The Case Against Eating Animals

Here it is, in four bullet points and four minutes.

1) We Torture the Animals We Eat Before We Kill Them

Most people like animals, and don't want to hurt them. Yet more than 95% of the meat you eat is produced on factory farms. The meat industry shows us pictures of happy cows in fields, but the reality is:

• Baby chicks are crushed on assembly lines, have their sensitive beaks cut off with a hot knife, and ground up alive in macerators.
• Piglets are castrated and have their tails cut off without anaesthetic, left to be sick and die on concrete floors in horrifying conditions, while runts are “culled” by having their heads smashed against concreate walls.
• Chickens are bred to grow so quickly their legs collapse.
• Mother pigs spend their whole lives in gestation crates too narrow to turn around or even move in, often causing them to crush their own babies to death.
• Animals are kept in airless, lightless sheds, filled with their own excrement, where their lungs burn from the ammonia in the air.
• At the end, they are herded into killing rooms, where they get a bolt to the brain, which might stun them before having their throats cut open – or, in the case of birds, who enjoy no protections under the Humane Slaughter Act, get shackled upside down by their feet and get a spinning blade to the throat, unless it misses and they drown in scalding water.

Here's what all of that looks like:

If you saw any of these things being done to a dog or cat – who are indistinguishable from pigs, cows, and chickens in intelligence, sociability, and cuteness (pigs play video games, cows have best friends, and literally nothing is cuter than baby chicks) – you would body-tackle the person doing it, he or she would be arrested and imprisoned, and everyone would applaud. There can be no possible justification for loving and cuddling some of these animals, and torturing and killing others, other than declining to think about it too hard.

It's not any better for dairy cows or egg-laying hens, who live lives of unimaginable suffering, and are slaughtered when they stop being productive, usually by the age of two. Dairy cows are forcibly impregnated to keep them lactating, and the babies are taken away at birth – and most of the the males sent to the veal pens, or just shot in the head and disposed of as “waste products”. Male chicks are also useless to the egg industry, so 7 billion baby male chicks are killed every year on the same day they're born – ground up alive by spinning blades while fully conscious or suffocated in bags.

More than 80 billion land animals, and at least a trillion sea animals, are killed (and tortured, and enslaved, and also raped) every year for food, which is industrial violence on an unprecedented scale. The impossibility of ignoring this forever, or pretending it isn't happening, may be why veganism is the fastest growing social justice movement in the world.

• Dairy cows, who are treated like milk machines, have to be kept pregnant to be kept lactating. (Here's what that looks like – like rape.)
• Their babies are taken away from them at birth, which is traumatic for both of them, and the males sent to the veal pens.
• Most egg-laying hens live 10 to a tiny cage, the wire bottoms of which destroy their feet, in lifelong abject misery.
• Male baby chicks are useless for egg-laying, and are ground up alive in a macerator.
• Both hens and cows are slaughtered when they stop being productive – about 1 year for hens (natural lifespan: 6 years) and 3 years for dairy cows (natural lifespan: 15 years). They die as abused adolescents.

2) The Animals We Kill and Eat End Up Killing Us

• The World Health Organization has ranked processed meat as a group 1 carcinogen (same category as cigarettes and asbestos).
• Meat contains high levels of antibiotics, hormones and steroids, faeces, pathogens such as E. coli and campylobacter, and antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
• The leading cause of death in the West is heart disease – and a plant-based diet is the only one shown to reverse heart disease.
• Poor diet – in particular one low in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and seeds – causes 1 in 5 deaths worldwide, and is now the leading cause of death in America.
• Increasingly, the medical establishment agrees that a plant-based diet is the healthiest and research shows it reduces risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.
• No, you don't need the protein.

3) Eating Animals Is Definitely Killing the Planet

Animal agriculture is responsible for:

• 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, greater than all transportation combined.
• 60% of all deforestation and biodiversity loss, including in the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and the Himalayas.
• A third of all fresh water use, while fresh water is running out and billions face water scarcity.
• Destruction of aquatic ecosystems, ocean dead zones, methane emissions, use of fossil fuels, environmental pollution due to animal waste, and mass extinctions (according to Wikipedia).
• This is because it takes nine times the land, water, fuel, and pesticides to produce a calorie of meat as a calorie of plants.
• The effects are so acute, that cutting out meat and dairy is actually the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact.

4) A Plant-Based Diet Is Awesome

There's virtually nothing you can't have on a plant-based diet. Nothing.

Octuple-chocolate cake!	Pizzas & giant calzones!	Brownies, cakes, cookies!
Caribbean roti wraps!	Spicy sausage casserole!	Meatballs!
Lasagna!	Thanksgiving!	Burgers!

A whole world of food awesomeness will open up to you.

If we define evil as that which causes suffering, then raising and killing animals for food is, by a wide margin, the greatest evil in the history of the world. It won't go on forever, and we'll be very ashamed looking back. But, right now, you have it in your power to personally save about 192 animals a year (from lives of unrelenting agony and violent death), while massively reducing your environmental impact, hugely benefitting your health, and eating like a king.

The choice is yours. (Expert, free help going vegan.)