Why to be Vegan?!
Why to be Vegan?
Hay! What are all the different reasons to become a vegitarian? Yes including enviormental and world wide!
Answers:
-Half of the water used in the U.S. is used for animal agriculture.
-Every year in the US an area the size of Connecticut is lost to topsoil erosion--85% of this erosion is associated with livestock production.
-Livestock already consume half the world's grain, and their numbers are still growing almost exponentially.
-Every kilogram of beef we consume, according to research by the agronomists David Pimental and Robert Goodland, requires around 100,000 litres of water.
-Approximately 1.3 billion cattle populate the earth at any one time. They exist artificially in these vast numbers to satisfy the excessive human demand for the meat and by-products they provide. Their combined weight exceeds that of the entire human population. By sheer numbers, their consequent appetite for the world's resources, have made them a primary cause for the destruction of the environment.
-In the US, feedlot cattle yield one pound of meat for every 16 pounds of feed. It takes an average of 2,500 gallons of water to produce a single pound of meat. According to Newsweek, "The water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer could float a destroyer." In contrast, it takes only 25 gallons of water to produce one pound of wheat. Feeding the average meat-eating American requires 3-1/4 acres of land per year.
-Feeding a person who eats no food derived from animals requires only 1/6 acre per year.. - Studies by North Carolina State University estimate that half of the some 2,500 open hog manure cesspools (euphemistically termed "lagoons"), now needed as part of hog productions there, are leaking contaminants such as nitrate--a chemical linked to blue-baby syndrome--into the ground water.
-Worldwide demand for fish, along with advances in fishing methods--sonar, driftnets, floating refrigerated fish packing factories--is bringing ocean species, one after another, to the brink of extinction. In the Nov., '95 edition of Scientific American, Carl Safina writes, "For the past two decades, the fishing industry has had increasingly to face the result of extracting [fish] faster than fish populations [can] reproduce." Research reveals that the intended cure--aquaculture (fish farming)--actually hastens the trend toward fish extinction, while disrupting delicate coastal ecosystems at the same time.
-A scientist, reporting in the industry publication Confinement, calculated in 1976 that the planet's entire petroleum reserves would be exhausted in 13 years if the whole world were to take on the diet and technological methods of farming used in the US.
-If tomorrow people in the US made a radical change away from their meat-centered diets, an area of land the size of all of Texas and most of Oklahoma could be returned to forest.It is estimated that livestock production accounts for twice the amount of pollution in the US as that produced by industrial sources. Livestock in the US produce 20 times the excrement of the entire US population. Since farm animals today spend much or all of their lives in factory sheds or feedlots, their waste no longer serves to fertilize pastures a little at a time. One poultry researcher, according to United Poultry Concerns literature, explains: "A one-million-hen complex will produce 125 tons of wet manure a day." To responsibly store, disperse, or degrade this amount of animal waste is simply not possible. Much of the waste inevitably is flushed into rivers and streams. Becoming a vegetarian does more to clean up our nation's water than any other single action.Methane is one of the four greenhouse gasses that contributes to the environmental trend known as global warming. The 1.3 billion cattle in the world produce one fifth of all the methane emitted into the atmosphere.Meat contains no essential nutrients that cannot be obtained directly from plant sources. By cycling grain through livestock, we lose 90% of the protein, 96% of the calories, all of its carbohydrates, and all of its nutritional fiber.Agricultural engineers have compared the energy costs of producing poultry, pork and other meats with the energy costs of producing a number of plant foods. It was found that even the least efficient plant food was nearly 10 times as efficient in returning food energy as the most energy efficient animal food.Since so much fossil fuel is needed to produce it, beef could be considered a petroleum product. With factory housing, irrigation, trucking, and refrigeration, as well as petrochemical fertilizer production requiring vast amounts of energy, approximately one gallon of gasoline goes into every pound of grain-fed beef.The direct and hidden costs of soil erosion and runoff in the US, mostly attributable to cattle and feed crop production, is estimated at $44 billion a year. Each pound of feedlot beef can be equated with 35 pounds of eroded topsoil.A nationwide switch to a pure vegetarian diet would allow us to cut our oil imports by 60%.Compared to a vegan diet, three days of a typical American diet requires as much water as you use for showering all year (assuming you shower every day). acre of land can produce 20,000 pounds of potatoes, but only 165 pounds of beef. In the U.S., 260 million acres of forest have been destroyed for use as agricultural land to support our meat diet (over 1 acre per person). Since 1967, the rate of deforestation has been one acre every five seconds.
-Trees are being cut down at an alarming rate in the US, as well as around the world, for meat production. .For every acre cleared for urban development, seven acres are cleared to graze animals or grow feed for them.
Being a vegan is different from being a vegetarian.
If you are a huge puss you can't eat meat, duh.
Check the source if you don't believe me. I dare you.
Hey!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Just so you know, me and my roomates are going to eat 6 animals for every animal you don't eat. I promise. So that means you're killing animals after all.
Because I love animals...and after seeing way too many documentaries on the slaughter of sharks, whales, chickens, horses, cows, lambs, etc etc etc, and the way they were so cruelly transported b4 the slaughter....is just too much!
A vegan doesn`t eat meat and doesn`t consume any product that is produced by an animal. They don`t eat eggs or drink milk, etc...They don`t buy furs, or leather bags, etc...
Being a vegan is manly a moral issue. They consider it cruel to kill animals or "exploit" them in any way.
Vegetarians just don`t eat meat. Weather because they don`t like it, think it is unhealthy or think it is a morally wrong thing to do, etc.. The main point is that they don`t eat meat.
The reasons as to why some people become vegans or vegetarians vary from person to person.
They don`t actually have a great impact on the environment because the animals we eat, or take products from, are bred for our consummation and so don`t do much damage to the food chain. Generally speaking, breeding these animals to provide for our "needs" don`t have a great effect on the environment.
people generally become vegans or vegetarians because of the whole morality involved.
I think vegans go a bit further than what I mentioned above and are against having animals in cages, not in their own habitat and are against animal testing. Don`t quote me on this though lol.
In my opinion it is all about telling people not to take it too far. The way they kill cows, pigs, etc... can sometimes be very very cruel and being a vegan is all about "protecting" animals.
I`m not a vegan but I do try to "protect" animals.
Vegans have the smallest ecological footprints and it is a healthy lifestyle.
If humans ate at a lower trophic level (such as 2) we would get more energy in proportion to biomass. Here's a diagram
Sun: 17,000,000 kilocalories goes to producer producers get 20,810 kilocalories - goes to herbivore- herbivore gets 3,368 kilocalories - goes to level 1 carnivore- level 1 carnivore gets 383 kilocalories- goes to level two carnivore- level two carnivore gets 21 kilocalories - decomposers get 5 kilocalories.
If everybody in the world were a vegetarian, the human population would be much more sustainable. We get 10 times more energy in proportion to biomass from plants.
As of 2000 54% of the world's cropland is used for meat production.
65% of US grain goes directly to livestock and fisheries.
Livestock use more than half the water withdrawn from rivers and aquifers each year, mostly to:
-Irrigate crops to feed livestock
-wash away manuer from the overcrowded livestock pens and feedlots
Manure leaking off the land into the water contributes to water pollution that kills millions of fish each year by depleating dissolved oxygen
About 14% of US topsoil loss is directly associated with livestock grazing
Overgrazing of sparse vegetation and trapling of the soil by too many livestock is the leading cause of desertification in some areas (namely in areas with arid and semiarid climates)
Cattle belch out 16% of the total amount of methane produced worldwide, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Some of the nitrogen in commercial inorganic fertilizzer used to grow livestock feed is converted into nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas released from the soil into the atmosphere
More than one third of all fossil fuels consumed in the united states is used in animal production.
livestock in the US produce at least 20 times more waste in the form of manure than the countries human population. Only half of this nutrient rich livestock waste is recycled back into the soil
Some environmentalists have called for reducing livestock production (especially cattle) to decrease it's environmental efffects and it's contribution to global warming.
Check out some of the literature out there...Animal Liberation is a good book. PETA also has some videos that will address your question....specifically the video Meet Your Meat.
i like to think i'm saving animals by not eating them
i also like to save animals i meet in the street
I can't afford the time it would take to write for 4 straight hours in a feeble attempt to answer your very broad question, which asks a lot of the people who give their valuable advice.
So, in keeping with that, I'm passing off the ability to answer to some friends of mine who are extremely skilled at answering exactly the kind of question you have asked. I'm a very logical, deductive, scientifically minded person, and they managed to convince me. So here they are ...
http://www.goveg.com/
http://www.peta.com/
Breeding animals for food is an environmental disaster. Aside from the gallons of water they'll be drinking, they live on land that turns fallow, they live off food that also requires water. I read recently that a lot of animal feed grown for the West comes from Africa. I'm sure Africans have better things to grow on that land... like food for themselves!
The meat industry is a disgrace. Pumping sick animals full of hormones, allowing them to rot in their faeces, forcing them to overeat, allowing sores to turn into gaping wounds, is hardly going to deliver a safe product.
Meat and dairy aren't healthy. Lets just pretend for a minute that eating meat every day is good for us. What about our addiction to dairy? "Milk is important" we are told. So they're telling us for the rest of our lives, we need to rely on the breast milk from a different species? That if there wasn't a supermarket nearby, I would have to get up and go and suck on a cow's teat to ensure optimum health? What baloney!
Then there's meat. Man is a pathetic hunter. Lets say that all hell broke loose and there was no access to shops. How would I get my meat? I have no claws, I'm not a fast runner, I can't climb trees very well. Do you even know where a chicken has come from? It's ancestor was a jungle fowl. You ever tried to catch a wild bird without weapons? Even if I found a dead bird, I don't have a digestive system suitable for raw meat, I can't digest feathers. I would even struggle to bite into the bird.
So, our 'natural' need to eat meat is rubbish. Then we're forgetting how diseased the meat is by the time it gets to us. How much bacteria is in there. How many hormones the cow was given, how many diseases the chicken had.
Survival of the fittest. Humanity's reliance on shops to provide foods that are not fit for our body is disturbing. What if there was a crisis tomorrow? Who would survive? The ape who knows about real nutrition, or the ape who thinks he can kill and eat a wild animal without weapons?
Oh, and it's all cruel. There are people who will spend thousands on vet bills for a cat, but who can't think twice before buying their KFC.