Veganism – A Better Choice For Our Personal Health And The Environment
In this day and age, veganism has become a current trend and I am also one of the participants. As a vegan, I share different opinions after reading this article. I still consider eating meat is morally unacceptable. I will explain the reasons in some aspect such as animal welfare, environmental impacts, and personal health.
First and foremost, eating meat will cause farmed animals suffering from pain. I know that the article has mentioned that your husband and you grazed livestock freely in your 1,400-hectare farm. You said that all the animals could wander wherever they please and rest where they like. This site seems idealistic, but actually unrealistic. Firstly, there is insufficient land for most producers to create such a paradise for animals. Moreover, producers will keep those animals like sows in narrow stalls or chains to prevent larger pigs taking food from smaller ones in order to make high productivity and profit. For example, producers in Brazil, Canada and in many Us states are still allowed to keep sows in stalls their whole life. You may say that consumers can enhance animal welfare by adding the occasional organic, pasture-fed steak to our diet. However, the fact is there is just 1%-2% of pigs in the UK currently reared as organic or free-range. Therefore, there are few animals can live on a big farm and have a free and peaceful life. In contrast, most of them must be kept in small stalls with barely enough room to lie down and even do not have enough room to move around. What they really face are always infected by bacteria that cause disease and death. I think humans are not the only living beings on the planet who deserve to be treated with respect, so do other animals. Therefore, only becoming a vegan can make animals suffer from less pain.
Apart from the animal welfare, eating animals also brings tremendous impacts to the environment. The article has mentioned that grazing animals can stimulate vegetation and accelerate soil restoration so that it can improve the soil erosion which is caused by plowing and intensive cropping. However, grazing animals is also a culprit of soil erosion. In order to provide enough land for more livestock and meat, mass deforestation always happens. In the end, those trees can no longer provide resilience and nutrients for the soil to cause soil erosion. The environmental organization Greentumble has found that human bulldoze seven football fields or land every minute to make more room farmed animals, and raising them uses 30 percent of the planet’s landmass — think the size of Asia. Nevertheless, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% -an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union, and Australia combined without meat and dairy consumption. Therefore, stop eating meats is the better remedy to soil erosion.
Despite the fact that the article has mentioned that the methane emissions of livestock could be decreased by adding wild plants such as angelica into their diets, the farmed animals still produce a much larger amount of greenhouse gas than plants. The Chief of FAO's Livestock Information and Policy Branch, Henning Steinfeld also says: "Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems.” As I know that only cattle have contributed more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all forms of transportation or man-made contributors. Without banning eating meats, the greenhouse emissions will no longer be decreased and the global warming problem will become more and more seriously. Moreover, livestock produces another greenhouse gas — ammonia which is the main cause of acid rain, will also bring ill impact to the environment. On the flip side, plants can clean the air, which means replacing emission-creating livestock with plants can be beneficial to the environment.
Last but not least, eating meat actually brings more harm than good to our health. It is no denying that healthy meat contains some elements like linoleic acid — a powerful anti-carcinogen, are good for our health. However, the meat consumed today differs from the meat which only consumes natural food as the article mentioned. Nowadays, most farmed animals are fed grain-based feed and given growth-promoting hormones and antibiotics. As we all know that one of the reasons why the issue of antibiotic resistance is still serious is due to continued feeding animals with antibiotics. Worse still, some meat products are highly processed after the animals have been slaughtered. They are smoked, cured, then treated with nitrates, preservatives and various chemicals. Then people who consume red or processed meat will actually have higher chances suffering from cancer, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and other complications. On the other hand, becoming vegan can provide us with a more healthy and sustainable diet. Not only can vegetables provide sufficient nutrients all we need, but they can also help us become healthier because they contain lower fat and more dietary fiber. Therefore, becoming vegan will be a better choice for our personal health.
I understand that there may be some benefits of meat like increasing biodiversity, but like Dr. Peter Alexander’s saying that we should interpret these results not as the need to become vegan overnight, but rather to moderate our meat consumption.
