M-EAT
Meat can be a touchy subject. But whatever your view on the morality and ethics of eating meat, there are some hard facts that should inform any debate. Those facts come from science, economy, laws. I’m going to talk about morality in vegan advocacy in a separate post. No philosophical arguments here.
1. MEAT stands for animal corpses
Billions of animals are slaughtered every day.
And those numbers are growing. In the last 50 years the human population has doubled, but the amount of meat we eat has tripled. As the world’s population heads towards 10 billion, the current trends in meat consumption and production CANNOT be sustained.
Most animals are violently adapted to the forms of husbandry: horns, curly tails, beaks and teeth are cut away without anesthesia. Chickens are fattening quickly and slaughtered before they are six weeks old. Hard facts: chickens can live for six or more years under natural conditions. Free-range broilers will usually be slaughtered at 8 weeks and organic broilers at around 12 weeks.
Free-range and organic means nothing to animals.
The animals essential basic needs are ignored and their freedom of movement is severely restricted (yes, also in free-range, organic, grass-fed...yada yada yada). Majority of chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese are raised in huge warehouses with tens of thousands of other birds and little space for the individual animal. Most of them will never feel the sun on their bodies, breathe fresh air or be allowed to scratch the ground. Pigs are mainly kept in factory farming, no sun, no fresh air, no cuddles. Breeding sows are locked up in tiny crate stalls for weeks where they can't even turn around.
We literally CREATED (breeded, harvested them like veggies I dare to say) those sentient beings in large numbers so that we can then kill and eat their corpse.
They didn't exist in those numbers before: we’re playing the role of a sadistic God here. We give them a painful, sad, horrific life. And then we go shopping at the morgue, what’s a butcher’s refrigerator after all?
We pay other people for doing it and most of them suffer from PTSD so we’re harming humans too.
If you had chickens in your backyard and killed them yourself, you still bought sentient beings with the only scope of killing them (somehow keeping them prisoners, no matter how well you treated and loved the creatures).
Dairy cows are forcely impregnated again and again to keep the milk flow running. There’s no time to wait for each single cow to be in the mood of being fucked from an appealing bull nearby.
Young calves are separated from their moms shortly after birth so that we can drink the secretion of a cow-mum even though we stopped breast-feeding ages ago. Most of the calves are sent straight to the slaughterhouse after a few days of “life”.
The constant milking and the overbreeding often lead to painful inflammation of the udder and other diseases so in order to sell the milk, farmers have to sanitize the milk - not so good for our health.
In factory farming, all dams are taken away from their young - we literally separate the animals families we created.
Yes, this is the reality in Europe too. As in the UK, Germany, Italy “Europe” - it’s not only the U.S. or China as many people think.
ALL animals - including those that live in free range, organic farming, backyard, etc - end up in a slaughterhouse.
Many people want to eat a plant-based diet because they no longer want to contribute to the suffering of non-human animals, sentient beings. It’s a moral choice based on logical, scientific, proven facts.
You can’t be an animal lover and eat them as well. If you do, either you’re lying (you don’t love animals)
or you’re hipocrate (preaching one thing and doing another).
I don’t mean that in a harsh way: I was myself delusional for 30years of my life. We have the tools, we’re just distracted. Wake up from ignorance. It takes humility and awareness, be aware.
2. HUMAN HEALTH
In order to keep the animals productive despite improper caring, antibiotics have become inevitable, which clearly put human health at risk.
Eating the decomposing flesh of a sentient being is a lot to ask to our digestive system.
And no wonder why we cover the smell and taste of raw meat with herbs and seasonings.
Decades of research links our diets to a whole array of health conditions, and suggests that vegans suffer less from heart disease, type 2 diabetes, some cancers, and osteoporosis.
Of course, we’re talking about a conscious healthy varied diet - the “fruit-only”, “detox-juicing”, “raw-plant” diets are plant-based non-sense. I’ll talk more about it in another post.
3. ENVIRONMENTAL COST
The environmental cost of our growing appetite for meat is alarming.
Research is increasingly showing the link between what we eat and the damage to our planet. Animal farming is a leading emitter of climate-changing gases. It provides us with few calories and yet is responsible for 60 per cent of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Oxford University research shows that plant foods - including nuts and soya - have a far less damaging impact than animal foods.
The intense soy and grain agriculture feeds those animals we kill and not some starving human population.
The Oxford University lead researcher concluded that becoming vegan was “the single biggest thing” a typical consumer could do to help protect the planet. We eat 2 or 3 meals a day, plus snacks - do the math (it’s science, not philosophy).
Because it requires so much more land than is needed to farm plants, animal agriculture is also a key driver for deforestation. Huge swathes of trees are cleared to make way for animals to graze or to grow crops to feed to animals on intensive farms. The animals who once lived in the forest must flee or die out.
When we use smoke and others to take the honey away from the hard-working bees, we’re putting at risk the entire world (not exaggerating here). If you watched the “bee movie” from Disney Pixar you know what I mean. And if you don’t know how fundamental bees (and other insects) are for this planet, I beg you: inform yourself.
Animal farming is also responsible for much air, soil and water pollution, causing or exacerbating ocean dead zones. These are areas where there is so little oxygen, nothing can survive. WE cannot survive without oxygen, clean water, plants to eat.
Fish are scooped out of the ocean by the billions and fed to farmed animals including fish. And most of the plastic found in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch actually comes from abandoned fishing gear.
Consuming animals contributes to Earth pollution and our oceans and entire ecosystems are dying.
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Veganism is much more than a diet!
It’s a commitment to protecting our planet, improving the health of people around the world and ending industrial livestock farming.
With this post, I voluntarily chose not going into too much detail, numbers, graphs, videos, images, and links. I’ll probably do multiple posts about it. Here, I wanted to keep it short and expose some facts.
Yes, I’m vegan. I want a world in which food production doesn’t exploit sentient beings, cause PTSD to those who work in farms, destroy forests and entire ecosystems, contribute to the extinction of wildlife, pollute rivers and oceans so badly that we can’t drink tap water anymore, and aggravates climate change.
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Don’t know where to start?
Veganuary is a UK registered nonprofit that inspires people from 2014 to try a plant-based diet in January. Since then, they have inspired over half a million people in 178 countries.
Challenge22 is a community that helps you and motivates you to adopt a vegan diet for 22days: every day, you'll get recipes, tips, videos and lots of motivation!
Land of Hope and Glory is a documentary that shows the truth behind UK land animal farming by featuring the most up to date investigations as well as never before seen undercover footage, with a total of approximately 100 UK facilities featured throughout the film.