I've heard all of your arguments

honey industry: remember! buying our things is the only possible way to save bees! pay us

We oppose big business interests and side with activists in any other context besides bacon, in which case we decide that we trust large multi-national corporations to tell us the truth about their products and we think protestors should “stop preaching” and get a job. We support collective boycott and understand that we can hurt corporations by refusing to purchase their products or use their services, but when it’s dairy on the line it apparently “makes no difference” whether we buy it or not.

These are my friends, Wallace, Finch, and Asparagus.

Wallace is called Wallace because he wallops people whenever they interact with him, his favourite type of communication is a playful headbutt and he NEVER backs down from a wrestling match (or loses one)

Finch is called Finch because he flinches every time you move, he’s the sweetest thing but he’s terrified of people, and he always keeps his distance.

Asparagus is called Asparagus because of his ear tag, labelled ‘aspergillus’ which indicates he’s had a skin infection in the past, but he’s incredibly inquisitive and curious and he’ll hang out near you forever, but never really close enough to get in contact.

When I walk into their field, I become their guest, and I don’t interact with them as a superior individual petting an inferior species, I see them exploring, wandering, nourishing themselves, communicating with each other, socialising, looking after their friends, defending themselves, and I know in my heart of hearts that each of their breaths is worth just as much as one of mine.

I’m now coming to terms with the fact that my friends are scheduled to be shot in the head and stabbed very soon, at a slaughterhouse which I’ve been to before, and has a history of both ineffective stunning and mad cow disease.

Put aside the devastating impact of animal products on our environment, put aside the fact that we can thrive and be healthier if we choose a plant based lifestyle, and that animal products are major causal factors in a significant number of ailments which plague the western world, put ALL of that aside.

They want to live.

Tell me, what do you think would be a good way to kill these animals? And whichever method you choose, would you therefore want to undergo it yourself? No? Why not?

See, no matter which method you choose, a mentally healthy individual would never want to go through it themselves, because it’s not about which way you die, it’s about the fact that you want to live, right?

Now, final question: You recognise that no method of slaughter you can think of for these animals would be suitable for yourself because you want to live, and you also recognise that these animals want to live, likely just as much as you do, still with me?

So tell me:

What gives us the god damned right to inflict this on them?

If you wouldn’t want to go through it, don’t subject others to it.

End of story.

Period.

‘Let’s cure cancer! We should strive to be better as a species! End world hunger! 😊👍’

Your average person after being shown that eating animals causes cancer, starves millions and will eventually cause the exponential escalation of climate change:

First, I just want to point out that the anatomy of carnivores and of humans is inherently different, everything about them from the increased acidity of their stomach acid to the reduced length of their intestines is an evolutionary trait designed to harvest all possible nutrients from decomposing flesh, without the added detrimental compounds (that we can’t avoid).

This is why you will never find a carnivore suffering from high cholesterol, even though one of the largest killers of modern western humans is high cholesterol in the form of atherosclerosis, strokes, and heart disease:

‘The highest intake of red and processed meat were associated with an increased risk of stroke by 41 and 24 percent’ http://www.pcrm.org/health/medNews/meat-and-eggs-increase-risk-for-stroke

‘Vegans have 28% reduced risk of ischemic heart disease’ http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/70/3/516s.full.pdf

‘Atherosclerosis associated with high dietary intake of meat, fat, and carbohydrates remains the leading cause of mortality in the US. This condition results from progressive damage to the endothelial cells lining the vascular system, including the heart, leading to endothelial dysfunction.’ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4315380/

On top of this, most of the other top killers of western populations can either be prevented or the likelihood of such reduced via alleviating animal products from the diet, such as heart disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and of course, cancer.

The causes of these diseases vary but can all be explained mechanistically, and the mechanistic data all points towards animal product heavy diets being the problem, for example type 2 diabetes is known to be associated with a higher body fat index, and in a recent report by the world health organisation, the only dietary group associated with an acceptable average of BMI, saturated fat intake, and cholesterol intake as well as more, was vegans, not even vegetarians came close.

Cancer is known to be caused by hormones such as oestrogen and IGF-1, and meat is recognised in a recent oxford study as being the source of 40% of all dietary oestrogen, with the remaining 60% coming from dairy products. Cancer is also known to be stimulated by the proliferation of muscle tissues leading to the release of free radicals into the bloodstream, which is inherently present in digesting meat, this is why vegan blood has an inherently elevated ability to fight cancer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/16094059/

And so yes, cancer has alternate stimuli for growth, but to discredit meat and other animal products in this process would be incomprehensible.

Now onto world hunger: Cattle are a catastrophically inefficient method of calorie conversion, estimates range from a calories in-calories out ratio of anywhere from 7.5-1 to 25-1, and it is because of this inefficiency of feeding a population 8x the size of our own, to then use as a food source, that 2/3rds of American produce goes to animals, and America alone could feed 1 billion people on plant based diets, whereas a global plant based diet could actually increase yield to feed an extra 4 billion people, but because so many people currently eat animal products, it’s necessary for places like America to import food from less developed countries, leaving those countries without enough food to feed their population. This is one of the methods that the meat industry use to run a monopoly over developing countries, which is criminal considering that 80% of starving children live in countries where food is either fed directly to livestock to be then subject to the horrors of live export, or the food is shipped to larger economies to be fed to animals there. http://m.dailykos.com/story/2013/9/29/1240661/-Feed-an-extra-4-billion-Grow-crops-for-humans-not-animals

Now yes, the system in place is largely responsible for this, this kind of inequity shouldn’t be allowed to exist but the fact that it continues to be so immovable is because the majority of the first world demands it to be. If the demand for animal products was to cease, so would the resources of the animal agricultural industries, so would their power over less privileged populations, so would their immunity from legislative change outlawing their exploitative industries, and so would the strife of world hunger.

Now lastly, climate change is a biggie and I’m running out of time to write this so I’m just gonna copy some resources straight in here, feel free to ask and I can get back to you ✌️ learning about the consequences of diet is a difficult process, I understand this, I remember the pain of learning the damage that I was causing to people and animals all over the world, but after I was able to think rationally again, I realised that the best way to eliminate these issues is to wipe away the customer base, destroy the power on which these industries stand, and then once they’re powerless, seek legislative change to ban industries from preying on vulnerable individuals, but we can’t progress into the later stages whilst people are still buying the product! 👍

*Here’s a report from the UN asking everyone outright to drop animal products because of their long list of environmental repercussions http://www.unep.org/resourcepanel/Portals/24102/PDFs/PriorityProductsAndMaterials_Report.pdf

*Because we currently feed more plants to animals than to humans http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034015/meta;jsessionid=74E875E1AFA11BD53BC5CDEA4A01ECFD.c5.iopscience.cld.iop.org

*And animals take in SIGNIFICANTLY more than they put out, it’s because the process of converting plant based-animal based calories is so inefficient, that we have a world hunger crisis, the world could currently feed 4 billion more people if everyone dropped animal products. http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034015/meta

Cattle take 7.5x as many calories as they put out https://web.archive.org/web/20170522083649/http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1027&context=driftlessconference

99% of US meat is factory farmed https://www.aspca.org/animal-cruelty/farm-animal-welfare

*Because 2/3rds of American produce goes to animals, and America alone could feed 1 billion people on plant based diets, but because so many Americans currently eat animal products, it’s necessary to import food from less developed countries, leaving those countries without enough food to feed their population. http://m.dailykos.com/story/2013/9/29/1240661/-Feed-an-extra-4-billion-Grow-crops-for-humans-not-animals

*Because animal agriculture is the main force in habitat destruction and species extinction. https://comfortablyunaware.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/biodiversity-and-food-choice-a-clarification/

*Because slaughterhouses are extremely dangerous places for workers, and the slaughterhouse workforces are largely immigrant based, because they’re easily exploited and will rarely stand up for their rights, for fear of being deported. https://www.hrw.org/report/2005/01/24/blood-sweat-and-fear/workers-rights-us-meat-and-poultry-plants

(2nd source) https://www.texasobserver.org/ptsd-in-the-slaughterhouse/

(3rd source) https://mobile.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/opinion/what-meat-means.html?

(4th source) http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5662261

*“What the Climate Action Plan fails to tell us is that livestock is responsible for 65% of all human-related emissions of N20, which has 296 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.”

“Climate change. Ocean dead zones. Fisheries depletion. Species extinction. Deforestation. World hunger. Food safety. Heart disease. Obesity. Diabetes. The list goes on. There is one issue at the heart of all these global problems that is too often overlooked by private individuals and policy makers alike—our demand for and reliance on animal products. ”

https://journals.law.stanford.edu/stanford-environmental-law-journal-elj/blog/leading-cause-everything-one-industry-destroying-our-planet-and-our-ability-thrive-it

*Because animal agriculture is responsible for 18% of all human related greenhouse gas emissions, 5% more than all transport combined. http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM

*Because emissions from livestock are predicted to increase by 80% by 2050, meaning that the earth will actually have no chance of survival whatsoever if we don’t curve it soon. http://academic.regis.edu/MFRANCO/Seminar%20in%20Biology%20research%20Literature/Papers/GobalDiets.pdf

*Because livestock is the driving factor behind the earth’s surface being 1/3rd desertified http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=17076#.VAodM17E8ds

*Because we could see the ocean as a total dead zone by 2048 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/11/061102-seafood-threat.html

There’s more than enough food to go around but distribution is SO corrupt and out of whack that pointing to any single source, including livestock, oversimplifies the issue horribly and ignores the basic underlying reason, which is greed. Through history, we’ve generally been able to balance our demand, including the demands of our livestock. We simply need to get better at standing up for ourselves.

Which is also what we need to do with climate change and workplace safety and all of that other stuff. There’s no reason that livestock would be doing all of that to the environment because the animals themselves simply don’t have that sort of impact. It’s the farming quality and ethics involved. I mean heck, look at how palm oil farmers have gone after orangutans, slaughtering so many, and that’s not a meat producing industry. They’re not willing to think about the greater impact or the ethics behind what they’re doing. And yet it doesn’t make palm oil farms inherently destructive or the industry inherently environmentally dangerous. It’s the same with any crop. Any crop has the potential to be destructive if planted by heartless and uncaring farmers. It can damage the soil for decades and even centuries, and that’s even purely organic farming too!

There is enough food to go around! The problem is that we feed it all to livestock! The system is corrupt and yes we need reform, but if livestock weren’t around, we would physically have no need to import so much from other countries because basic math would indicate that it would be an even bigger inefficiency than we have now, economically it would be idiotic. And so removing livestock from the equation would half the power of big Ag (by cutting out animal ag) and so the countries which we’ve exploited for their food would have nowhere to sell the food but to their own people, it wouldn’t be a perfect system still until we force reform, but you can’t say an extra 4 billion people’s worth of food would hurt the situation.

Unfortunately, factory farming is the most eco-friendly way of keeping up with our demand for animal products, and it’s still economically devastating. Open pasture farming requires exponentially more space, and so more deforestation, more desertification and less carbon sequestration. Livestock by themselves aren’t very damaging, but when global human biomass is around 350 million tons, and the biomass of cows alone is 560 million tons (not accounting for other livestock species), they could destroy the world on their own. Here’s why livestock are damaging: *Excessive food consumption requiring: -Excessive deforestation (over 90% of Amazon deforestation is accredited to livestock) -Excessive transport of food and livestock -Mass exploitation of human labour

*Excessive waste runoff causing nitrogen rich ocean dead zones where nothing can grow or survive

*Reduced ability of the earth to sequestrate carbon due to deforestation, leading to less carbon dioxide being absorbed from the atmosphere, further speeding global warming

*Because of their colossal biomass, colossal greenhouse gas emissions, as mentioned earlier, livestock are responsible for 5% more CO2 emissions than all transport combined, and for 65% of all N20, which has 296x the global warming potential of CO2.

*Desertification of the earth’s surface due to constantly harvesting the land and then acidifying the soil with animal waste, reducing the arable land and the potential for forest land until we can repair the land surface.

According to the British Dietetic Association, “Well planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of life and have many benefits.”

According to the Dietitians Association of Australia, “With planning, those following a vegan diet can cover all their nutrient bases.”

According to the Dieticians of Canada, “A healthy vegan diet can meet all your nutrient needs at any stage of life including when you are pregnant, breastfeeding or for older adults.”

According to Harvard Medical School, “Plant-based eating is recognized as nutritionally sufficient.”

According to the Cleveland Clinic, “There really are no disadvantages to a herbivorous diet”.