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Why Vegan?

I'm not your typical vegan. I'm not against eating animal products; I'm not even against eating meat. In my view, all life forms are inherently equal, and it is no worse to eat a chicken than a carrot. All things have a right to live, but we must eat something to survive.

What I am against is the unnecessary cruelty inflicted upon farm animals in our society, and the environmental destruction resulting from factory farms. Once upon a time, our livestock lived on idyllic little farms, allowed to lead relatively natural lives, and were raised on such a small scale that their impact on the environment was minimal. But despite the rosy image that is fed to us by the animal product industry, farms are nothing like that anymore. Animals are raised on giant factory farms, where thousands of animals are crowded together in totally unnatural and inhumane conditions.

Here are my three main reasons:

1.) Animal abuse.
Farms today house thousands of animals in crowded conditions. Every action taken by agribusiness is done to make the animals grow as quickly as possible to produce as much animal flesh or animal products as possible. The bottom line is cost-effectiveness.

Chickens are crammed into tiny cages and given a space smaller than the size of a sheet of paper. They can't spread their wings, and their immobility is such that many have their feet grow around the wires of the cages. The crowding drives them mad, causing them to violently peck one another — and to counteract this effect, chicken producers cut the chickens' beaks off (without anesthesia), which leads to deformity and sometimes lifetime pain. Since broilers and layers are bred separately, there is no use for males of the layer breed, and they are killed as chicks.

Cows are kept in a constant cycle of pregnancy and lactation and are given hormones that increase their milk production to unnatural levels. Their udders are overlarge and almost always infected from the strain of so much milk. They are not allowed to graze and are fed grains rather than grass, along with meat by-products that increase production (and note that cows are natural herbivores — eating meat is completely unnatural for them). Beef cattle are kept in crowded feedlots and not allowed to graze, and are also fed meat by-products and hormones to promote growth. Milk cows have their calves taken away at birth — the females to be raised for milk production and the males to be raised for veal. Veal calves suffer horribly. They are kept in tiny cages, so small they can't move, which is done to keep their flesh tender beyond when it normally would be. They are purposely fed an iron-deficient diet to keep their flesh as white as possible. At four months of age, they are killed.

Pigs have it pretty bad, too. Sows are kept in gestation crates so small they can't turn around, and are kept in an endless cycle of pregnancy and birth to produce as many piglets as possible. They are forced to have many more litters per year than they would naturally.

Even farmed fish suffer needlessly: they are kept in overcrowded pens where disease runs rampant and they are fed hormones and artificial colors. All of these animals are fed incredible amounts of antibiotics, when they are perfectly healthy, in order to prevent the disease that naturally occurs in such crowded conditions.

2.) Environmental destruction.
The environment is my main interest, and honestly if abusing animals somehow helped the environment I probably wouldn't object — but abusing animals actually is having an enormous negative impact on the environment. The thing to realize about raising animals for food is that the animals need to eat something, and producing one pound of animal flesh (or milk or eggs) requires many pounds of plants to produce. This means that animal foods require many times the land, water, fossil fuels, and pesticides that an equal amount of plant foods would require. If we were to eliminate animal products from our diet, America would need 30% of the crops it now grows, because 70% currently goes to feeding livestock. If we were only to reduce our animal product intake (a more realistic goal), we would still reduce our resource use by a substantial amount. Eating animal products is incredibly inefficient compared to plant products, every way that you look at it.

But aside from the inefficiency, there are other environmental consequences of animal factories. Factory farms, housing thousands of animals in a confined space, produce an incredible amount of waste. Small scale farms are able to reuse this waste as fertilizer, because it's in a managable amount. But factory farms produce so much that there is simply nothing to be done with it. The waste is usually dumped into pits, which have a nasty habit of overflowing when they get too full or if there's a storm. Then, they simply run off into the local streams, lakes, and rivers. The environmental impact from this vast amount of feces put into our water is just staggering. There are laws in some places to prevent this type of pollution from factory farms, but even then they are rarely enforced.

3.) Human health.
Eating animal products in moderate amounts, like our hunter-gatherer ancestors did, is perfectly manageable for the human body. But eating them at the level that Westerners do is incredibly damaging to our health. We simply aren't built to handle such high levels of cholesterol and protein, and the three main causes of death among industrialized nations (heart disease, stroke, and cancer) are all linked to animal products. Osteoporosis, another major health problem for Westerners, is unquestionably caused by the high level of animal protein in our diets. It is not simply "calcium deficiency" that is the cause — rather, consuming too much protein causes the body to leach calcium from the bones in order to process it. So eating dairy products actually causes osteoporosis rather than preventing it, because the amount of calcium you get is outweighed by the amount you lose as your body processes the protein. Eating more animal products also means a greater exposure to pesticides, which are known to cause cancer, and exposure to dangerous bacteria like E. coli and salmonella. Study after study shows that vegetarian diets and diets low in meat are much healthier. A balanced vegan diet provides everything the human body needs, with the exception of vitamin B12, which is only absent because we wash off our vegetables too well these days, and B12 is easily supplemented with fortified foods or vitamins.

More good reasons:

The Meatrix - a cute video parodies The Matrix and shows the lies behind the factory farm industry
Meet Your Meat - Peta's video on the horrors of factory farms and slaughter houses
Vegan Outreach: Why Vegan?
Vegan Action: About Veganism
The Vegan Thing
Reasons to Be Vegan
Dan Piraro: Why I'm Vegan - the cartoonist of the pretty decent strip Bizarro is also a vegan activist
Center for Science in the Public Interest's Eating Green Guide - the word vegan isn't mentioned but it's all about how animal products are harmful to the earth, human health, and the animals' welfare.