Perhaps the very first thing to point out is that cows do not create carbon or methane. The carbon that goes into the molecules of methane have come from plants, which means it has come from the air (air is about 0.04% carbon dioxide) that the plants absorb to turn into: sugars, fibre etc.
I hope this page will help to make it clearer that methane suppression is going to be harmful to: animals, including humans and the environment.
The amount of methane created by the bacteria in the animals gut is to do with what is in the feed.
With Concentrated Animal Feed Operations antibiotics are commonly added to the feed. These antibiotics kill many of the health promoting bacteria that have evolved alongside mammals. In killing these bacteria the methane producing organism thrive in the ecological niche created by the common antibiotics. This graph shows just how dramatic the shift has been in the fauna inside the guts of cattle. The numbers are from USA and come from page 335 of the 2021 book ‘METABOLICAL‘ by Dr Robert Lustig, MD, MSL.
