{"id":444699,"date":"2026-05-16T11:54:29","date_gmt":"2026-05-16T18:54:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=444699"},"modified":"2026-05-16T11:54:31","modified_gmt":"2026-05-16T18:54:31","slug":"wildebeest-buffalo-and-cattle-oh-my","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=444699","title":{"rendered":"Wildebeest, Buffalo, and Cattle, Oh My!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From Watts Up With That?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Guest Post by<\/em><\/strong> Willis Eschenbach<\/a> (@WEschenbach on X, my personal blog is here<\/a>)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We live in an odd age when a billionaire can look at the planetary mess, point at cows, and announce that they\u2019re a danger to the climate, while an entire continent quietly demonstrates that the real trouble came in the form of a virus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bill Gates likes to say that about 6% of global emissions are from cows, and that we should either \u201cfix the cows\u201d <\/em>so they stop doing that, or \u201cmake beef without the cow\u201d. <\/em>Catchy line. The Serengeti, however, has a different script, and it starts not with cows, but with rinderpest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roll back to East Africa before the late 1800s. The Serengeti is running on its factory settings: huge migratory herds of wildebeest and buffalo sweeping back and forth with the rains, shaving the grass down as they go. Grazers are in charge; grass fuel stays modest; fires happen, but they\u2019re patchy and relatively small; woodlands hang on as scattered trees and clumps that can survive the occasional, not too intense burn.<\/p>\n\n\n

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In that state, the place is not some methane-free Eden\u2014those herds are belching merrily away\u2014but it\u2019s a functioning savanna where herbivores, fire, and trees have worked out a long-term compromise.
Then we improve it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Import Indian cattle, import the rinderpest virus along with them, and suddenly the system\u2019s main fuel controllers\u2014wildebeest and their friends\u2014hit a wall. The rinderpest chews through the ungulates, slashing wildebeest numbers to a fraction of their former glory and hammering buffalo as well.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Nobody has changed the rainfall, the soils, or the grass species. They\u2019ve just imposed a new, top-down mortality factor that doesn\u2019t care about carrying capacity or migration. The Serengeti shifts from \u201climited by food\u201d to \u201climited by rinderpest.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once the big grazers are gone, the grass celebrates. It grows tall, cures, and lies there as a continuous carpet of fine fuel. What used to be eaten is now waiting for a match. In the rinderpest era, fires become more frequent, burn larger areas, and bite harder into seedlings and saplings that might otherwise have grown into trees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Holdo, Holt, Fryxell, and colleagues reconstructed this period<\/a> and concluded that the disease-depressed Serengeti was not just more flammable; it likely acted as a net carbon source, as repeated burning and reduced woody cover drained carbon from biomass and soils. If you\u2019d flown over then, you might have called it a \u201cnatural fire-maintained grassland.\u201d In reality, it was a savanna on crutches, being held open by an imported virus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the part the climate spreadsheets never see. Our modern global tables show \u201clivestock: ~12\u201314% of emissions, cattle ~ two-thirds of that,\u201d and from this we get the sermon: cows are a climate threat, cows are 6%, cows must be fixed or replaced. Gates leans hard on that framing in interviews and in his climate book\u2014livestock methane as a stand-alone villain, synthetic beef as the enlightened alternative.
But the Serengeti\u2019s experience says that when you take out the large herbivores\u2014the wild analogue of our cattle\u2014you don\u2019t automatically get a climate win; you can get more fire, less wood, and less stored carbon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now fast forward again to the mid-20th century, when the rinderpest story goes into reverse. Veterinarians roll out mass vaccination campaigns for cattle across East Africa, cutting the virus off at its preferred reservoir. As rinderpest fades from the livestock, it stops spilling over into wildebeest calves. Calf survival rises, adult mortality drops, and suddenly the main brake on herd size isn\u2019t an exotic disease anymore\u2014it\u2019s how much grass the system can grow. Wildebeest numbers respond like a coiled spring: from a few hundred thousand under disease pressure up to over a million animals within a couple of decades. Buffalo and other grazers increase, too. The four-legged fuel management crew is back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What happens next is the part that nobody who talks only about \u201c6% from cows\u201d seems to grapple with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n