Guerilla Monk

VEGANISM IN A NUTSHELL
By PETA’s Bruce Friedrich

THERE ARE PROBABLY as many reasons to be a vegan as there are vegans. The five we hear most often at PETA are human rights, the environment, human health, animal welfare, and animal rights. I’ll address them each in a moment, but first, let me tell you why I became a vegan.

In 1987, during my first year of college, I read Frances Moore Lappé’s book Diet for a Small Planet. Basically, Lappé argues that cycling grains, soy and corn through animals so that we can eat their flesh or consume their milk and eggs is vastly inefficient, environmentally destructive, and contributes to poverty and starvation in the developing world.

After reading Lappé, I wondered how I could claim to care about the environment, how I could claim to care about global poverty, if I kept eating meat, dairy products, and eggs. It also occurred to me that animals are made of the same stuff as humans—flesh and blood, and that they suffer just as we do. I grew up in Minnesota and Oklahoma, and it always saddened me to see trucks loaded with turkeys, chickens, pigs or cows driving through the bitter Minnesota winter or the sweltering, arid Oklahoma summer, taking the animals, through all weather extremes, to what I knew would be a gruesome death. Taken together, the arguments were simply overwhelming. I decided to become a vegan.

Back to those top five reasons we hear for going vegan: a vegan diet is, without a doubt, the best choice for our health, the only sustainable choice for the environment, and the only choice that expresses in a positive manner who we are in the world—compassionate people, compassionate toward people and toward animals.

Human Health
Meat, dairy and egg products are making people sick. In fact, they are ruining our later years and killing us. They have absolutely no fibre or complex carbohydrates in them, and they are packed with saturated fat and cholesterol. In the short term, eating meat, dairy products and eggs is likely to make a person fat and lethargic. In the long term, eating these products can cause heart disease, cancer, stroke, high blood pressure and an array of other problems. I’d like to make a couple of points about human physiology, and then I’ll talk about the link between animal products and a few of the worst health scourges plaguing North Americans.

It’s amazing how many seemingly intelligent people, to justify their meat-eating, open their mouths, point at their teeth, and say something about “canines” as a means of defending a habit that is ecologically devastating, cruel to animals, and likely to kill them. Leaving aside how different human “canines” are from the canine teeth of carnivores (I really wonder if these people have ever even looked at the long, dagger-like canines of a dog or tiger), every natural carnivore has an array of other physiological properties that do not mirror ours. For example, unlike humans, all natural meat-eaters, such as dogs and rats, manufacture their own vitamin C, whereas we need to consume vitamin C in fruits and vegetables; true carnivores perspire through their tongues rather than through their skin; natural meat-eaters have sharp, pointy front teeth, sharp and jagged molars, and a tooth-bone density many times greater than that of humans, which enables them to crunch through the bones of their prey; carnivores have no digestive enzymes in their saliva at all, and their digestive acids are many times more acidic than those of humans, so the bacteria from rotting flesh won’t kill them; natural meat-eaters have jaws that move only vertically, instead of in a grinding motion as ours do, and they don’t chew their food—they just rip and swallow; carnivores have claws to rip their prey apart instead of sensitive fingers for plucking; they have an intestinal tract only three times their body length to eject rotting flesh quickly; and natural meat-eaters never develop atherosclerosis, no matter how much saturated fat and cholesterol they consume—this is the disease that kills almost as many human beings in the industrialised world as all other causes of death combined. And the list of physiological differences between people and natural meat-eaters goes on and on.

But let’s also think about natural behaviours. How many of us salivate at the idea of chasing a small animal, ripping her limb from limb, and then devouring her, blood and all? I hope that no one listening has that reaction, but every carnivore does. How many of us, if we’re walking down the street and see an animal carcass on the road, think, “Mmmm … I’d like to eat that”? No. We think, “Oh, how sad,” or, “Blech.” Every single carnivore, if hungry, digs in.

Yes, human beings learned, “Hey, if we kill all the bacteria with fire, this stuff probably won’t kill us.” And a long time ago, when there was no vegetation for us, we started eating meat. BUT it’s still not good for us, and in fact it’s so bad for us that it kills many of us.

As I said, I adopted a vegan diet in 1987. At the time, I was running cross-country, and when I dropped meat and dairy products from my diet, my 10k time plummeted from about 46 or 47 minutes down to between 42 and 43 minutes. Basically, when I stopped forcing my body to expend so much energy processing saturated fat, cholesterol and animal protein, I had more energy, my metabolism sped up, I dropped a few pounds that I didn’t even know I had, and I got faster. I also found that I needed less sleep, had far more energy, and felt happier, just in general. Of course, I am not unique. Vegans are always telling me that they need less sleep and less coffee and have more energy than they ever had before. They also tell me that their newfound energy has made them happier.

Dr T. Colin Campbell is one of the world’s foremost epidemiological scientists and director of what The New York Times called “the most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease”. Dr Campbell’s studies have shown that, as he puts it, “the vast majority of all cancers, cardiovascular diseases, and other forms of degenerative illness can be prevented simply by adopting a plant-based diet”.

Let’s touch on heart disease first. Heart disease kills almost as many people in North America as all other causes of death combined. Up until about 15 years ago, it was assumed that as people get older, their arteries inevitably become clogged. If you didn’t get hit by a bus or die of cancer or something, your arteries would eventually close, causing either your brain or your heart to give out, and that would be it. Enter Dr Dean Ornish, who has since proven that 100 per cent of heart attacks from clogged arteries—and again, this is by far the developed world’s biggest killer—that 100 per cent are preventable. Dr Caldwell Esselstyn has replicated Dr Ornish’s findings, taking patients who were suffering from clogged arteries and making them “heart attack proof” (to quote Dr Esselstyn in the August 1999 issue of the American Journal of Cardiology) by getting their cholesterol levels down below 150.

In fact, the average vegan cholesterol level is about 133, while the average vegetarian cholesterol level is 161. And the average meat-eater’s cholesterol level is 210. Although the medical establishment may say, “Well, you’ve done your best,” at 210, people are still dropping like flies. As Dr Charles Attwood pointed out, this is insane: if people were being run down by trucks at the same rate that they’re dying from meat-and-dairy-induced heart attacks, something would be done.

And the same is true for cancer. There is complete scientific unanimity: as much cancer is caused by diet as is caused by smoking, which is a lot! And it is also completely clear how we can prevent cancer. The World Cancer Research Fund, the American Cancer Society, and the Royal Cancer Society in Britain—all organisations that study the issue agree that as many cases of cancer are caused by diet as are caused by smoking, and all of them make the same top-two recommendations for preventing cancer: eat more plant-based foods, and eat fewer animal-based foods. In other words, “go vegan”. According to Dr. William Castelli, chair of the Nutrition Department at Harvard Medical School and the researcher who has directed the longest-running clinical trial in history, “A low-fat, plant-based diet would … lower the cancer rate 60 per cent.”

Just to be clear, it’s not the fat and cholesterol that cause cancer; it’s the animal protein. The fat and cholesterol cause heart disease; the animal protein causes cancer. Dr T. Colin Campbell states that “human studies also support this carcinogenic effect of animal protein, even at usual levels of consumption … no chemical carcinogen is nearly so important in causing human cancer as animal protein”.

But what about milk? That the dairy industry has succeeded in selling people on this nonsense—that cow’s milk is good for them—is truly remarkable and a tribute to the power of pouring money into advertising. But no one tries to defend milk drinking as natural, because what could be less natural than one species’ decision to consume the mammary secretions of another species? It’s not as if nature made a mistake—dog mothers’ milk for puppies; kangaroo mothers’ milk for kangaroos; rat mothers’ milk for baby rats; cow mothers’ milk for calves … oh, hey, wait a minute! Let’s use cow mammary secretions for human beings also, including grown-up ones who shouldn’t be drinking any mothers’ milk at their age anyway. Of course not.

Nevertheless, the dairy industry would have us believe that consuming its products will protect and even build your bones. The fact is, however, that clinical and population evidence shows us otherwise. For example, in the areas of the world where people consume the most dairy products, you find the highest rates of osteoporosis. Please check out PETA’s Web site DumpDairy.com to learn all about the link between meat and dairy consumption and osteoporosis. What dairy researchers do to spin the results of studies would make George Orwell proud, but in the end, it is obvious that the dairy industry is profit-driven and that it will sacrifice our health in a heartbeat in order to make more money.

Recently, there has been a lot of commotion about the fact that kids are getting fatter. One culprit is the soft drink industry, which is signing contracts with school systems to have its products given prominent placement. The dairy industry saw the prospect of a serious payday if it could challenge the soda dominance in schools. So what did the industry introduce? A product with even more sugar than sodas and more than twice the calories—460 calories in one bottle, and 16 grams of fat to boot! That’s almost as much fat as in a McDonald’s “Happy Meal”, and this is just a beverage. Dairy products are a prescription for obesity, heart disease, lethargy, and a host of other problems. That the dairy industry would actually claim to be doing kids a favour is morally revolting.

On the other hand, vegetarians are one-third as likely to be obese as meat-eaters, and vegans are about one-tenth as likely to be obese. You can be a fat vegan, of course, and you can be a skinny meat-eater. But vegans are, on average, 10 to 20 per cent lighter than meat-eaters. Anyone who has questions about this might want to review Dr Neal Barnard’s Food for Life or Dr Dean Ornish’s Eat More: Weigh Less.

All of this analysis applies to fish flesh as well as to other animal products: fish flesh also has no fibre or complex carbohydrates and is packed with cholesterol. Fish are also frequently laden with heavy metals or other contaminants from the water in which they swim. We’ve all heard the warnings about high mercury levels in fish and how pregnant women shouldn’t consume fish; well, if it’s not good for pregnant women, it can’t be good for anyone else, either.

According to the US Government Accounting Office, or GAO, inadequate regulations mean that unsafe, contaminated and spoiled fish often end up on our nation’s grocery shelves. In fact, 15 per cent of all food-borne illnesses in the US are caused by contaminated fish, even though fish represents only a small fraction of the total food consumed. Some fish flesh is offered for sale without having been inspected even once, and even where FDA oversight applies, according to the GAO, many inspections consist of no more than paperwork, and even serious violations rarely result in a consumer alert.

Really, there is nothing good about fish flesh. The one thing we hear about is the cholesterol-lowering properties of Omega 3 and 6 fatty acids, but one finds Omega 3’s and 6’s in many vegan foods as well, like flaxseed oil. Besides, if your cholesterol level is below 150—and remember that the average vegan level is 133—you’d make Ripley’s Believe It or Not if you had a heart attack.

All this discussion is about animal products when they’re at their best, that is, organic. But most animal products are packed full of antibiotics, dioxins, and food-borne pathogens like E. coli, salmonella and campylobacter. Millions of people get sick each year from eating contaminated meat, especially chicken and sea animals, and thousands die. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, meat and dairy consumers are taking in 22 times the acceptable level of dioxins in their food. Ninety-five per cent of dioxin exposure comes from consuming meat, dairy, or egg products. The other 5 per cent is environmental; virtually none comes from consuming vegan foods.

If you care about your health, if you want to live with as much vigour as possible, look as good as possible, and do as much good as possible, it would be wise to move toward adopting a vegan diet.

The Environment
The second reason for adopting a vegan diet is for the environment. The best thing any of us can do for the environment is to adopt a vegan diet. Raising animals for food is steadily and rapidly depleting and polluting our arable land, potable water and clean air. All animals need food to survive. For example, a 200-pound man will burn off at least 2,000 calories even if he never gets out of bed. As in humans, most calories that go into an animal are burned off; only the excess calories are available to make milk, eggs, or flesh and fat.

It’s bizarre, really: you take a crop like soy, oats, corn or wheat, products high in fibre and complex carbohydrates, but devoid of cholesterol and artery-clogging saturated fat. You put them into an animal and create something with no fibre or complex carbohydrates at all, but with lots of cholesterol and saturated fat. It makes about as much sense to take pure water, run it through a sewer system, and then drink it.

E, the respected environmental magazine, noted in 2002 that more than one-third of all fossil fuels produced in the United States are used to raise animals for food. This seems a conservative figure. If we have to grow massive amounts of grain and soy (with all the tilling, irrigation, crop dusters, and so on that that requires), truck all that grain and soy to factory-style farms and feedlots, feed it to the approximately 10 billion land animals who are raised for food in the US each year, truck those animals to automated slaughter facilities, truck the dead animals to processing centres, run the processing and packaging machines, and then truck the packaged meat to grocery stores—well, there’s a lot of energy being used up at each one of those stages.

If all this energy is being used, all these fossil fuels are being burned, and all this manure is being produced, of course, we’re talking about some serious air pollution. Many environmentalists will sooner walk or ride their bike than drive, in order to decrease air pollution in their area, and then will happily eat some dairy, meat or egg product without a second thought about the fact that they are paying for gas-guzzling animal transport trucks, refrigerated meat trucks, pollution-churning processing plants, and so on.

A friend of mine says that where the environment is concerned, eating meat is like driving a huge SUV or an 18-wheeler. Eating a vegetarian diet is like driving a mid-sized car, and eating a vegan diet is like riding a bicycle or walking.

A similar analysis holds for land. According to John Robbins, the average vegan uses about 1/6 of an acre of land to satisfy his or her food requirements for a year; the average vegetarian who consumes dairy products and eggs requires about three times that, and the average meat-eater requires about 20 times that much land. We can grow a lot more food on an equal amount of land if we’re not funnelling the crops through animals.

Also, the use of herbicides and pesticides and the monocropping of feed crops like corn, soy, wheat and oats are destroying vital topsoil. Howard Lyman, a fourth-generation cattle rancher who has become a vegan advocate, talks about how he became a farmer because of his love for the life-filled soil. Now, he says, the soil has become lifeless dirt—in large part because it has been ruined by raising animals for food.

And think about water. According to the National Audubon Society, raising animals for food requires about as much water as all other water uses combined, even as many areas are experiencing drought conditions. It requires about 300 gallons of water to feed a vegan for a day. It requires about four times as much to feed a vegetarian, and 14 times as much to feed a meat-eater. Of course, if you have to feed animals, you have to irrigate the crops that you’re feeding them. You have to give them water. The systems that keep animals today use water to hose down both the factory farm and the slaughterhouse. It’s a water-intensive operation.

Raising animals for food is also a water-polluting process. One dairy cow produces more than 100 pounds of excrement per day. The animals raised in the US produce 130 times the excrement of the entire human population of this country. Their excrement is more concentrated than human excrement and is often contaminated with herbicides, pesticides, toxic chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, and so on. These massive farmed animal factories don’t have waste treatment plants, so this sludge goes in vast quantities onto and destroys topsoil, or it goes into and pollutes water, often causing ecological imbalances and killing fish and other aquatic life.

Clearly, all of these statistics are going to be approximations. Some of them will change based on the time of year and the area crops are being grown in. What doesn’t change is that animals will not grow or produce milk and eggs without food and water, and they won’t do it without producing excrement. Thus, eating meat, dairy products and eggs will always be vastly more resource-intensive and vastly more polluting than using the land to grow food for human beings.

Of course, anyone who reads the papers knows what the factory fishing trawlers are doing to our sea and ocean bottoms. One super-trawler is the length of a football field and takes in 800,000 pounds of fish in a single netting. Trawlers scrape up ocean bottoms, destroying coral reefs and everything else in their way; hydraulic dredges scoop up huge chunks of the ocean floor to sift out scallops, clams and oysters. Most of what the fishing fleets get isn’t even eaten by human beings. Half is fed to animals who are raised for food, and about 30 million tons each year are just tossed back into the ocean, dead, which greatly disturbs the natural biological balance. Commercial fishing fleets are destroying sensitive aquatic ecosystems at a rate that is quite beyond comprehension.

Then there is aquaculture, which is increasing at a rate of more than 10 per cent annually. Aquaculture is even worse than commercial fishing, because, for starters, it takes about 4 pounds of wild-caught fish to reap 1 pound of farmed fish. Farmed fish eat fish caught by commercial trawlers but not used for human consumption. Farmed fish are often raised in the same water that wild fish swim in, but fish farmers dump antibiotics into the water and use genetic breeding to create Frankenstein fish. The antibiotics contaminate the oceans and seas, and the genetic-freak fish sometimes escape and breed with wild fish, throwing delicate aquatic balances out of kilter. Researchers at the University of Stockholm demonstrated that the horrible environmental influence of fish farms can extend to an area 50,000 times larger than the farm itself.

The choice is clear: we can show our environmental values every time we sit down to eat by eating a vegan diet, or we can stomp over the Earth in combat boots by eating meat, dairy or eggs. Really, a true environmentalist can’t eat meat, dairy or eggs.

Human Rights
The third reason for adopting a vegan diet is for human rights. In college, I was active in a group called “Poverty Action Now”. We raised money for Oxfam International and organised weekend trips to help at the homeless shelter in a nearby town. So Lappé’s analysis of global poverty and the fact that so many people are starving to death even as we in the developed world eat so gluttonously hit me hard. Right now, 1.3 billion people, more than 20 per cent of the world’s population, are living in dire poverty. Right now, 800 million people are suffering from what the United Nations calls “nutritional deficiency”. That’s a euphemism: they’re starving. Every year, 40 million people die from starvation-related causes.

It is depressing to consider that throughout the last big famine in Ethiopia, that country was exporting desperately needed soy to Europe to feed to farmed animals. The same relationship held true throughout the famine in Somalia in the early 1990s.

And the same relationship holds between Latin America and the United States today. As just one example, two-thirds of the agriculturally productive land in Central America is devoted to raising farmed animals, almost all of whom are exported or eaten by the wealthy few in these countries. Just two years ago, the UN Commission on Nutritional Challenges for the 21st Century said that unless we make major changes, 1 billion children will be permanently handicapped over the next 20 years as a result of inadequate caloric intake. The first step toward averting this tragedy, according to the Commission, is to encourage human consumption of traditional grains, fruits and vegetables.

So the question is, why are we cycling huge amounts of grains, or soy, or corn, through all the animals we breed just to kill, even as so many people starve for want of any sustenance at all?

On the domestic front, a book came out a few years ago titled Fast Food Nation by investigative journalist Eric Schlosser. In Fast Food Nation, Schlosser details the human abuse in slaughterhouses and includes the information that slaughterhouse workers have nine times the injury rate of coal miners in Appalachia, that some slaughterhouses have 300 per cent turnover rates, and that many slaughterhouses reserve the worst jobs for people who are in this country illegally and thus can’t defend any of their rights. This is certainly the country’s most dangerous and least desirable job. There is no way of getting around the truth that eating meat or dairy products supports these sorts of relationships.

Animal Welfare
The fourth reason for adopting a vegan diet is recognition that eating animal products supports cruelty to animals. If we do not want to pay people to inflict gratuitous abuse on animals, a vegan diet is the only diet that makes sense.

I want to be clear: even if veganism were no better for the planet and even if a vegan diet were not healthier than one with meat and dairy products, a vegan diet is still the only clear and consistent ethical choice we can make where animals won’t be bred, abused and inevitably butchered on our behalf. We share the planet with an array of amazing beings, and if we would prefer not to contribute to their extreme suffering, we should not eat them.

Twenty years ago, scientists, the ones who were telling us we could smoke low tar cigarettes, were still telling us that other animals don’t feel pain in the same way that humans do. Now, no reputable scientist believes that. Everyone now understands that cattle, pigs, chickens, fish—all farmed animals—feel not only pain but joy, sorrow, fear, distress, and an array of other emotions as well, just as we do. They share these and other capacities with us.

As just a few examples, among many: scientists at the University of Guelph have learned that pigs and chickens will choose to turn on the heat in a cold barn if given the chance and to turn it off again when they are too warm, and University of Bristol researchers have observed that chickens will complete a difficult maze to reach a nest instead of laying their eggs on the barn floor. Perhaps you read the New York Times article about the ability of sheep to recognise the faces of 50 or more other sheep or humans from photographs, even if they haven’t seen the other sheep or humans in two years? In Pennsylvania, a farm welfare researcher has shown that sows like to play video games, and that they play the games better than some primates. And a researcher in Saskatchewan is studying the complex social lives of cattle, finding that they interact in ways very similar to the ways we interact. These scientists join sanctuary owners and many small farmers in recognising that animals are individuals, with feelings just like our own.

Science and understanding may have progressed, but factory farming hasn’t. As Senator Robert Byrd told the US Senate, “Our inhumane treatment of livestock is becoming widespread and more and more barbaric.” He went on to detail the suffering of pigs in tiny stalls, hens in cages, calves in crates, and the inhumane—and inhuman—slaughter of all these animals. Senator Byrd stated, “These creatures feel; they know pain. They suffer pain just as we humans suffer pain.”

I hope that everyone listening will watch PETA’s short “Meet Your Meat” video, which you can watch or order online, at GoVeg.com. Once you have a copy, please make more copies for everyone who you think might profit from watching it, and encourage them to do likewise. The video shows you what you’re supporting if you consume meat, dairy products or eggs. Every practice shown on the video is standard across the animal-agriculture industry.

The indisputable fact of the matter is that the production of all animal foods in modern agriculture settings, no matter if they are meat, dairy or eggs, always involves killing the animals when they are no longer profitable, and this is always a gruesome and violent process. Furthermore, factory farms are abusing animals—they are treating animals in ways that would be illegal, were dogs or cats treated so abusively. Everything natural to animals is denied them; their entire lives, from birth to death, are characterised by unmitigated misery. Alice Walker has a phrase for eating animal products: she calls it “eating misery”.

In the rush for profits, abnormal breeding practices are used so that animals will grow far more quickly than they would naturally, and their organs and limbs can’t keep up. So, for example, chickens’ upper bodies grow seven times as quickly as they did just 25 years ago, but their lungs, hearts and limbs can’t grow that fast. These factory-farmed animals live for fewer than two months before they’re at full slaughter weight, and yet they still suffer from high rates of lung collapse, heart failure, and crippling leg deformities. Chickens and turkeys are naturally inquisitive and would normally spend their lives actively dust- and sun-bathing, digging in the underbrush, building nests, playing with their chicks, and so on. Walk into a factory shed today, with tens of thousands of chickens, and you’ll find that, after just a month, the animals have become so debilitated that they can barely move.

Similar conditions exist for all animals raised for food. Cattle and pigs have their testicles ripped out with no painkillers. Cattle have their horns cut from their heads and have third-degree burns, branding, inflicted on them, often three or four times during their short lives. Pigs have their ears, tails and teeth mutilated. The beaks of laying hens are seared off with a hot blade. The animals are pumped full of hormones or antibiotics, both to make them grow more quickly and to keep them alive through the horrible conditions that would kill them from stress and disease if they were not drugged.

After very short lives, the animals are shipped to slaughter, often through severe weather extremes and always without food or water. Conditions are so bad that some animals arrive at the slaughterhouse crippled or dead. According to the USDA, more than 100,000 cattle per year, mostly dairy cows, arrive at slaughterhouses unable to walk off the backs of the transport trucks. According to the National Pork Board, more than 400,000 pigs each year arrive for slaughter unable to walk off the trucks. More than 100,000 pigs arrive dead from the harsh travelling conditions. As for those who do make it, imagine how bad the conditions must be to kill and injure so many others.

Gail Eisnitz wrote an excellent book titled Slaughterhouse, and you can read reviews and extensive excerpts on the Web by using the Slaughterhouse link on the GoVeg.com site. Ms Eisnitz interviewed USDA slaughterhouse veterinarians, slaughter workers, and truck drivers as well as others who are intimately familiar with conditions in US slaughterhouses. These experts testified that animals routinely arrive for slaughter frozen to the sides of transport trucks, frozen to truck bottoms in their own faeces and urine, crippled from the journey, and so on. Near dead, they are simply hooked to chains and dragged from the backs of the trucks.

The animals who live through transport invariably suffer an awful death. Workers and veterinarians from inside the plants testify that animals are routinely conscious through the entire slaughter process—their throats are slit, their limbs hacked off and their skin torn from their bodies while they are still conscious. Pigs routinely go into the scalding hot water for hair removal still conscious. Chickens are scalded alive in the feather removal tank.

This is an inevitable result of the fact that pig slaughter lines in the US move at a rate of 1100 animals per hour. Cow slaughter lines move at 400 animals per hour. In the European Union, the maximum rate is 300 for pigs and 75 for cows. So, US lines are moving three to six times as quickly as European lines. Obviously, animals are still going to be conscious as their throats are slit and their limbs hacked off.

In PETA’s “Meet Your Meat” video, we show slaughter at its “best”—cows and pigs slaughtered in a small slaughterhouse in Massachusetts, by a trained worker who is in no hurry at all. And yet, you can clearly see that the animals are still conscious as their throats are slit. With lines moving at the rates they do and workers making so little money and having so little training, one can assume that gratuitous abuse is the norm, rather than the exception.

Sometimes people ask about dairy products, since the animal abuse in the dairy industry isn’t as obvious It may be surprising to hear that animal abuse in dairy production is worse than that in most other animal product-based industries. Cows give milk for the same reason all animals give milk—for their babies. But we take their babies away from them within 24 hours of birth and add the females to the dairy herd. Many of the males are raised for veal. You might say that there is a hunk of veal in every glass of milk.

But that’s not all: not only do those who consume dairy products support the veal industry; they support the abuse of the cows as well. Most dairy cows spend their entire lives on concrete and often become lame as a result. And dairy cows now give about four times as much milk as they did just 25 years ago. Imagine a human mother giving four times her normal milk output. The animals’ udders are so overloaded that they sometimes drag on the ground, and fully one-half of all dairy cows suffer from mastitis, a painful udder infection. There is no way of getting around the fact that the production of dairy and meat involve very similar aspects of pain and suffering for the animals. It is best not only for us but also the animals if we can transition as quickly away from these products as we are able to do. Thanks to the creation of so many fantastic soy products in recent years, it is now easier to do then ever.

One of the most incredible facts about the animal abuse I’ve just discussed is that it’s all routine. It’s inspired by profit; it’s standard agricultural practice. The industry will tell us that only happy animals produce, but that’s nonsense: stressed animals eat more. Animals unable to move grow more quickly than animals that can move around. Mutilating animals and dosing them with hormones and antibiotics allows them to live through conditions that would normally cause them to kill one another from the stress or to get sick and die. And, of course, cramming animals into transport trucks, even though it kills a lot of them, is more economically viable than using more trucks and giving the animals more space. Once they’re at the slaughterhouse, the low-wage, high-turnover workers are forced to kill at such a pace that animal welfare is entirely discounted. Profit is king; animal welfare is not a concern.

Okay, then, what about fish? As we discussed earlier, fish may not scream out in pain, but they feel pain every bit as much as mammals and birds. This is a physiological fact, and it’s not disputed in scientific circles. And although we may have trouble empathising with fish, their methods of sonic communication, their senses of smell, their ability to navigate, all put human beings to shame. In fact, marine biologists like Jacques Cousteau and Sylvia Earl tell us that fishes are individuals with unique and interesting personalities.

Regardless of who’s bringing in the catch, the methods of raising and killing fish are undeniably abusive. Commercial fishing trawlers, as I’ve mentioned, can net 800,000 pounds of fish; the fish are killed by crushing or by decompression as they are dragged from the ocean. Think about death by decompression or crushing. Have you ever felt claustrophobic in a crowd of people on a subway train or at a concert? Imagine how it would feel to be killed by being crushed. Or decompression—it’s like stepping onto the moon without a spacesuit. Decompression often ruptures fishes’ swim bladders and causes their eyes to pop out of their heads.

Aquaculture may be even worse, and it accounts for close to one-third of the fish consumption by human beings. Aquaculture involves cramming thousands of fish into tubs or confining them to roped-off areas of the sea or ocean, each animal with just a bit more room than the space taken up by his or her body. An aquaculture tank looks sort of like a massive tub of writhing Spam; you can’t believe that there are fish in there, and you have to wonder how a single animal could survive. The answer is that they’re drugged with antibiotics, but the death losses are massive nonetheless. And, as I mentioned, producing 1 pound of farmed fish requires 4 pounds of wild-caught fish.

Make no mistake: if someone eats meat, dairy or egg products, that person is contributing to serious animal cruelty, no matter how good of a person they are in the rest of their life. And it’s animal cruelty that, if it were done to a dog or a cat, would warrant felony animal abuse charges against everyone involved. This isn’t a comfortable thing to deal with, I know, but it is the truth. And how can we turn our backs once we know this?

But that’s not all …

Animal Rights
The final reason I hear for adopting a vegan diet, and this may be the most important reason for teens and college kids, is the growing understanding that animals feel pain in the same way we do—in fact, it’s this realisation, that animals are not automatons, that forms the basis of the modern animal rights movement.

Before coming to PETA, I spent six years working in a shelter for homeless families and helping to run a soup kitchen in Washington DC. While there, a friend of mine sent me a book by a theologian at Oxford University, Dr Andrew Linzey, who argues that animals were designed with certain needs, desires, species-specific behaviours and inclinations, and so forth and that animals have the capacity for pain and suffering, just as human beings. From Dr Linzey’s perspective, denying animals the ability to do the things they were designed to do and inflicting pain on them for reasons of convenience are categorically unethical. Linzey argues that causing pain to an animal is the moral equivalent of causing pain to a human being.

This was the first time that I’d heard that particular argument. The logic of it spoke to me on a deep level. Of course, if animals have the same right to be free from pain and suffering as do humans, we certainly can’t eat them, rip their skins off to wear them, experiment on them, or beat them into doing senseless acts in circuses or rodeos. It was this argument, which I heard after I’d already been a vegan for about 4 years for human rights and environmental reasons, which caused me to become an animal rights activist and to come to eventually come to work for PETA.

Basically, Linzey’s is the animal rights perspective. The animal rights perspective holds that animals have a right, just as human beings do, to be free from pain and suffering. Back in the 18th century, Jeremy Bentham, the father of the Utilitarian Movement, stated that if we’re talking about a being’s right to be free from pain and suffering, the morally relevant variable is not whether that being can think or talk or how we relate to that being’s life, but his or her capacity to feel pain, to suffer. Of course, any introductory physiology course will teach you that birds, mammals, and fish, have basically the same capacity to suffer. We share this capacity with all animals.

Alice Walker, the civil rights activist and humanitarian who wrote The Colour Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy, wrote the introduction to a book titled The Dreaded Comparison by Marjorie Spiegel. In this book, Spiegel compares the treatment of human slaves in the 16th through 19th centuries to the way animals are treated today. Alice Walker agrees, saying, “The animals of the world … were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women were created for men.” That’s quite a statement. “The animals of the world … were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women were created for men.”

The animal rights movement is a movement for justice, just like abolition, suffrage, civil rights and women’s rights. Most people today understand that bias on the basis of race or gender or religion or nationality—any bias against other human beings—is wrong. The neglected link, for many, is species bias—having the idea that just because certain beings are not human, we can do whatever we wish with them. Dr Albert Schweitzer put it well when he stated that “compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to [hu]mankind”.

Again, prejudice is prejudice, whether it is based on race or gender or religion—or on species. In each case, a line is drawn, separating those in the group above the line from those in the group below the line. Nobel laureate Dr Isaac Bashevis Singer, who fled Nazi-occupied Poland, called species bias the “purest form of racism” and animal rights the purest form of justice advocacy, because animals are the most vulnerable of all the downtrodden. He felt that mistreating animals is the epitome of the “might makes right” moral paradigm—a moral paradigm that is ethically bankrupt.

Interestingly, the animal rights perspective has been embraced by a range of brilliant thinkers and humanitarians that includes, in addition to those I’ve mentioned: Pythagoras, Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Harriet Beecher Stowe, C.S. Lewis, Susan B. Anthony, Leo Tolstoy, and Mahatma Gandhi.

Conclusion
In conclusion, I’m convinced, on the basis of the evidence, that a vegan diet is, without a doubt, the very best choice for our health, the only sustainable choice for the environment, and the only choice that expresses in a positive manner who we are in the world—compassionate people, compassionate toward people and toward animals.

Albert Einstein said that nothing would benefit humanity more than the general adoption of a vegetarian diet. Leo Tolstoy stated, “Vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism.” Their point, as they elaborated, is that eating is essential to who we are. There is a lot of suffering in the world. There are a lot of problems. Solutions will require time and devotion from people of goodwill. But if every time we sit down to eat we choose to support animal abuse, unjust human relationships and environmental degradation, what does that say about our integrity, about our commitment to other issues of social justice? Again, according to Tolstoy, “Vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism.”

It is interesting to recall that slavery on this continent flourished from the 1520s until the mid-1860s. Women were not given the right to vote in the US until 1920, with the passage of the 19th Amendment. Many people listening probably have close relatives who were alive when there was a spirited debate in Congress about whether the Union would dissolve if these irrational creatures, women, were given a say in governance. One hundred years ago, there wasn’t a single law against child abuse in this country. Not one. Your child was your property.

One hundred years ago, there was not a single country on the planet that guaranteed the vote to all adults. It’s remarkable to recall that just 350 years ago, the Pope sentenced Galileo to the torture chamber until he would recant the “heresy” that the Earth is not the centre of the physical universe.

For a bit of historical perspective here, let’s recall that Socrates was teaching 2,600 years ago; Plato and Aristotle were philosophising 2,500 years ago. Jesus was preaching 2,000 years ago. Shakespeare was writing 500 years ago. But we just got around to saying, “Hey, maybe people shouldn’t hold slaves, and maybe people shouldn’t be free to beat their children, and maybe women are rational enough to be given a say in governance,” fewer than 150 years ago.

I mention all this only to point out how quickly things change. Not long ago, a mere historical blink of an eye, society believed with complete certainty the diametrical opposite of what we believe, and with equal certainty, to be true about many things today.

Look how far the animal rights movement has come in, historically, no time at all. In just the past 20 years, science has shown that a vegan diet is the healthiest and environmental researchers have proved that eating meat, dairy products, and eggs is not sustainable. Even more importantly, the scientific view that animals are don’t feel emotion has been replaced by a new, belated understanding that, of course, they do. In just the past few years, the issue of animal treatment on factory farms has taken centre stage, with the US Congress decrying slaughterhouse treatment of animals, the fast-food giants requiring some improvements for animals, and the Washington Post running front-page stories about some of the abuses.

When I became a vegan in 1987, vegetarian foods were just coming on the market, and some didn’t taste very good. Now, Silk-brand soy milk is in every grocery store in the country, and even shows like 20/20 are proving, in blind taste tests, that people like it better than cow’s milk. Chains like Burger King, Johnny Rockets and Ruby Tuesday are selling fabulous veggie burgers across the country. Veggie wraps and gourmet salads are more popular than ever. Millions and millions of people are learning that moral integrity requires that when we sit down to eat, we make conscious choices, rather than unconscious ones, and that the only diet for environmentalists, animal lovers, and people who care about their health is a vegan one.

The 18th century saw the beginnings of our democratic system, which was the first to hold that “all men are created equal” and which established, under the law, basic freedoms such as the rights to assemble peacefully, practice one’s chosen religion, say what one likes, and print what one likes. The 19th century abolished slavery in the developed world. The 20th century abolished child labour, criminalised child abuse, and gave women the vote and blacks wider rights. If we all do as much as we can, the 21st century CAN be the one for animal rights.

I suppose for me, it boils down to Socrates’ adage from 2600 years ago, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” It seems to me that what it means to be a person of integrity is that I try to ask questions, which I try not to support things that I oppose, that I try to make my life mean something.

That’s what I think it means to have integrity—that I try to lead a life that is in keeping with my professed values—my opposition to human exploitation, my view of myself as an environmentalist, my desire to be as healthy as possible, so I can work and play harder, my belief in kindness, toward other people and toward animals.

Please ask yourself: would you want to work on a factory farm, searing the beaks off of chickens or castrating pigs and cows without painkillers? Would you want to work on a factory fishing trawler? Are there other areas of your life where you participate in practices that would repulse you if you had to watch them happening? You know most of us could watch grains being tilled or even spend an afternoon shucking corn or picking beans, fruits or vegetables. Seriously, how many of us would want to spend an afternoon slitting open animals’ throats?

Some people go vegan overnight; others take a bit more time. I don’t want to discount the power that convenience, social pressure and so on, can wield. Clearly, any decision to decrease consumption of animal products is to be celebrated, even as it’s seen as a step toward the transition to a totally vegan diet …

I think that ethics must include living a life that is, as much as possible, in keeping with our basic values. We can’t be perfect, but we really should all do as much as we can.

I have no doubt that in 100 years, human beings will look back on the human mistreatment of other animals with the same horror we presently reserve for historical injustices such as slavery and moral transgressions against human beings.

Animals suffer and die like we do. Animals are made of the same stuff we are. Eating them is an act of gluttony and disregard for our own health, for the environment, for the global poor, and most of all, for our fellow animals. If you are not a vegan, please work toward becoming one. If you are a vegan, thank you so much for caring and please become more active.

One of the exciting things about helping animals, the Earth, and your own health is that you don’t have to fill out a form or make a call. You can start today, by choosing a healthy, humane, vegan meal when you sit down to eat.

Happy veganism.