Three Shocking Facts About Eating Meat

 

The Surprise

A humorous take on the issue of eating meat, with a reminder of some of the harm it causes to us individually and to the wider world.

Source: Byzantine_K https://www.flickr.com/photos/november5/14996938526/ – includes larger sizes  for down load with a creative Commons License.

Though the above poster is satire the message it conveys is one of a shocking reality that few people fully comprehend.

Shocking fact: 65 billion animals are slaughtered worldwide each year

That right! Approximately 65 billion land (farm) animals are slaughtered worldwide every year  to sate the appetite of wealthy people in the west for a food they do not need and is not natural. A further 90 billion marine animals are also killed worldwide every year!

Here in the UK alone over 900 million farm animals die each year, in 2011 this included 8.5 million pigs, nearly 15 million sheep, 17 million turkeys, 15 million ducks, over 931 million chickens and 2.8 million cattle. Add to that 4.5 billion fish and 2.6 billion shellfish you have a total of over 8 billion animals killed in the UK each year.

This equates to 22 million animals slaughtered every day; 919,000 an hour; 15,000 per minute and 255 every second.

Read More:
http://www.viva.org.uk/what-we-do/slaughter/slaughter-farmed-animals-uk

Cruel Britannia – the shocking truth about animal farming in Britain today
Warning!!! some people may find this video upsetting. If you don’t there has to be something very wrong with you!

Source of video

http://www.viva.org.uk/what-we-do/cruel-britannia-life-and-death-uk-factory-farms – Scroll down the page for more information

The worldwide figure of 65 billion amounts to nine animals per person however keep in mind that this is an approximate average as of course millions of people in developing countries are starving and have never eaten meat.

This brings us to the next…

Shocking Fact: Meat contributes to the starvation of millions of people

Meat is a food that not only harms the defenceless animals who are killed after spending their short wretched lives in the shocking conditions of a factory farm, but also contributes to the starvation of millions of people in developing countries.

The fact is that there is enough food in the world for everyone. But tragically, much of the world’s food and land resources are tied-up in producing beef and livestock-food for the well-off, while millions of children and adults suffer from malnutrition and starvation. 

Dr. Walden Bello, executive director of Food First, Institute for Food and Development Policy.

There is enough plant food available on this planet to feed everyone yet over 850 million people are estimated to go hungry, at least 800 million people go to bed hungry every night, every five seconds one child dies from hunger. The annual UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) report says, present levels of hunger cause the death of more than five million children a year.

Almost a third of the Earth’s ice-free land surface is utilised to raising the animals we either eat or milk.

One third of the world’s grain goes to feed animals, the food from which goes to feed only about a third of our population of six billion. Consider : The amount of vegetable protein fed to the US beef herd would feed almost the entire populations of India and China. If animals where allowed to live out their natural lives, in their own environments, left to breed and graze in the way that nature intended, land used to feed animals bred to an unnatural proliferation could be utilised to directly feed people, with the result that there would be enough food to feed everyone. Without the interference of man, particularly concerning factory, farm animal’s would not in nature breed to the huge numbers that there are today.

Our world is capable of producing more than enough plant food to meet the needs of all its six billion people. If people used land to grow crops to feed themselves, rather than feeding crops to animals, then there would be enough to provide everyone with the average of 2360 Kcal (calories) needed for good health.

826 million people around the world are seriously undernourished – 792 million people in developing countries and another 34 million in industrialised countries (18). Two billion people – one third of the global population – lack food security, defined by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as a “state of affairs where all people at all times have access to safe and nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life.” (5) Today, some 12 million children die annually of nutrition-related diseases. The Food and Agriculture Organisation says, “Doubtless, far more are chronically ill.” (19)

For more information concerning this issue please read the article Feed the World from which the above quotations came:
http://www.viva.org.uk/resources/campaign-materials/guides/feed-world – The pdf file and the online file are free. The pamphlet is £1 which goes towards helping animals.

Shocking Fact: Meat is harmful to the environment and contributes to global warming.

“If anyone wants to save the planet , all they have to do is to stop eating meat. That’s the most important single thing you can do. It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty.
Paul MaCartney

Eating meat harms the environment and may be one of the largest factors to climate change.

According to a new documentary the agriculture industry is one on the main contributors of climate change.

Please take the time to read the information below and watch the trailer for Cowspiracy

There is one single industry destroying the planet more than any other.
But no one wants to talk about it …

Read More and watch the video:
“Cowspiracy” …. a new documentary!!

http://hrexach.wordpress.com/2014/08/18/cowspiracy-a-new-documentary/

Cows don’t conspire, that’s for sure. But they’re involved in a conspiracy of silence and misinformation, created by humans, which aims to hide from public knowledge the real impacts of our eating habits. When it comes to Meat, most of us are living inside the Matrix. By that I mean that most of us, of course, don’t care that much about knowing where the meat in our Big Macs or chicken nuggets came from. We doesn’t establish the connection between bacon and slaughtered pigs, or between the milk in our breakfast table and cows who are forcibly separated from their offspring. We prefer not even remembering that a living and sentient creature had to be killed and cut into pieces in order for us to enjoy our fleshy repasts inside a McDonalds or a Burger Kings.

Read More:

COWSPIRACY – THE SUSTAINABILITY SECRET (The Connections Between Animal Agriculture and Global Warming)

http://awestruckwanderer.wordpress.com/2014/08/23/cowspiracy-the-sustainability-secret-the-connections-between-animal-agriculture-and-global-warming/

http://cowspiracy.com/
https://twitter.com/Cowspiracy

6 Myths the Beef Industry Wants Us to Believe

http://nackpets.wordpress.com/2014/08/20/6-myths-the-beef-industry-wants-us-to-believe-one-green-planet/

Rain forests are still being felled to graze hamburger cattle. Going vegan saves one acre of forest every year.
Cornell University

Whole tracts of forest are cleared for grazing, one of the reasons that one and one-half acres of rainforest are lost every second. That is over 200,000 acres each and everyday!

“Experts estimates that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day due to rainforest deforestation.”
Rainforest Facts

Methane from live stock causes global warming. The erosion of soil by cattle and the contamination of water by slurry are further detriments along with the general processing techniques of the meat industry. Over grazing of live stock is causing deforestation. I personally find this concept confusing and we need to be careful here how we react to such as these environmental problems should not imply that cattle as a whole are a detriment and should not exist. No it is simply the exploitation and over breeding of cattle to provide meat and milk that is the problem; a source of food which we do not need in order to thieve, in fact meat and other animal products are a detriment to health. Furthermore every animal on the planet ceases to consume milk after weaning except humans, it is neither healthy nor natural. In their natural state cattle are like any other animal simply part of the environment and have as much right to exist as any other creature. All creatures impact in some way on the environment and have always done so. Imagine the problems dinosaurs created, the huge and veracious herbivores must have laid waste to whole swathes of land. However of course they probably did not exist in such proliferation as to become a serious detriment which threatened the survival of the whole eco system. It is man’s interference with nature and enforced breeding of live stock that has resulted in the potential destructive consequences mentioned above. Nonetheless these problems should not imply that it would be in order to cull these animals but rather in the future to allow animals to exist in their own indigenous habitats, to breed, graze and have a natural impact on the environment. I am of the opinion that the earth is self-regulating to some degree and it is only man’s interference that has resulted in nature’s inability to bring about such self regulation.

Not only upon land of course has man’s interference with nature and his insatiable need to consume meat impacted unfavourably, man has also caused devastation to our oceans and water ways. From lakes and rivers to the vast oceans of the entire world the disastrous effects of over fishing and other activities such as pollution has resulted in the extinction or significant decrease in populations of many species. This not only threatens the survival of many species of fish but also threatens to wreak havoc with entire ecosystems. For example fishing is threatening the world’s populations of whales, dolphins and porpoises, tuna, plaice, monkfish and cod. Other creatures adversely effected as a result of fishing include, birds, seals, turtles, mink and otters. Coral reefs and aquatic plants are similarly effected. For more information refer to information included in the following link to the Vegetarian society’s website: https://www.vegsoc.org/sslpage.aspx?pid=531

I consider that the greatest problem concerning the planet is man’s inference with the natural evolution of all creatures and none more so of course than in factory farming or the depletion of sea creatures for food. Such activities create an imbalance, a chain reaction that disturbs the whole ecosystem. Perhaps if nature where left to her own devices and her animals left unmolested, unexploited and not interfered with, such as selective breeding, the outcome of the aforementioned natural activities of grazing and the prolific production of methane, which is of course produced by all living creatures, would be less dramatic and would in time balance out.

Time to stop eating meat

Try Vegan For 30 Days – Sign the Pledge!

http://action.peta.org.uk/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=5&ea.campaign.id=20593&ea.tracking.id=GA&gclid=CPT84uiVscACFUsOwwodaTAAsg

Want some help:

Change your diet
http://www.viva.org.uk/going-vegetarian-vegan

How to go vegan
http://features.peta.org/how-to-go-vegan/

Vegan Recipies
http://www.unleashed.org.au/change_the_world/go_veg/vegan_recipes.php

Can’t live without your bacon here is a cruelty free alternative which does not require the death of these intelligent creatures:

The Vegan Bacon That Meat Loving – Foodies Can’t Get Enough Of: Recipe Included !http://freefromharm.org/vegan-recipes/vegan-bacon/