If you care about your own health, the health of farm animals, and the health of the planet, then here are a few reasons why you should consider a vegetarian diet.
Reason 1: The American Dietetic Association says that vegetarians have lower rates of death from heart disease, including lower blood cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer, and that vegetarians are less likely than meat-eaters to be obese.
Reason 2: Over half of the antibiotics used in this country are fed to animals in factory farm settings to keep them alive in this overly crowded environment where they stand in their own filth day in and day out, and are fed a diet that is very unnatural for them (including by-products from other slaughtered animals). So, not only are meat eaters eating an animal that is fed a gross diet, they are also contributing to the excess of antibiotics in our environment which can create “super bugs,” or antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Reason 3: A 2006 United Nations report summarized the devastation caused by the meat industry by calling it “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global,” and recommended that animal agriculture “be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.”
Reason 4: Egg producers cram 5-11 hens into a single “battery cage,” where they will spend their entire miserable life with less floor space than a single 8X11 sheet of paper. Putting animal welfare aside, these producers view the chicken merely as a production unit. They figured out that while housing more chickens in each cage might hurt each individual chicken’s production rate, the overall net gain of eggs/cage will be higher. Most of the chickens that survive this ordeal for a year will be shocked into an extra laying cycle through a process called forced molting. This includes starving the chickens or feeding them nutrient deficient food for a period of up to two weeks, in order to trick their bodies to enter into another laying cycle. Then, when egg production slows again, the birds are send to slaughter. Their bruised, beaten bodies will be ground up for soups or other mediums where the meat quality can be disguised. For every hen that gets sent to a battery cage for egg production, a male chick will be discarded, either ground up alive or thrown in dumpsters to suffocate. This happens to hundreds of millions of baby roosters every year in the United States.
Reason 5: Farm animals have a central nervous system, just like cats and dogs, and just like us. They feel pain in the same way that we do. Pain serves the same function for them as it does for us; pain warns us of an aversive stimuli, therefore letting our brain determine what actions to take to avoid such pain in the future. Most farmed animals are raised in an environment where they have no escape from pain, and are forced to endure without relief. Many states have a common farming exemption that allows all practices deemed common to therefore be free from prosecution under any of the states’ anti-cruelty statutes. This leads to countless animals’ mutilation without aid of painkillers. Debeaking (a process where a baby chick’s beak is seared off with a hot blade, to lessen the death rate in overcrowded living conditions), castration, tail docking, and dehorning are all routinely, legally, conducted without painkillers.
Reason 6: According to a recent report by Compassion in World Farming, it takes up to 16 pounds of grain to produce just one single pound of edible flesh [goveg.com/worldhunger.asp]. The United Nations concluded that the greenhouse gases produced from animal agriculture are greater than the sum of greenhouse gases from all the world’s transportation devices combined. This is why some people believe that true environmentalists are vegan.
Reason 7: The Animal Welfare Act does not apply to animals raised for food or food production. The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act only applies to slaughterhouses under Federal meat inspection (and therefore excludes state inspected and small custom exempt slaughterhouses), has exemptions for ritual slaughter, and [most importantly] excludes poultry. 95% of the land animals killed for food in the United States are poultry, and are thereby governed by no laws regarding slaughter methods.
Reason 8: 30 states posses exemptions in their state anti-cruelty statutes regarding customary farming practices. Examples: Colorado (The anti-cruelty statute shall not affect accepted animal husbandry practices), Indiana (Exempts acceptable farm management practices), Illinois (The Humane Care for Animals statute shall not affect normal good husbandry practices), Louisiana (The anti-cruelty statute states that it shall not apply to the “herding of domestic animals,” and states that for “the purposes of this Section, fowl shall not be defined as an animal.”), Maryland (Exempts customary and normal agricultural husbandry practices including dehorning, castration, docking tails and limit feeding.”), Montana (Exempts commonly accepted agricultural farming and livestock practices)…etc. etc. etc
Reason 9: You will never get bored with a vegetarian diet. There are a plethora of recipes from every corner of the world that you can choose from. And, in most cases your guests will never know that you choose to feed them a healthy meat-free meal, because they will be too busy stuffing their faces and asking for recipes.