Dispatch from the Razor's Edge, the Blog of Michael Stephen Fuchs

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:

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, in adolescence. 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. Male chicks are also useless to the egg industry, so 7 billion baby male chicks are killed every year – ground up alive by spinning blades while fully conscious or suffocated in bags.

More than 72 billion animals a year are killed (and tortured, and enslaved, and also raped) 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.

2) The Animals We Eat End Up Killing Us

3) Eating Animals Is Definitely Killing the Planet

Animal agriculture is responsible for:

4) A Plant-Based Diet Is Awesome

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

Octuple-chocolate cake!
Octuple-chocolate cake!
Pizzas & giant calzones!
Pizzas and giant calzones!
Brownies, cakes, cookies!
Brownies, cakes, cookies!
Caribbean roti wraps!
Caribbean roti wraps!
Spicy sausage casserole!
Spicy sausage casserole!
Meatballs!
Meatballs!
Lasagna!
Lasagna!
Thanksgiving!
Thanksgiving!
Burgers!
Beyond and Impossible 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 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 200 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.


  the planet     animal rights     health     veganism  
about
close photo of Michael Stephen Fuchs

Fuchs is the author of the novels The Manuscript and Pandora's Sisters, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation); the D-Boys series of high-tech, high-concept, spec-ops military adventure novels – D-Boys, Counter-Assault, and Close Quarters Battle (coming in 2016); and is co-author, with Glynn James, of the bestselling Arisen series of special-operations military ZA novels. The second nicest thing anyone has ever said about his work was: "Fuchs seems to operate on the narrative principle of 'when in doubt put in a firefight'." (Kirkus Reviews, more here.)

Fuchs was born in New York; schooled in Virginia (UVa); and later emigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lived through the dot-com boom. Subsequently he decamped for an extended period of tramping before finally rocking up in London, where he now makes his home. He does a lot of travel blogging, most recently of some very  long  walks around the British Isles. He's been writing and developing for the web since 1994 and shows no particularly hopeful signs of stopping.

You can reach him on .

my latest book
ARISEN : Raiders, Volume 5 - The Last Raid by Michael Stephen Fuchs
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