cow and neither does the plant that absorbs it. It takes the exact same amount of time for a molecule of CO2 from burning fossil fuels to filter through the atmosphere as it does from a cow.
If your removed the cow, sheep, pig, whatever you would keep the carbon locked up in the plant, which is what we need to be doing, for a much longer period of time AND you wouldn't have the additional emissons associated with animal agriculture and meat production.
TL:DR - there is no sound environmental reason for keeping livestock, at least not in its current state.