Why go veggie? (or better still vegan?)
Save lives
In the UK, every year, around 1,000 million animals are slaughtered for food. Every one of these animals is capable of experiencing pain, fear and distress. Whether factory farmed, free-range or organic, all face a terrifying death. If you stop eating animals, you will save around 2,000 animals during your lifetime!
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Help stop animal suffering
Animals reared for human consumption are treated like emotionless lumps of meat that cannot feel pain. Most of these animals are intensively farmed inside crowded, filthy sheds, in which they are deprived of everything that makes life worthwhile.
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Be healthy
The saturated animal fat found in meat and dairy products not only piles on the pounds, but also increases your risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and other health problems. Studies show that vegetarians have lower rates of obesity and heart disease and have a longer life expectancy than meat-eaters.
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Feed the world
Rearing animals for food makes inefficient use of the world’s scarce land and food resources. This means that there is less food for feeding hungry people.
The human population is on the increase, and around the world millions of people are dying of hunger. Soon, world food production will not be able to keep up with the demands of a Western meat-eating diet, which is now being adopted by developing countries. Nearly half of the world’s food crop is fed to animals. We can feed up to 10 times as many people by using the available land to feed people directly, rather than devoting it to fattening up animals.
A vegetarian diet uses one fifth of the land used for a typical Western meat-based diet. Animals use up most of the energy and nutrients they eat in the day-to-day working of their bodies. Only by cutting back on global meat consumption will we ever be able to feed everyone in the world.
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Save the planet
A recent report by the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) stated that animal farming is responsible for 18% of all global greenhouse gas emissions and that this ‘enormous’ impact is greater than that of air, sea and land transport combined. Farmed animals are one of the main sources of methane, which is an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2). This is produced by bacteria in the stomachs of sheep, cattle and goats, and is farted and belched out by the animals. Cattle grazing is also responsible for large-scale rainforest deforestation – a major cause of CO2 emissions. People who eat a vegetarian or vegan diet have a much smaller ‘carbon footprint’ because growing vegetables produces much less carbon dioxide and methane than rearing animals for meat.
A quarter of the Earth’s land area is used as pasture for livestock. Wildlife habitats and fast-shrinking rainforests are often cut down for cattle pasture or to grow crops for animal feed. One of the most popular crops grown worldwide is the soya bean, of which the vast majority (about 90%) is used for animal feed.
Farmers spread animal manure and other farm waste on to the land as fertiliser. This runs into nearby streams and rivers causing water pollution and killing wildlife.
The world is suffering a global water shortage. Animal farming uses vast quantities of water and is making the situation worse. It takes 900 litres of water to produce 1kg of wheat compared with 100,000 litres to produce 1kg of beef!
Many of the world’s fish species have been driven to the brink of extinction because of over-fishing. Dolphins, whales, turtles and other sea birds are frequently killed when they get caught up in discarded fishing tackle and drift nets.
People who think eating farmed fish is a solution to the problem of over-fishing in the oceans are misguided. Around five tons of wild-caught fish are killed and used as feed to produce one ton of farmed fish.
Want to know more?
- Read our Eating Meat: Wrecking The Planet And Creating A Global Food Shortage factsheet
- Watch the environmental impact animation from Eat This!
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The Yuck factor
Eating meat means you might be eating every part of the animal, including gristle, bone and blood vessels.
Farmed animals suffer from injuries and diseases, caused and spread by overcrowding and stress. They include foot and mouth, salmonella, E.coli, campylobacter, mastitis, foot rot, lameness and scrapie. In recent years, diseases have been found in farmed animals that threaten both people and animals, such as bird flu and BSE. Farmed animals are fed drugs, including antibiotics, to keep them ‘healthy’. People ingest traces of these drugs when they eat animal flesh, or animal products such as milk and eggs.
