Most people can just about tolerate vegetarians even if they don't personally give a fuck about what dies to fill their belly. But vegans? It’s not cruel to milk cows or take eggs, is it? Most people believe that cows need to be milked and that they’d suffer if they weren’t, but if you actually think about it - cows weren’t created by humans or for humans, so before we decided to exploit them, they took care of themselves; it’s only now that we’re interfering with nature that suffering is being caused. Cows only give milk to feed their young; so they're artificially inseminated in order to calve; milk production then lasts for up to 10 months, when they’re impregnated again, and the cycle continues, over and over, resulting in a knackered animal good only for slaughter, and of course money in the bank for the meat and dairy industry. They no more need to be milked than they need to be pumped full of hormones, antibiotics, appetite stimulants and assorted chemicals to increase milk production and facilitate ‘intensive’ (i.e. inhumane, greed-driven) farming, then over-milked until they develop sore, swollen, infected udders. In case you’re wondering what happens to the calves of dairy cows, since their milk supply is being taken - don’t worry, they don’t need milk: it spoils their flavour. These calves are put in tiny veal crates, with no room to lie down, and insufficient food – they often resort to licking the boards of the crates to try to get nutrition. What food they do get is iron-deficient, to keep their flesh attractively pale and aesthetically pleasing to the eye of the discerning consumer. Apparently this also makes the flesh more tender – isn’t it nice to know that all that suffering isn’t in vain?
As for eggs, cruelty is also inherent in the ‘layer hen’ industry. Chicks born into this industry are sorted at birth, and the male chicks suffocated in plastic bags. When hens are past their productivity period they’re slaughtered or else deprived of food and water, which forces moulting to occur and results in another laying cycle. Hens also have their beaks seared off to prevent mutilation of themselves and other birds, and are kept in cramped, uncomfortable steel-mesh battery cages with slanted wire floors which cause severe discomfort and foot deformation. So why not eat free range then? Free-range hens also have very limited space in which to live, they only have a 'good' (and I use that word very unwillingly) life in comparison with the abject misery of a battery hen's existence. They too have their beaks seared off, and male chicks are killed in the free range sector just as in the rest of the egg industry.

“It’s the natural order of things; animals eat other animals, don’t they?” Yes…and how many people go out and hunt their own food? They pick up their packets of pre-killed ‘prey’ all nice-and-neatly wrapped off the shelf in Supervalu and they’ve got visions of themselves as some hunter-gatherer, standing alone against the wilderness with nothing but their wits to help them survive…delusional? The voting majority? Surely not…

It takes seven pounds of grain or soybeans to generate one pound of meat. Yeah, seems like a great idea to me - let's stuff animals with grain so meat eaters the world over - the first world, that is - can eat more and more steak, while 15 children die of hunger every minute. One third of the earth’s land surface is suffering desertification because of deforestation, overgrazing, and overcultivation due to animal farming. It would take only one eighth of the land needed to feed a meat-eating population to feed a vegan one.

A typical animal emits 48 kilograms of methane a year, which contributes hugely to the exacerbation of the greenhouse effect. Slurry, containing manure and urine, can be up to 100 times more polluting than raw untreated domestic sewage. Silage effluent, produced when preserving crops to feed cattle, pollutes up to 200 times more. The tanning of leather for the fashion industry also causes huge amounts of pollution.

Dairy products are a health hazard. They contain no fibre or complex carbohydrates and are laden with saturated fat and cholesterol. They are contaminated with cow's blood and pus and are frequently polluted with pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics. Dairy products are linked to allergies, constipation, obesity, heart disease, cancer, and other diseases. A common belief is that vegan/veggie diets are unhealthy: protein-, iron- and calcium-deficient, among other things – this couldn’t be further from the truth. The average vegan diet has TWICE as much iron as a meat-eating diet. Protein can be gotten from pulses: beans, lentils, chickpeas etc., which are the basis of a lot of vegan recipes. All you’re missing out on is heart disease, high cholesterol levels, numerous cancers, E-coli, salmonella and human variant CJD. I know it may be hard at first to manage without these life-threatening illnesses, but hey, all we can do is try.

Many people also choose veganism for spiritual reasons, based on the belief that all life should be treated with reverence, defined as ahimsa, the Sanskrit word for non-killing and non-injury popularised by Mahatma Ghandi. Members of the Society of Friends (Quakers), Seventh Day Adventists, Buddhists, Jainists or Christians; or empathisers with paganism (e.g. wicca, druidry) or humanism are often vegan.