Zoomass Harvests - Harvesting the Biosphere - page 55

this advantage is lost, and much time and effort go into harvesting, drying, and
storing hay needed for the months of winter feeding when the animals remain
penned in.
Adults of the smallest mammals that were domesticated for meat—guinea pigs
and rabbits—weigh, respectively, about 1 kg and at least 2 (even more than 3) kg
per adult. The largest ones—cattle and water buffaloes, domesticated initially for
draft and for milking—have typical slaughter weights as little as 250-300 kg in
low-income countries but more than 500 kg with optimized feeding, with maximum
bull weights approaching or even slightly surpassing 1 t. Similarly, horses domesti-
cated for transport and draft (but also eaten in many countries of the Atlantic and
Central Europe, Latin America, and Japan) have body masses ranging from less than
400 kg to more than 700 kg for the heaviest kinds. The range for domesticated
birds is narrower, from pigeons (adult body weight less than 500 g) to turkeys
(adults in the wild up to about 10 kg, twice as much for penned-in nonl ying breeds).
Feed supply constrained the availability of animal foods in all traditional societ-
ies. While some dairy cultures sustained a modest but fairly widespread consumption
of dairy products, only the richest strata of societies in the preindustrial world
enjoyed meat dishes. Typical diets were nearly meatless even in the industrializing
Europe of the early nineteenth century, and overwhelmingly vegetarian diets were
the norm in rural China and India even during the 1980s. Only the combination of
rising food crop yields (freeing more land for feed crops), higher disposable incomes,
and a truly worldwide trade in animal foods has brought modern meaty diets to all
of the world's afl uent countries, and now also to such rapid modernizers as South
Korea, China, and Brazil.
Fishing and Marine Mammals
The inverted trophic structure of marine ecosystems makes them a poor environ-
ment for phytomass harvests: primary producers are too small, too short-lived, and
too dispersed and their biomass l uctuates too much (and too unpredictably) for
them to be relied on as a source of food or feed. The only exceptions are algal
macrophyta growing in the intertidal zone, particularly the seaweeds belonging to
the genus Porphyra (Japanese nori , originally collected in the wild, now cultivated
on nets) and the genus Laminaria (kelp, Japanese konbu , a large-leafed brownish
plant from cold coastal waters with a naturally very high content of monosodium
glutamate). These and a few other seaweeds have traditionally been collected in a
limited number of countries in East and Southeast Asia, Atlantic Europe, Canada,