Vegan: Why Not?
More and more people are becoming vegans every day. Did you know that only three yours ago in 1997 a Roper Poll estimated the number of vegans in the United States to be between 600,000 to one million? (Why Vegan 1) That number has continued to rise steadily since.
Why are so many people becoming vegans? The answer is really quite simple. “If you had the chance to save just one life - or to save thousands of lives - wouldn’t you?” (Davis 2) If your answer is yes then vegan is the right choice for you. There’s nothing stopping you. I mean you probably already know that cutting meat out of your diet is not only good for your health, but good for the earth as well, especially red meat. What you don’t realize is that things like eggs and dairy products are just as bad, both for your health and the earth. Just think about it, by tomorrow you could be proudly calling your self a vegan.
What I wanted to talk to you more about was the cruelty that is inflicted upon the animals that you probably eat. It makes me sick to see some of the pictures I found showing animal suffering. For example; chicken, chances are most of you probably have eaten it. Well have you ever seen one of the warehouses where these chickens are kept before slaughter? I have, let me describe it for you. (Though I would suggest going and seeing it for your self. It’s nice to know just what it is you are eating.) Now close your eyes and imagine this nightmare.
All you can see is chickens everywhere. All the chickens are packed in warehouses so tightly that you can hardly see the floor. It smells just awful. You see a bunch of dead chickens being pecked at. There is a tractor to your right driving along scooping up all the dead chickens that died of either disease or starvation from these harsh living conditions. The tractor is scooping up the dead and throwing them into a pile. You ask yourself; what do they do with the dead and diseased ones? Just a guess but they probably send them off to the grinder. Then they either feed it to the others, or they sell them to McDonalds, for those new chicken burgers.
Back to my point of why you should not only become a vegetarian, but also drop eggs and dairy products to become a true vegan. Now I’m sure you think the only difference between being a vegan and a vegetarian is that vegans over do the whole thing, or at least that’s what I used to think when I was a vegetarian. If you are thinking about becoming a vegan or even just a vegetarian there are probably three reasons why you would choose to do so.
Cruelty - It’s just plane sick and wrong the way we treat our livestock.
Earth - It’s a simple fact that vegan is the best choice for the earth.
Health - Many people think that it’s healthy to be vegan.
First is cruelty, eggs no harm in them right. Wrong egg laying hens receive approximately six-tenths of a square foot of grazing space, in order to maximize production. Under these harsh conditions the chickens often peck at each other, to combat this the workers cut off their beaks. Did you know that for each egg you eat a poor hen had to spend approximately 34 hours in a tiny cage, with no room to move? What about having my own egg laying hens, no harm in that right? Wrong, “Egg-laying hatcheries don’t have any use for male chicks; they are killed by suffocation in plastic bags, decapitation, gassing or crushing.” (Qtd. Rollin, 1995)
Second earth, egg-laying hens produce a large amount of waste including dead, diseased bodies and their waste. Therefore bad for our earth as well. Third health, many people believe eggs are bad for your health, but that’s for you to decide.
Cows; they’re ugly and they stink. Don’t they say you are what you eat? What more is there to say. I’m sure that unless you are stupid then you already know that you shouldn't eat beef. For some unknown reason most people insist upon eating it anyway. Why? I don’t know maybe they like the taste of blood. Or maybe they really are just stupid after all.
I was hoping to talk more about milk rather then state the obvious about red meat. For some reason people actually think that milk is good for them. Or maybe, though I doubt it, maybe, just maybe our crazy IHS teachers were right about how advertisements affect us, and how they affect our every day lives, after all. I‘m sure you all recognize this fraise. Got Milk? I mean let’s face it, cows milk is for baby calves and not for people. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. Of course, cows are considered to be the worst of all the animals for our earth for many reasons. One of witch is that cows are breaded to be stupid so it would be easier to keep them in captivity. As a result they eat their grass down to the root, causing large areas of grass to die, which causes a sever ethological in balance.
There is a well spread myth that most people believe that says it doesn’t hurt cows to drink their milk. Well they’re wrong, they obviously don’t realize that when good old Bessie gets old and she stops producing enough milk she is slaughtered immediately. Here’s something that you probably don’t know either. The FDA approved a Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) in 1993. Allowing a cow to produce approximately ten times what she would naturally produce in one year, (30 tons). Such high milk production leads to death in some cases for poor old Bessie (Vegan outreach 4).
So why not? I guess people just don’t like change, they’re stubborn and simply refuse to change, especially old people. Others just follow the crowd and do whatever they see others do, even if they know it is wrong. You should set a good example, and others will surely follow. You should do what you know is right both for you and the earth. Those of you, who eat meat because you like the taste should always remember this phrase, “Eat to live, don’t live to eat.”
Works Cited:
International Vegetarian Union. Ed. John Davis. February
27, 2000.
http://www.ivu.org/faq/definitions.html
Why Vegan? Ed. Vegan Outreach. 1997-2000.
The Transformation of Animals into Food. Ed. Vegan Outreach. 1997-2000.
http://www.veganoutreach.org/wv/wv2.html (a must see)
Literature Paper | By Jeremiah Mondello | March 8, 2000