With all this talk about quitting meat to help save the climate there are going to be a lot more vegans around than there already are.

The panic hits you in the gut with sickening force: “OMG – cows will be roaming the city mall, nudging their way into my fries like one-eyed pigeons.”

The logic at first seems reasonable: lots of cows, no one to eat or control them – they will breed out of control until their methane makes the planet flammable and it blows up.

The fear us understandable. Cows are scary. I was scared of cows as a kid. They were big – much bigger than me. And they stared. It was unnerving.

However, I can offer a few reasons why we shouldn’t be worried about cows ruling the earth in 2012, when we’re all vegan (you didn’t know you were going vegan? Now you do).

I’m going to exercise my proficiency in futures study here, which uses techniques such as causal layered analysis to divulge likely trends.

Post 2012: Initial Domination by the Chicken Clan

Firstly, if any animal was going to rule the earth it would be chickens. Did you see Jurassic Park? Those birds are smart as. And do you know how many chickens there are? If not, here’s the breakdown.

Even if all the other animals formed an inter-species syndicate sworn against the chicken clan, they wouldn’t stand a chance against the sheer pecking power of trillions and trillions of intelligent chickens.

However, the glory of the era of the chickens would be short-lived. Chickens used in industrial farming (all of them) nowadays are genetically altered to be fat-ass so fat-ass people can order fat-ass chickens. As smart as the big chickens in Jurassic Park were (smarter than Jurassic Park’s scientist of choice: Sam Neil, whose IQ dropped severely after shooting the sequel – demonstrated by his appearance on Meat and Livestock commercials), their modern relatives would feel quite lethargic after ruling the world for a time.

So assuming the chickens left some of the cows alive, this would be just a small population, not enough to effectively threaten the human population which would have been able to escape to the island of Australia where the chicken population per hectare is manageable.

So you see – go vegan without worry – we are safe in the long run, although the chickens might get scary for a bit.