Why the heck do people go vegan?
Well, first of all, why do we even eat meat, milk, or eggs? The reason we still eat these things today is because of culture, because it is normal, because our parents told us so and because their parents told them so. For example, in parts of China eating cats and dogs is normal, we look at that with horror. In parts of India, the cow is a holy animal, they must look at us in horror.
Think about it, why do other cultures love and kill different animals than our culture? Because it is what they've been told to do. And what we are doing is what we've been told to do.
For the animals
Vegans believe that animals are not here to serve us.
Meat:
We don't have the right to bring animals into this world just so we can kill them. For people arguing that eating meat is natural, well, let me refere you back to the topic of culture, it is learned behaviour, not instinct behaviour. If you saw someone on the street beat a pig to death you would probably try to stop them or call the police, you would feel compassion for that pig. If you were a true meat eater your mouth would start to water.
Milk:
We bred cows so that they give huge amounts of milk, about 10x more than that their baby could drink, cows were not designed to give these huge amounts of milk and their body suffers the consequences. Cows 'in the wild' can live up to be 25 years old, in the dairy industry they are usually worn out by the age of 4 or 5 and then sent to slaughter.
What a lot of people don't realise (and neither did I) is that a cow has to be pregnant in order to start milkproduction. So, she is artificially impregnated and she carries a 9 month pregnancy just like human mothers do. In those 9 months she will feel her baby move around and she will become aware of the fact that she is pregnant. She knows she is going to have a baby. Cows have very strong maternal instincts, they love and protect their babies and usually their babies drink their milk until they are one year old and in the wild they would stay together in the herd for the rest of their lives. But in the dairy industry, 92% of all the babies are taken away from their mother in the first 24 hours of their birth.
Eggs:
In the egg industry you have 3 different kinds of factory's. One that produces the meat, one that produces the eggs, and one that simply produces more chickens, a hatchery. Most people understand (I hope atleast..) that only the females lay eggs. But what I didn't know and I think a lot of other people also don't know is that roosters don't grow fast enough to be profitable to raise them for meat. So, what does the hatchery do with all the unwanted roosters? The most common practice is to throw these cute little yellow fluffballs into a grinder, that grinds them up into pet or lifestock feed. They are babies, born far away from their mother and killed within hours after birth
For the planet
Animal agriculture is responsible for 51% of global CO2 emissions and with that, the leading cause of global warming. About 2 acres of rainforest is destroyed every second to grow food for lifestock. It is also the leading cause of ocean dead zones because of polluted water.
The average meat eater uses 16 times more land and 10 times more water than a vegan.
If the entire planet was vegan, we could feed everyone on this planet and a whole other planet too. Right now, 20.000 people starve to death every day. Yet no cow goes a day without food.
91% of all the soy is fed to cattle, 70% of grain is fed to cattle and 50% of all the corn is fed to farm animals.
Want to know more?
For the animals:
Earthlings
Gary Yourofsky's best speech ever
101 reasons to go vegan
For the planet:
Cowspiracy
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