Dear Meat-Eaters,
You say you're an animal lover, you say you're an environmentalist, you say you care for your body. But none of those things are true when you eat meat. You can't say you love animals when you eat them with every meal. You can't say you love the earth when you are supporting the leading cause of deforestation and the largest producer of greenhouse gasses. You can't say you care for your body when you eat animals injected with growth hormones and carcinogens. What you don't realize is that eating animals is hurting the earth, it's harming yourselves, and it's supporting whole lives of suffering.
Modern animal agriculture is putting a huge strain on the earth. The over nine billion animals slaughtered each year produce more that one million tons of manure every day. Their waste often contains undigested antibiotics and growth hormones which can be harmful to animals in surrounding ecosystems when holding tanks leak. Those nine billion animals also produce fifty one percent of greenhouse gasses, which adds up to over four million tons of gasses produced per day in the United States alone. Some of the most harmful of these gasses are methane gas, which is seventy times more damaging then carbon dioxide emission, and nitrous oxide which is over two hundred times more damaging than carbon dioxide. Those nine billion animals also are the leading cause of deforestation. Seventy percent of the Amazon Rainforest has been turned over to allow for grazing and eighty percent of deforestation can be traced back to factory farming. Those animals also require water, and a lot of it. It is estimated that fifty five trillion gallons of fresh water is consumed by factory farms each year, that breaks down to about five thousand gallons of water per pound of meat. Going vegan cleans the soil, purifies the air, combats deforestation, and saves about four hundred thousand gallons of water per year.
Eating animals doesn't just take a toll on the earth however, it also takes a toll on your body. Processed meat is a class one carcinogen, which means it is just as harmful as cigarettes and increases your risk of cancer by eighteen percent. Eating meat and other animal bi products also increases your risk of heart disease and diabetes by about twenty two percent due to the large amount of fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol that lead to clogged arteries. Meat is also packed full of hormones to make the animals grow unnaturally fast, produce more milk, and larger eggs. None of which are things humans need to do. Additionally, our bodies aren't made for eating meat. We have blunt, herbivore teeth, the idea of biting into live meat is repulsive and could likely kill us, we have short bowels compared to carnivores, and have no way of breaking down bone. By going vegan, you can decrease your risk of cancer by forty percent, improve joints and arthritis pain, reduce your risk of type two diabetes by seventy five percent, and lower your risk of dying from heart disease by nearly forty five percent.
Animal agriculture is perhaps the most destructive to its ten billion victims per year. These animals suffer from the day they are born until the day they die. They are taken away from their mothers moments after their birth and put into tiny, filthy spaces surrounded thousands of other sick and suffering animals where they will live out the rest of their short, miserable lives. They live on the bare minimum, they are dehydrated, and malnourished. Most of them will never get to feel the sunlight, will never get to run through the grass, will never know anything other than torture and pain. Even in their last moments, these animals are not treated with respect. They travel to slaughter houses stuffed into trucks, that overheat in the summer and freeze in the winter, their hooves get caught in cracks in the floor, damaging their legs, and they can even suffocate due to how many animals are shoved into one container. Once they arrive to the slaughterhouse, they are still not treated humanely, they are still conscious when they are hung upside-down to have their throats slit, or when they are being electrocuted, poisoned, or in some cases, beaten. These animals know no love or compassion the entire time they are alive, but our pets know nothing but love and compassion. What is it that makes one animal's life more valuable than another? Going vegan ends some of the pain inflicted upon these animals and can save an animal's life every day.
You say going vegan is too hard, but that's not true you just want convenience. You say out of sight out of mind, but you can't plead ignorance once you know the truth. You say that one person going vegan won't make a difference, but if everyone said that nothing would ever change. I hope you think about the thousands of gallons of water that could've been used elsewhere to produce your steak. I hope you think about how you could be endangering your life's longevity by eating bacon. And I hope next time your overlooking a menu you think about the animal who had its life stolen from it for you to have your pork chop.
Sincerely,
A Vegan
