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('101 Reasons Why
I'm a Vegetarian' 2001 By Pamela Rice)
1.
There are many subsidies to the meat
industry, but the biggest break it enjoys by far comes inconspicuously via
the federal Animal Welfare Act, which does not apply to animals raised for
food. The states only minimally take up the legal slack, allowing cruelty
and abuse of farm animals to be the norm. If farmers were forced by law to
give their animals truly humane living quarters, such as spacious
environments, clean surroundings, fresh air, sunlight, and companionship -
if it were illegal simply to administer drugs to animals who would
otherwise die from the conditions they live in - cheap fast food could
never exist. Time and again, the industry fights proposed measures
designed to ameliorate conditions for farm animals, even slightly, because
they would cost it literally pennies more per animal. Ultimately, low
prices have allowed demand to stay high and the industry to grow.
Virtually all of the over 8 billion animals slaughtered for food in the
U.S. every year are the product of a swift-moving assembly-line system,
incorporating dangerous, unprecedented, and unsustainable methods of
efficiency. Farming in the U.S. has been allowed over the last generation
to grow into a grim corporate monstrosity, the scale of which is hard to
comprehend or even to believe.
2.
When the Clean Water Act went into effect in 1972,
agriculture as a source of pollution was overlooked. The EPA has
identified agricultural runoff as a primary pollution source for the 60
percent of rivers and streams considered "impaired." A 1997 Senate report
said that every year, U.S. livestock produce 10,000 pounds of solid manure
for every U.S. citizen (see #22).
3.
After reviewing 4,500 scientific studies and papers
on the relationship between cancer and lifestyle, a team of 15 scientists
sponsored by two leading cancer research institutions advised that those
interested in reducing their risk of many types of cancer consume a diet
that is mostly fruits, vegetables, cereals, and legumes. They declared
that up to 40 percent of cancers are preventable, with diet, physical
activity, and body weight appearing to have a measurable bearing on risk.
4.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nations, two-thirds of the world's major fishing grounds and
stocks are now exhausted or seriously depleted. Fishers, using modern
techniques such as sonar, driftnets, bottom-fishing super trawlers,
longlines, and floating refrigerated fish-packing factories, are
ultimately not only putting themselves out of business but rapidly
destroying ocean ecosystems. Early in 1998, 1,600 scientists from around
the world declared that the oceans were in peril. They warned that swift
action is imperative to prevent irreversible environmental degradation
(see #92).
5.
The Humane Slaughter Act requires that an animal be
rendered unconscious with one swift application of a stunning device
before slaughter. In today's slaughterhouse this requirement can easily be
violated, thanks to increasingly fast line speeds that result in animals
being cut up while fully conscious. Sped-up conveyor belts produce more
profits for packing plants, but the cost is borne by the animals and by
the laborers who have to work on the petrified creatures as they fight for
their lives. And for birds (not legally recognized as animals), "humane"
preslaughter stunning is not administered (see #72).
6.
Cardiovascular disease and cancer cost the country nearly
$500 billion every year. Although smoking, lack of exercise, heredity, and
environmental exposures are other causative factors, these diseases are
inexorably linked to diets high in calories (meat), high in saturated fat
(meat), and low in fiber (meat).
7.
It might be easy on your conscience to consume the flesh of a creature
perceived to be stupid, dirty, and brutish. It may be surprising to some,
however, that pigs are highly intelligent. Ask Professor Stanley Curtis of
Pennsylvania State University. He taught several pigs to understand
complex relationships between actions and objects in order to play video
games. Curtis, along with his colleagues, found pigs to be focused,
creative, and innovative, equal in intelligence to chimps.
8.
Conservative industry figures for feed-to-flesh
ratios are 7:1 for cattle, 2.6:1 for pigs, and 2:1 for chickens. Many
factors, however, can influence feed conversion. By virtually all
accounts, eating food derived from animals is wasteful. And when the
industry does accomplish more efficiency, improvements usually come at the
expense of the animals, via genetic tinkering and growth-enhancing drugs.
9.
Of the 36 million pounds of antibiotics used
annually for all purposes in the U.S., 70 percent are administered to
healthy animals to make them grow faster on less feed. Though perfectly
legal, the practice is promoting the selection of antibiotic-resistant
bacteria. More and more, these bacteria are causing human illnesses that
physicians are finding difficult and even impossible to treat. The
practice is adding to the general worldwide crisis of drug-resistant
disease.
10.
Every year, Americans suffer 76 million illnesses,
over 300,000 hospitalizations, and over 5,000 deaths from something they
ate. That something was probably of animal origin. The government's
strategy for controlling dangerous bacteria is to inspect meat during
processing - something it isn't doing well nowadays (see #24). Except in
rare instances, neither the USDA nor the FDA has any regulatory powers on
farms where pathogens originate. With the exception of E. coli O157:H7,
dangerous bacteria are legally considered "inherent" to raw meat. It's up
to consumers to neutralize pathogens with cooking. Two of the legal ones -
campylobacter and salmonella - account for 80 percent of illnesses and 75
percent of deaths from meat and poultry. One hamburger can contain the
meat of 100 different cows from four different countries. One infected
animal can contaminate 16 tons of beef.
11.
Heart disease does not have to be a death sentence
or mean a life of cholesterol-lowering drugs and bypass surgery. By
prescribing a vegetarian diet, regular exercise, and spiritual nourishment
for his heart patients, Dean Ornish, M.D., proved that the progression of
this number-one killer can be halted and even reversed (see #85).
12.
Jim Mason and Peter Singer write in their book
Animal Factories, "Instead of hired hands, the factory farmer employs
pumps, fans, switches, slatted or wire floors, and automatic feeding and
watering hardware." As with any other capital-intensive system, managers
will be concerned with the "cost of input and volume of output....The
difference is that in animal factories the product is a living creature."
13.
Eating a plant-based diet guards against disease, first in an active way,
with complex carbohydrates, phytochemicals, antioxidants, vitamins,
minerals, and fiber, then by default: The more plant foods you eat, the
less room you have for the animal foods that clog arteries with
cholesterol, strain kidneys with excess protein, and burden the heart with
saturated fat. The American Dietetic Association acknowledges a
correlation between a vegetarian diet and reduced risk of coronary-artery
disease, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and certain types of cancer.
14.
Meat packing is the most dangerous occupation in the
nation. Workers may be crushed by animals falling off the line. Poultry
workers typically make a single movement up to 20,140 times a day and
suffer repetitive-stress dis-orders at 16 times the national average.
Turnover at plants can be as high as 100 percent per year.
15.
With so many fish species on the brink of extinction
(see #4), governments continually try to regulate fishing gear, catch
size, and catch season. But the regulations almost never work. Policing is
expensive. Illegal fishing around the world is estimated to be between 25
and 50 percent of the reported catch. And this does not include catches
from ships that avoid interdiction from patrol boats by registering with
"flag-of-convenience" countries - states that have not signed on to
international fishing treaties that regulate environmental and labor
conventions. These boats, which bring in a full quarter of the world's
fish, are often owned by phantom companies in the U.S., Europe, or Japan.
This legal "pirating" of the seas doubled during the 1990s.
16.
Factory hens today are forced to live in "battery"
cages stacked in rows, four high, by the thousands. Each is confined to
about 48 to 86 square inches of space. (This page is 81 square inches.)
After months of confinement, necks are covered with blisters, wings bare,
combs bloody, feet torn. Manure fumes and rotting carcasses force poultry
workers to wear gas masks. When the hens become what the industry
matter-of-factly calls spent, producers truck the mutilated birds - often
long distances - to slaughter, or gas them, or grind them up while still
alive, to be used as feed for the next flock.
17.
Campylobacter, which most commonly infects chicken,
is the leading bacterial cause of food-borne illness in the U.S.
Infections give victims cramps, bloody diarrhea, and fever, and lead to
death for up to 800 people in the U.S. each year. A Minnesota Department
of Health study tested a hundred chicken products from processing plants
in five states in 1999 and found an 88 percent contamination rate. Of
these, 20 percent were resistant to quinolones, a family of powerful
antibiotics. Scientists blame the resistance on the mid-1990s FDA approval
of two of these drugs for therapeutic use on commercial chickens (see #9).
18.
An English study that compared the diets of 6,115
vegetarians and 5,015 meat eaters for 12 years found that the meatless
diet yielded a 40 percent lower risk of cancer and a 20 percent lower risk
of dying from any cause. According to William Castelli, M.D., director of
the famed Framingham Heart Study, vegetarians outlive meat eaters by 3 to
6 years.
19.
Half of every butchered cow and a third of every
butchered pig becomes either by-product material or waste. In addition,
920 million animals die on U.S. factory farms before reaching slaughter.
What's an industry to do with all this death and gore? Call the renderer
straightaway! Recycling, they call it. Lips are exported to Mexico for
taco filling; horns are made into gelatin; other parts are fashioned into
everything from drugs to aphrodisiacs and cosmetics. The rest is minced,
pulverized, and boiled down for more products. Much is dried to a powder
to be mixed into animal feed. There are some regulations: Since 1997,
feeding ruminant-based slaughterhouse by-product to cattle is illegal (see
#63). In 2001, however, the FDA found hundreds of animal feed producers in
violation.
20.
Essentially, if a farming practice is established as
"accepted," "common," "customary," or "normal," no matter how cruel,
anticruelty statutes do not apply. Such a legal environment serves to
grant meat producers carte blanche for the development of still other
cruel practices and technologies. In general, the animal cruelty laws that
do exist are rarely enforced. Fines for violations are negligibly small,
and prosecutors may have to demonstrate that a defendant was in a
particular mental state when a cruel act was committed. Basically, the
meat industry enjoys a privilege unique in the world of law: Instead of
society judging which of its actions should be legal or illegal, it makes
this determination itself. Is there any wonder that precious little
economic loss comes for the benefit of farm animals?
21.
Our modern dairy cow lives with an
unnaturally swelled and sensitive udder, is likely never to be allowed out
of her stall, is milked up to three times a day, and is kept pregnant
nearly all of her abbreviated life. Her young are usually taken from her
almost immediately after birth. A cow living in today's modern milk
factory is, as John Robbins puts it in his book Diet for a New America,
"bred, fed, medicated, inseminated, and manipulated to a single purpose -
maximum milk production at minimum cost."
22.
Waste from livestock in the U.S. amounts to 130 times that
produced by people (see #2). Every time it rains, excess phosphorous and
nitrogen from the urine and feces seep into our waterways, causing algal
blooms, or red tides. Another result of agricultural runoff has been the
proliferation of dinoflagellates, named for their characteristic dual
flagella, the appendages they use to propel themselves. In 1991,
Pfiesteria piscicida was discovered to be a particularly nasty variety,
with the ability to ambush its prey by stunning it with a disorienting
toxin before sucking its skin off. This nearly indestructible one-celled
creature, or "cell from hell," as it soon became known, killed a billion
fish during just one flare-up off North Carolina during the early 1990s.
People who come in contact with the tiny predator often experience memory
loss as well as grotesque sores on their skins. In 1982 there were 22
known species of harmful dinoflagellates. In 1997 there were over 60.
23.
Castration makes bulls much easier to handle. It makes
their meat more marketable also. There are three castration methods, two
of which shut off the blood supply so that the testicles either are
reabsorbed into the animal's body or simply fall away after a couple of
weeks. In a third method, the scrotum is cut so that the testicles can be
pulled out. Anesthesia is rarely given before any of these procedures, and
sometimes operations are botched. One livestock expert advises would-be
emasculators, "Sloppy castration means lower profits."
24.
By concealing a camera on his body, an employee of a Rapid
City, South Dakota, slaughterhouse was able to obtain a videotape for
CBS-TV's "48 Hours." The tape showed how a plant with over 300 employees
that processes an average of 50 cows per hour with only four USDA
inspectors "keeps the line moving." It showed workers taking dangerous
shortcuts in cleaning up fluid that had broken out of an abscess from a
piece of chuck beef - a severe violation of USDA rules, which require an
extended clean-up procedure. A USDA veterinarian commented, "I can say
from my experience of nine years and in talking to other food inspectors
around the country, this probably goes on on a daily basis."
25.
In 2000, the USDA came out with its official
dietary guidelines, as it does every five years, and as always it told
people to eat less meat. Of course it didn't use those words; when it did,
in 1979, the meat industry sounded such a hue and cry that the U.S. agency
quickly retreated. Reduce "saturated fat and cholesterol" it says now,
something that means almost nothing to most people.
26.
A commercial egg-laying hen is kept crammed with four to
eight other birds for life inside a small wire cage. The birds remain
perpetually tortured and frustrated as their eggs fall through the wire
mesh to roll out of reach but not out of sight. Egg laying is such a
personal matter that a hen seeks privacy when performing the function.
27.
The senseless waste of the world's growing meat-centered
diet is illustrated by a hypothetical statement put forth by the
Population Reference Bureau: "If everyone adopted a vegetarian diet and no
food were wasted, current [food] production would theoretically feed 10
billion people, more than the projected population for the year 2050."
28.
In 1997 a bird virus jumped to a human for
the first time in history. By early 1998, the avian influenza strain H5N1
had killed six people as well as entire flocks of chickens in Hong Kong.
Fearing that the strain might be signaling the beginning of a pandemic of
human influenza (see #35), authorities slaughtered and buried 1.3 million
poultry-market chickens in the city over a chaotic three-day period.
29.
As gigantic hog-confinement operations dot
the nation more and more, issues of odor impose themselves on entire
communities. Fumes carry 150 volatile compounds that can become airborne
on dust particles. "In the summer, when they start pumping effluent, it
wakes you up. You are gagging," vented one neighbor of a hog factory in a
March 1998 New York Times article.
30.
A male calf born to a dairy cow - what does a farmer do
with this by-product of the milk industry? If he is not immediately
slaughtered or factory-raised, he is made into fancy veal. To this end, he
is locked up in a stall and chained by his neck to prevent him from
turning around for his entire life. He is fed a special diet without iron
or roughage. He is injected with antibiotics and hormones to keep him
alive and to make him grow. He is kept in darkness except for feeding
time. The result? A nearly full-grown animal with flesh as tender and
milky-white as a newborn's. The beauty of the system, from the standpoint
of the veal industry, is that meat from today's "crate veal" still fetches
the premium price it always did when such flesh came only from a baby
calf. But now each animal yields much more meat.
31.
On October 12, 1999, the population of the world hit 6
billion, at least in theory. This number is expected to reach 10 billion
by 2050. The Green Revolution, which fueled much of the recent growth,
appears to have come to an end. Indeed, grain production worldwide has
been declining since 1983, and biotech is not likely to reverse the
downturn. Today, 70 percent of grain in the U.S. and 40 percent of grain
worldwide lavishly goes to feed livestock. And just when the world seems
to think it needs more land to cultivate grain to feed to animals so more
people can eat them, per-capita world cropland has declined by 20 percent
in the 1990s alone. The World Health Organization says 1.2 billion people
in the world don't get enough to eat. Increasing meat production is
definitely not the answer.
32.
Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are highly toxic
chemicals, once used widely in a number of industrial applications. Though
they are now banned in the U.S. and other Western countries, their
residues have become part of the food chain, lodged in the fat of fish,
beef, pork, milk, and other dairy products. Various studies have linked
prenatal exposure to PCBs - even tiny amounts - to impaired intellectual
development in children. Women who plan to become pregnant are advised to
avoid foods containing them, because the chemicals can accumulate in their
bodies for years.
33.
Some farmers feed their chicken flocks
manure. No, it's not illegal, and yes, animals will grow by eating it.
According to the FDA, the practice is safe if, during composting, the
feces are allowed to reach high enough temperatures to destroy harmful
bacteria. The problem is, farmers rarely take all the necessary steps in
the composting process.
34.
The late parent advisor Dr. Benjamin Spock maintained that
cows' milk "causes internal blood loss, allergies, and indigestion and
contributes to some cases of childhood diabetes." In the last edition of
his famous baby book he recommended that children after the age of 2
essentially adhere to a vegan diet. But he also believed that dairy milk
was not good for infants. According to renowned nutrition researcher T.
Colin Campbell, "Cows' milk protein may be the single most significant
chemical carcinogen to which humans are exposed."
TO BE CONTINUED |
