Livestock across the world

 Livestock across the world

Where are livestock concentrated?

The number of livestock (cows and bulls only) worldwide amounts to 1,255 million heads, distributed as follows: Asia 388 million heads, Europe 128 million, North America 166 million, the Soviet Union 122 million, Africa 161 million, South America 258 million, and Oceania 32 million.

Livestock in the world

Animal numbers depend on many things; Among them are the areas of pastures, their quality, the quality of the animal, the purpose of caring for or raising it, the level of civilization, and the extent of their use of preferred breeds that respond to the purpose or purposes, whether it is meat, milk, or both, and the material value of the animal depends accordingly.

But if this applies to certain animals that produce meat, milk, wool, and hides; Among historical or contemporary groups we find other functions.

There were draft, carrying, and riding animals: camels, horses, donkeys, and mules, and there was a more social than material appreciation for animals among groups we now call primitives.

This means a social function for cows, sheep, goats, and camels and indicates the extent of the owners’ wealth, and therefore their social ranks. This results in the payment of dowries, blood money, and fines in numbers per animal as determined by the customs of society. Finally, there are cows, which Hindus associate with religious value.

It follows from all of this that livestock is a more complex subject than agricultural wealth in general.

This is why we find a large difference in the number and value of animals, which can be divided primarily into livestock in the countries of the developed world and the countries of the developing world. This division leads to a difference in the method of grazing, the nature of pastures, and the amount of meat and milk produced between the developed and developing worlds. Here we must realize the role of animals in the eastern countries, where animals, including cows, were used in agricultural work, and then we find a subdivision within the developing world between the Mediterranean world, the Middle East, India and China, and the tropical world of Africa.

  All continents of the world have an area of pastures, and the first thing that draws attention is that the tropical pastures in Africa, South America, and parts of northern Australia differ from the pastures of the temperate region or the pastures of the plains of the central continents from those in the western continents. The main difference is the amount of rain and temperature that produce different grasses in terms of texture, length and density of grasses and weeds; In the grasses of the tropical range, the plant is longer, coarser and denser, so that it may not help the animal to thicken.

The grasses of the temperate range are shorter, softer, and less abundant, with the exception of swamplands, where many types of grasses, grasses, reeds, and thickets grow.

In terms of area, we find that the three southern continents occupy about 54% of the global pasture areas, even though the areas of the three continents are only 42% of the land. We also note that the rich plains pastures of North America and the (former) Soviet Union alone account for 33% of global pastures. The rest of the pastures, 13%, are distributed across Europe and the rest of Asia. The reason for this scarcity is due to the presence of competition between agriculture and the dense population and the pastures that are often displaced to the less fertile land or the many mountain slopes of the Alps and the huge ranges of Asia.

However, the lack of natural pastures is compensated for by the fact that the animal in Europe overlaps in what we know as mixed agriculture, and in Asia it overlaps extensively in eastern agriculture, and this or that leads to an increase in the number of animals in Europe and Asia.

  What is observed is a growth in animal numbers in general, with the exception of donkeys, whose numbers have stabilized, but growth varies from one continent to another. In North America, the numbers of sheep and goats decreased, and the number of pigs and sheep and goats decreased in South America, while the numbers of goats and sheep increased in Asia and Africa.

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