A Quote by Jonathan Safran Foer
There is an overabundance of rational reasons to say no to factory-farmed meat: It is the No. 1 cause of global warming, it systematically forces tens of billions of animals to suffer in ways that would be illegal if they were dogs, it is a decisive factor in the development of swine and avian flus, and so on.
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Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.
Animals on factory farms and slaughter houses are mutilated, drugged and abused in ways that would be illegal if dogs or cats were treated similarly. The problem is that farm animals are exempted from the Animal Welfare Act. Therefore, companies often act with impunity.
Each year, billions of animals are subjected to cruelty on factory farms, feed lots, and slaughterhouses. The brutality that these animals endure would be grounds for felony cruelty charges if inflicted upon our cats and dogs.
The factory meat industry has polluted thousands of miles of America's rivers, killed billions of fish, pushed tens of thousands of family farmers off their land, sickened and killed thousands of U.S. citizens, and treated millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty.
Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn't motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn't enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?
We know it (meat eating) is indisputably the number one cause of global warming. So what does it mean exactly to be an environmentalist on a daily basis if you are not thinking about the number one cause of global warming or one of the top two or three causes of all other environmental problems? Does it mean you are necessarily someone who doesn't care about the environment? Obviously not, but it might mean you have a blind spot for something big.
Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.
Heidi Cullen had said that all of these local and cable weather forecasters who have been certified by the AMS, the American Meteorological Society, should be decertified if they refuse to accept the proven science of man-made global warming. There are numerous credible scientists, who have not been convinced that this is anything other than sunspot activity or normal cycles that the earth has gone through for billions and billions and billions and billions of years. Science can't prove man-made global warming, they simply can't, so they come up with this notion of consensus.
The business of raising animals for food (with its continuous heavy waste stream of methane and nitrous oxide - leading global warming gases) is responsible for about 18% of global warming. Some scientists actually say the number is closer to 50%.
Let’s start with the most prominent ecological crisis of our time: global warming. When you look seriously at the numbers, you find that switching from a meat-based to a plant-based diet would do more to curb and reverse global warming than any other initiative.
Ninety-five percent of the eggs produced in America come from factory-farmed birds. Even if free-range farms were hugely more humane, the sheer number of animals raised to satisfy people's desire for eggs, meat, and milk makes it impossible for us to raise them all on small, free-range farms.
Global warming results not from the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but from an unusually high level of solar radiation and a lengthy - almost throughout the last century - growth in its intensity. It is no secret that when they go up, temperatures in the world's oceans trigger the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So the common view that man's industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations.
The choice to become vegetarian was purely for ethical reasons. Like most meat eaters, I was a little concerned with removing meat from my diet. Also, like most meat eaters, I was blind to the horrible ways animals are treated.
Okay, I'll say I would go back in time and bring scientists with me and create a hairspray that would not cause global warming. But it would still give us '80s hair.
I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.
People tend to care about dogs because they generally have more experience with dogs as companions; but other animals are as capable of suffering as dogs are. Few people feel sympathy for rats. Yet rats are intelligent animals, and there can be no doubt that rats are capable of suffering and do suffer from countless painful experiments performed on them. If the army were to stop experiments on dogs and switch to rats instead, we should not be any less concerned.
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