Have you ever wondered how many cows there are on planet Earth? The answer in 2018 was about 1.5 BILLION – and the number has likely risen since! In fact, if you added all the cows on the planet together, they’d weigh about 400 million metric tons – making them the heaviest species on our planet. Second place goes to the Antarctic krill, which are much smaller but more numerous – they weigh about 379 million metric tons in total.
We’re here to talk about cows, though – not krill. Cows, often known as "cattle", are raised all over the world for meat, milk, or hides – as well as for riding, pulling carts and plows, and for their dung, which is used to create manure or fuel. In a few places, they’re also kept as pets, or for religious reasons. They’re smarter than you might think, too. They are able to tell humans apart from each other from their faces and have a good long-term memory – being able to memorize food locations for more than 50 days. They only need about four hours of sleep a day.
Unfortunately, Earth can’t really support the number of cows that are living on it. Cows are responsible for about 10% of all global greenhouse gas emissions, and cattle farming is also a big cause of deforestation in tropical countries. If we want to stop climate change, we’re going to need to consume a lot less beef, milk, and leather.
Luckily, Minecraft’s Overworld can support as many cows as you want – at least until your computer memory runs out! So fill your inventory with wheat and feel free to go on a mass cow-breeding spree. Let’s create a bovine utopia filled with millions of happy, mooing cows!
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