Factory Farmed or Free-Range — Animals Suffer When You Eat Meat

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re already aware of the horrible conditions — including cramped, unsanitary living quarters, lack of sunlight and persistent disease — encountered in factory farms. While free-range and other supposedly “humane” types of farming are advertised as an alternative to this, in fact they only prove what animal rights activists have known all along — namely that cows, chickens, pigs and other “livestock” are all highly intelligent, social creatures deserving of a long and happy life. If we are to honor this fact, avoiding the use of animal products entirely is the logical choice.

Animal Agriculture Kills Wild Animals, Too

It’s not only farm animals that suffer at the hands of the agricultural industry. Each year in the U.S., more than 3 million animals — including endangered species such as golden and bald eagles, as well as domesticated cats and dogs — are killed by Wildlife Services (a federal agency) in an effort to eradicate “nuisance” wildlife that could potentially attack “livestock”. These animals are often killed indiscriminately, often in painful, drawn-out ways. The current trend of free-range farming will only mean more collateral damage to animals living freely in nearby areas.

Eggs Aren’t Harmless

Taking a stand for animals can’t end with cutting out meat. If we are to be truly informed and ethical eaters, it is necessary to understand the harsh realities of egg farming, too. Here are some facts you might not be aware of:

• Hens in industrial farms are forced to lay up to 30 times more eggs than they would naturally
• 95% of all egg-laying hens live out their lives in cramped battery cages, where they are often cruelly de-beaked and frequently suffer from broken bones, hemorrhaging and dehydration
• Every year, 200,000,000 male chicks are killed by the egg production industry — typically by suffocation or ground up alive in industrial macerators

Neither is Dairy

The situation in a modern dairy farm is no less grim. Most newborn calves are forcibly removed from their mothers within 12 hours so that milking can begin.  This separation is extremely distressing to both the mother and her calf.  They often call for each other for days. Then, the calf will spend the first 2-3 months trapped alone in a small pen and fed a special milk replacer engineered to fatten them up for production as quickly as possible.

Once they are old enough to lactate, they begin a cycle of forced impregnation that takes an increasingly heavy toll on their bodies. When production declines around age four or five — less then a quarter of their natural lifespan — most dairy cows are unceremoniously slaughtered and sold for meat.

Vegan Diets Save the Lives of Animals

Every day — often without thinking — we make a series of small decisions about the foods we put in our bodies. Recognizing that you alone decide what to eat is the first step in ending animal cruelty. While many people find this intimidating, it can also be empowering.

To learn more about the link between veganism and animal rights issues, keep browsing our website and explore some of the resources we’ve put together for anyone who wants to make more responsible, humane dietary choices.

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I don’t eat lamb…You feel guilty. It just feels kind of like…they are very gentle. It’s like a shame that they’re killed and we eat them. Well, cows are [gentle, too, but we eat them. I don’t know how to describe it….It seems like everybody eats cow. It’s affordable and there are so many of them but lambs are just different. You don’t cuddle a cow. Seems like it’s okay to eat a cow but it’s not okay to eat a lamb…the difference is weird.    — 43-year-old meat eater

Statements like the ones above epitomize the types of comments meat eaters make that bewilder vegetarians. It truly is perplexing: a butcher wouldn’t be able to carry on with his work if he really thought about what he was doing, and a rational adult male is affectionate toward one species but eats another and has no idea why. Before being asked to reflect on their behaviors, neither of them thought there was anything at all odd about the way they relate to the animals that become their food, and after such reflection their awareness “wore off” within hours. So the butcher kept the unpleasant reality of his job at bay and continued to process animals, while the meat eater suppressed his mental paradox and continued to eat them. It is no wonder that vegetarians find the mentality of meat confounding.

Yet for many vegetarians, what is most baffling is not meat eaters’ tendency to avoid reflecting upon their food choices, but the array of explanations they give for why it’s “impossible” to stop eating meat: After learning the myriad nutritional benefits of a plant-based diet, the health-conscious meat eater claims he doesn’t want to risk becoming protein deficient. After reading the statistics of the environmental damage wrought by animal agriculture, the hybrid-driving meat eater says she’s got her hands full working on other social issues and   she doesn’t eat much “red” meat anyway. After learning that countless

grocery stores and restaurants offer plentiful vegetarian options and that there’s a wide variety of cookbooks and vegetarian starter kits that offer guidelines for transitioning to a plantbased diet, the intellectual meat eater says it would be too complicated to stop eating meat. After hearing about the suffering of farmed animals, the sensitive meat eater expresses heartfelt sympathy only to end up at the Burger King drive-through later that day because she can’t break the habit of eating animals. And after eating yet another delicious faux meat meal that he claims is so much like the real thing he couldn’t tell the difference, the meat eater says he “could never” become vegetarian because he likes meat too much. The same people who find it impossible to stop eating meat may have raised a family on their own, survived a life-threatening illness, worked their way through a lifetime of schooling, lived through a major trauma, won a Nobel prize, or accomplished any number of feats that surely require more effort and sacrifice than becoming vegetarian.

Understandably, the mixed messages meat eaters send can cause vegetarians to feel exasperated and frustrated. Yet, rather than question a meat eater’s mentality, which would lead to greater understanding, vegetarians often question the meat eater’s character, which leads to further tension and confusion – at best, the meat eater is viewed as selfish and lazy, someone who puts his or her own comfort and convenience above the lives of other animals and the preservation of the planet. But while it makes sense that vegetarians would draw such conclusions, these assumptions are arguably as illogical as those posited by meat eaters. Many meat eaters are also loving fathers, mothers, and friends; they are fearless rescue-workers, dedicated teachers, impassioned activists, tireless community leaders, kindhearted philanthropists, compassionate animal caretakers, devoted partners, and great humanitarians.   that it enables humane, rational people to engage in inhumane, irrational behavior, without even realizing what they’re doing. So, vegetarians would do well to focus on meat eaters’ mentality rather than their morality and approach conversations with curiosity rather than resentment.

Approaching meat eating with curiosity can lead vegetarians to ask the questions that will help them more effectively relate and advocate to meat eaters: How can compassionate individuals put the body parts of dead beings into their mouths and find the experience pleasurable rather than repulsive? How can a nation of critical consumers who may brood over which brand of jeans to purchase leave their food choices so unexamined—choices that drive an industry that kills 10 billion animals per year? How do people not see the contradictions that are right in front of them? Vegetarians—and even a number of meat eaters—understand why people shouldn’t eat meat, but few people understand why they do eat meat and it is this latter point that must be addressed in order to have more productive conversations about meat consumption.

IDEOLOGY

The answers to the above questions make sense only through the lens of ideology. An ideology is a social belief   system that shapes people’s beliefs, feelings, and behaviors. A dominant ideology is the belief system of a dominant (power-holding) social group – for example whites, males, or the economically advantaged – and it is so socially entrenched that its influence is largely invisible. Dominant ideologies construct our reality; they shape the lens through which we see the world by promoting beliefs, attitudes, practices, laws, values, and social norms as universal truths rather than a set of opinions that reflect and reinforce the interests of the power-holding group.

Dominant ideologies whose tenets (beliefs and practices) run counter to the deeper values of most individuals must actively work to ensure the participation of the populace. Without popular support, the system would collapse. These ideologies rely on specific strategies, or defenses, to hide the contradictions between people’s values and behaviors, allowing individuals to make exceptions to what they would normally consider ethical. Such ideologies exist on both social and individual levels; their defenses operate externally (shaping social institutions and norms) and internally (shaping our mentality). External defenses maintain a social structure that forces people to conform to the norm by rewarding those who do (e.g., making them feel socially accepted) and punishing those who deviate (e.g., making them feel deficient and ostracized). Internal defenses maintain the mentality that supports social norms, and these defenses are triggered any time information is presented that threatens the ideology. Internal defenses aren’t logical responses; they’re automatic reactions that block or distort information that may expose the ideology.

The primary defense of a dominant, “unethical” ideology is invisibility and the primary way the ideology stays invisible is by remaining unnamed. If we don’t name it, we won’t see it, and if we don’t see   it, we can’t talk about it. Invisibility protects the ideology from scrutiny and thus from being challenged. This is one reason that only non-dominant ideologies are named, at least initially; for instance, while there has long been a name for the ideology of those who don’t eat meat, vegetarianism, the dominant, meat eating ideology hasn’t been named until recently.

CARNISM

Carnism is the name I’ve given to the ideology in which it’s considered ethical and appropriate to eat certain animals. As long as eating meat is not necessary for survival, it’s a choice, and choices always stem from beliefs. Meat eaters are not carnivores, which are animals that need meat in order to survive. Nor are they merely omnivores which, like vegetarians, are animals that are able to survive consuming both plant and animal matter. “Carnivore” and “omnivore” reflect nothing more than a biological predisposition. For humans, eating meat is not a biological necessity, but a philosophical choice based on a set of assumptions about animals, the world, and oneself. [1]

By failing to name the system that is carnism, eating meat is seen as a given rather than a choice, and the assumptions driving meat consumption remain unexamined. This lack of awareness is why people eat pigs but not dogs and have no idea why.

Carnism is a system that is organized around intensive and unnecessary animal suffering. Because most people don’t want to cause animals to suffer, let alone know that they’ve participated in such suffering, the system must prevent them from connecting the dots, psychologically and emotionally. The carnistic system is set up to block awareness, in order to block empathy and its sister emotion, disgust. When a person sits down to a hamburger, for instance, she isn’t aware, or thinking, of the living animal she’s eating. She therefore isn’t feeling empathy for the suffering of the being that became her food and she finds the meat appetizing rather than disgusting.     But this same (American) diner doesn’t have years of carnistic conditioning when it comes to eating dogs. Were she to sit down to an identical burger, but made of dog flesh rather than beef, she would be acutely aware of the animal from whom the meat was procured and she would likely be too disgusted to eat it.

Carnism enables people to eat the meat of a select group of animals by employing a specific set of defenses that operate on a collective as well as an individual level. These defenses include, but aren’t limited to, denial (“Animals raised for meat don’t really suffer much”), avoidance (“Don’t tell me that; you’ll ruin my meal”), dichotomization (“Dogs are for loving and pigs are for eating”), dissociation (“If I think about the animal that became my meat I’ll be too disgusted to eat it”), and justification (“It’s okay to eat certain animals because they’re bred for that purpose”). Carnistic defenses are intensive, extensive, and are woven into the very fabric of our society and our minds.

RELATING TO CARNISTS

Much of the confusion and tension between vegetarians and meat eaters, or carnists, exists because neither group recognizes the carnistic mentality or the tremendous pressure to maintain the carnistic status quo. Vegetarians need to understand that carnists are ensnared in an invisible system that actively works to coerce them to act against their own interests (psychological consistency and emotional authenticity) and the interests of others. Vegetarians also need to realize that asking a carnist to stop eating meat is asking for much more than a change in behavior. It is asking for a fundamental shift of identity, for a profound paradigm shift, and for the carnist to resist deeply embedded psychological defenses. No matter how easy it may have been for you to stop eating meat, for most people, this kind of change happens only over time, when they feel psychologically and emotionally safe enough to begin questioning some of their lifelong assumptions. In Strategic Action for Animals, I describe specific principles for communicating with and advocating to carnists so as to increase the likelihood that your interaction will be mutually satisfying and your message will be received. Following are some useful points:

MODEL THE QUALITIES YOU’RE ASKING FOR: curiosity, compassion, empathy, respect, and a willingness to truly listen and self-reflect. The more defensive you are, the more you’ll trigger defenses in your audience.

RELATE TO CARNISTS AS PEOPLE, RATHER THAN AS MEAT EATERS. No matter how much you don’t respect their choice to eat animals, it’s essential to respect carnists’ humanity.

SIMILARLY , REMEMBER THAT CARNISTS ARE INDIVIDUALS, many of whom have more in common with you than they do with each other. Don’t lump them into a group and project stereotypes onto them.

FOCUS MORE ON THE PROCESS (the dynamic, or the “how”) than the content (the subject, or the “what”) of a conversation. Instead of your goal being to influence another’s

perspective, strive toward having a respectful, mutually enlightening dialogue. No matter how strongly you feel about promoting vegetarianism, the more you strive to “convert” your listener, the less likely it is that you will achieve this end.

RECOGNIZE THAT THE FACTS DON’T SELL THE IDEOLOGY . The only reason a person would choose to eat a hamburger over an identical veggie burger is because of what meat represents, rather than what it actually is. Knowing this will help you feel less frustrated with resistant carnists.

DON’T LET DEFENSIVE CARNISTS DISRESPECT YOU. Some carnists attack vegetarians as a way of defending their meat eating. You should never let people judge you as being extremist, hypocritical, picky, hypersensitive, etc. } Create an empowering environment . Empowerment is the feeling of being connected to your personal power, and empowered people are much more likely make positive changes. The opposite of empowerment is shame, and shame results from feeling judged. To empower others, treat them as though they are fundamentally worthy – speak from your heart with the objective of sharing your truth and detach yourself from the outcome of the conversation.

Understanding the carnistic mentality can be tremendously liberating for carnists and vegetarians alike. By making the invisible visible, we take a step outside the carnistic system and can choose how we participate in it. Carnists can choose to more fully examine their meat eating; vegetarians can choose to more fully examine how they relate to carnists. And both groups can better cultivate the very qualities that will ultimately transform the system: awareness, empathy, and compassion

. [1] This statement does not refer to those who are geographically or economically unable to choose whether to eat meat.

The post The Mentality of Meat appeared first on North American Vegetarian Society.

Our sense of superiority over the rest of animal creation has always been founded on our superior intellect. For two reasons, intelligence provides a shaky foundation for the treatment of animals. First, intelligence does not predict sentience. There’s no valid reason that a mouse should feel the prick of a needle any less acutely than does a human. The British Clergyman Humphrey Primatt (1735-1779) said it eloquently: “Superiority of rank or station exempts no creature from the sensibi then disappear just a half second later, five-year-old chimp Ayumu casually touches the exact locations on the screen in the order that the numbers appeared. He can recall all 10 digits consistently, whereas the average human rarely gets beyond three or four. When the British memory champion Ben Pridmore – who can remember the order of a shuffled deck of cards in 30 seconds – competed head-to-head against Ayumu, the chimp performed three times better.

Recent studies are also revealing not only that animals have emotions, but that they have moods or dispositions – what I call ambient emotional states. For example, most of us have had periods in our lives when we are feeling down or depressed, or positive and full of optimism. Starlings appear to have similar feelings. Birds kept alone for 10 days in impoverished cages take a pessimistic view; they are much less likely than enriched and stimulated birds to investigate a dish that may contain either palatable or bad tasting food. Rodents, primates and  other animals confined for long periods in unstimulating farm or laboratory cages develop neurotic behaviors that reflect long-term negative emotional states. Baboon mothers who have lost an infant enter a period of mourning – the scientists call it bereavement – that lasts for several weeks. And like human parents, the bereft mothers seek emotional therapy by solidifying their social networks: they engage in more grooming bouts, which helps soothe the baboons’ anguish and better enables them to “move on.”

Once thought the sole province of humans, language – in which sounds or symbols are used to represent other objects that may be separated in time and space – has now been described in many species. Chickens have a vocabulary of more than 30 specific calls, including small-, large- and intermediate-sized aerial predators. Roosters entice hens with a “food solicitation call.” Occasionally, a rooster deceptively uses the call when there is no morsel present; hens soon learn to identify a cheater, which ensures that most roosters remain honest. Prairie dogs have about 20 different words for different predatory threats, each of which elicits an appropriate response even if the listener has not seen the threat himself or herself. Owing to heavy human persecution, many colonies have added a call for “man with gun” to their vocabulary.

Only recently have scientists begun entertaining the idea that animals have a sense of right and wrong. Yet we should not be too surprised that animals behave virtuously, or that they may have the rudiments of moral awareness, because social living requires that individuals make compromises and take others into consideration. During rough-and-tumble play, animals signal to each other that they will not bite too hard, and larger participants play less roughly to sustain the playful interaction. Studies with dogs and monkeys show that both have a sense of fairness. A monkey will refuse to continue “paying” for cucumbers if another starts to receive preferred grapes in exchange for a token. A dog will stop offering a paw if only the other dog is being given a treat for doing so; the refusal is not based on boredom or fatigue, for the same dog will continue to offer a paw for no treat for much longer if there is no second dog present.

Another way animals show goodwill to others is through cooperative breeding – in which mature adults forego breeding to help others raise offspring. It is widespread in mammals, birds and fishes. For instance, when a pair of Princess of Burundi cichlid fishes of Lake Tanganyika raise their brood, they are typically assisted by five helpers of  both sexes, who may or may not be genetic relatives of the breeding pair.

This is just a brief sampling of numerous studies coming to light that show that animals are highly sentient and that they have complex inner lives. These developments present both a paradox, and great promise. The paradox is that, even though our moral awareness of animals is unprecedented, we continue killing animals in unprecedented numbers. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that in 2005, humans worldwide killed 50 billion (land) animals to be eaten. And with a growing human population and the global spread of Western, meat centered dietary habits, that figure continues to climb.

The promise is that we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift in our relationship to animals. There is a proliferation of university courses in animal ethics and animal law, in books on animal ethics and veg*n lifestyles, and in laws protecting animals and banning cruel farming practices. In 1997, the European Union officially recognized animals as sentient beings able to feel pain and emotion, and on both sides of the Atlantic, the worst of factory farming practices are beginning to be banned. In Holland, the Party for the Animals – the first of its kind –has made rapid gains since its formation in 2002, most recently winning 4 percent of the Dutch popular vote, and is now on the brink of winning one of Holland’s 25 seats in the European Parliament.

With the rise of new problems linked to the consumption of animal products – including climate change, zoonoses (diseases passed from animals to humans) and the epidemics of obesity and diabetes – the human race is being forced to reassess its self-centered past. No longer can we afford to run roughshod over the planet and its sentient inhabitants. Never before has compassionate living been more clearly in our own best interests. The vegetarian movement is a vital cog in the wheel of these reforms.

Jonathan Balcombe is a biologist based in Washington, D.C. He is the author of “Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good” (Macmillan, 2006), and two forthcoming books: “Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals” and “Exultant Ark: A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure” (University of California Press, CA. September 2010).`

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The fact to consider is that this catchphrase, if coming from a meat-eater, is beyond the pot calling the kettle black. In fact, eating animals causes a great deal more human suffering than does going without.

The amount of harm done to humans by the animal industry is enormous and no other industry gets away with such harms on this scale. It persists, frankly, because so many people make their food choices without fully thinking about the broader implications for their neighbors or themselves.

How much harm are we talking about? Let’s start on the broadest scale: Livestock production helps fuel global climate change, accounting for anywhere from 18 percent (U.N. estimate) to 51 percent (Worldwatch Institute) of all greenhouse gases.

Let’s stop right here for a moment to consider that even if acceleration of global warming were the sole bad effect of meat-eating, those who abstain
would already have a decisive edge in the “who cares more about fellow humans” question. But the harm to humans goes further than that. Much further.

The entire human population is also threatened by animal-derived viruses (e.g., bird flu, swine flu, SARS, tuberculosis) and factory farms are prime incubators of many of these, says the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.

Among other “public health threats” the commission names is the careless use of antibiotics on healthy animals, a way of minimizing the spread of disease among animals in disease-friendly conditions. This accounts for more than 70 percent of all antibiotics used, which fosters new, stronger strains of disease, weakening the drugs’ effectiveness for sick people.

Add to this the outsize consumption of an ever- more-precious resource – fresh water – and already the livestock industry is bad for people as a whole.

Locally, the impact is more direct, the problems more acute. Air and water emanating from factory farms are said to cause breathing problems among their neighbors. The Pew Commission stresses that the gases generated by factory farms are associated with respiratory problems, such as asthma, for “communities proximate to [nearby] those facilities, as well as populations far away from these operations.”

The commission also cites “depression and other symptoms” attributed to animal-farm emissions. Manure contamination of sources of drinking water is also a danger, given the toxicity of E. coli and the potential effects of hormones in contaminated water.

But you’ve gotta take the bad with the good, the thinking goes, and the good is: Jobs.

Even that, though, is mostly hype. Certainly, a few people get very rich off of livestock, but in general, workers are exploited right along with the animals.
Dairies and slaughterhouses are often staffed by immigrants (illegal or not) who have little choice, and less voice, in their dangerous daily tasks. Injuries from corralling and dismembering large animals get downplayed, as the workers know they’re dispensable – and invisible.

Articles such as “The Chain Never Stops” in Mother Jones and such books as Gail Eisnitz’s Slaughterhouse have compiled both stats and personal stories detailing the misery, pain and horror these jobs entail for the down-on-their-luck populace that meat companies count on to tolerate such an abusive, violent work environment.

And while slaughterhouse workers clearly have a dangerous job, dairy employees (also often illegal immigrants) fare little better. A 2009 expose by Rebecca Clarren in High Country News detailed the misery, injuries and inhuman treatment common in these under-$10-an-hour jobs.

“It’s a job with lots of risks. If I had papers, man, there’s no way I’d be working in a dairy. But in this town, this is the best job I can get,” she quotes one illegal immigrant worker as saying. “Every worker I know says they’ve been kicked or stepped on by a cow. It’s common. But one day (the cows) might break your bones, or maybe even kill you.”

“Between 2004 and 2007,” Clarren continues, “nearly seven of every 100 dairy workers were hurt annually on average, compared to 4.5 out of 100 for all private industries. Beyond using tractors and heavy farming equipment, dairy workers interact with large, unpredictable farm animals – work that ranks among the most hazardous of all occupations, according a 2007 article in Epidemiology. Plus, they breathe air laced with bacteria and manure dust, putting them at risk for long-term respiratory disease.
Clarren notes that “The majority of the West’s nearly 50,000 dairy workers are immigrants,” and adds perspective from Marc Schenker, director of Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) Western Center for Agricultural Health and  to Safety: “If you’re undocumented, you won’t complain. You won’t ask … not do a task you think is dangerous. These things lead to workplace injuries.” Shenker stresses that “[t]heir injuries aren’t inevitable; they’re the failure of our system to do the right thing. It’s not only an injustice but a tragedy.”

Animal-industry work takes many forms – and so do its tragedies: Although hundreds of children and adults were likely scarred for life by witnessing trainer Dawn Brancheau’s death at a SeaWorld show, at least she died doing a job she loved. Dairy and slaughter workers encounter horrific workplace accidents (and fatalities), without the media attention.

The effect of the gruesome workplace dangers is damaging, and, as with environmental degradation, it also washes downstream.

A recent study found that even after controlling for demographics, race, unemployment and other supposed crime-related factors, a stark correlation remained: “Slaughterhouse employment increases total arrest rates, arrests for violent crimes, arrests for rape, and arrests for other sex offenses in comparison with other industries. This suggests the existence of a “Sinclair effect” [referring to Upton Sinclair, who noted
Care More About Animals  in The Jungle that slaughterhouse work seemed to make employees more violent and combative once their shifts were completed] unique to the violent workplace of the slaughterhouse, a factor that has not previously been examined in the sociology of violence.

Yes, the killing of animals – not just those in factory farms, note, but also the “humanely raised” ones spotlighted at Whole Foods – apparently leads to the killing of people, as we might expect given the many studies that show children who violently abuse animals are most likely to grow into human-abusing sociopaths.

Lastly, let’s remember consumers themselves, who raise their risk of hypertension, heart disease, cancer and stroke with every bite of meat. Add to this an additional 76 million cases of foodborne illness and 5,000 deaths each year, overwhelmingly caused by fecal contamination by livestock.

All of these harms are related: Since most people don’t want to watch what they’re paying to have happen to animals, meatpackers routinely break both humane- handling and food-safety laws. Earlier in 2010, an 18-year United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) veterinarian testified before Congress in conjunction with a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report showing enforcement of humane slaughter laws is lacking.

Dean Wyatt outlined violations of the Humane Slaughter Act he witnessed on the job, stuff like “aggressively” unloading animals, letting pigs slip and trample one another, and shackling and bleeding out pigs while they were conscious. He found his efforts to call attention to these systemic abuses thwarted, though.

“FSIS [Food Safety and Inspection Service] officials who were hundreds of miles away simply took company personnel at their word that the egregious events I had personally witnessed did not justify my actions,” Wyatt said in his testimony before lawmakers. After speaking up about problems, he faced retaliation from the agency.
If the agency’s not watching close enough to see such violations, they’re going to miss others. The USDA Inspector General recently found that “Beef containing harmful pesticides, antibiotics and heavy metals is being sold to the U.S. public because agencies are neither setting limits for them or testing for them.” In
one case a shipment was so contaminated it was turned back by Mexico – and then sold to U.S. consumers.

Big surprise, huh? The same people who don’t worry about causing animal suffering also don’t give a hoot about meat-eaters or their health – only their dollars. And many continue to fork over those dollars, while forking these products into their mouths.

Conversely, living a nonviolent, compassionate life is good for us and good for the planet. A vegan lifestyle avoids almost all of the bad effects described above.

In short, going vegan means giving your fellow humans – as well as the animals – a break.

VANCE LEHMKUHL is a vegan writer, cartoonist and musician. In addition to Vegetarian Voice, his writing has appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News and Z Magazine. He’s known for penning a collection of vegetarian cartoons, The Joy of Soy, for his long-running strip “Edgy Veggies” in Veg News, and for his live improv cartooning on veggie themes. He’s also the founder of the eco-pop band Green Beings and the host of Vegcast, a well-known vegetarian podcast.

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