Veganism in a Nutshell



Veganism in a Nutshell

by Bruce Friedrich, PETA

There are probably as many reasons to be a vegan as there are vegans. The five we hear most often at PETA are human rights, the environment, human health, animal welfare, and animal rights. I’ll address them each in a moment, but first, let me tell you why I became a vegan.

In 1987, during my first year of college, I read Frances Moore Lappé’s book Diet for a Small Planet. Basically, Lappé argues that cycling grains, soy, and corn through animals so that we can eat their flesh or consume their milk and eggs is vastly inefficient, environmentally destructive, and contributes to poverty and starvation in the developing world.

After reading Lappé, I wondered how I could claim to care about the environment, how I could claim to care about global poverty, if I kept eating meat, dairy products, and eggs. It also occurred to me that animals are made of the same stuff as humans—flesh and blood, and that they suffer just as we do. I grew up in Minnesota and Oklahoma, and it always saddened me to see trucks loaded with turkeys, chickens, pigs, or cows driving through the bitter Minnesota winter or the sweltering, arid Oklahoma summer, taking the animals, through all weather extremes, to what I knew would be a gruesome death. Taken together, the arguments were simply overwhelming. I decided to become a vegan.

Back to those top five reasons we hear for going vegan: A vegan diet is, without a doubt, the best choice for our health, the only sustainable choice for the environment, and the only choice that expresses in a positive manner who we are in the world—compassionate people, compassionate toward people and toward animals.

Meat, dairy, and egg products are making people sick. In fact, they are ruining our later years and killing us. They have absolutely no fiber or complex carbohydrates in them, and they are packed with saturated fat and cholesterol. In the short term, eating meat, dairy products, and eggs is likely to make a person fat and lethargic. In the long term, eating these products can cause heart disease, cancer, stroke, high blood pressure, and an array of other problems

Recently, there has been a lot of commotion about the fact that kids are getting fatter. One culprit is the soft drink industry, which is signing contracts with school systems to have its products given prominent placement. The dairy industry saw the prospect of a serious payday if it could challenge the soda dominance in schools. So what did the industry introduce? A product with even more sugar than sodas and more than twice the calories—460 calories in one bottle, and 16 grams of fat to boot! That’s almost as much fat as in a McDonald’s “Happy Meal,” and this is just a beverage. Dairy products are a prescription for obesity, heart disease, lethargy, and a host of other problems. That the dairy industry would actually claim to be doing kids a favor is morally revolting.

The second reason for adopting a vegan diet is for the environment. The best thing any of us can do for the environment is to adopt a vegan diet. Raising animals for food is steadily and rapidly depleting and polluting our arable land, potable water, and clean air. All animals need food to survive. For example, a 200-pound man will burn off at least 2,000 calories even if he never gets out of bed. As in humans, most calories that go into an animal are burned off; only the excess calories are available to make milk, eggs, or flesh and fat.

It’s bizarre, really: You take a crop like soy, oats, corn, or wheat, products high in fiber and complex carbohydrates, but devoid of cholesterol and artery-clogging saturated fat. You put them into an animal and create something with no fiber or complex carbohydrates at all, but with lots of cholesterol and saturated fat. It makes about as much sense to take pure water, run it through a sewer system, and then drink it.

The choice is clear: We can show our environmental values every time we sit down to eat by eating a vegan diet, or we can stomp over the Earth in combat boots by eating meat, dairy, or eggs. Really, a true environmentalist can’t eat meat, dairy, or eggs.

I want to be clear: Even if veganism were no better for the planet and even if a vegan diet were not healthier than one with meat and dairy products, a vegan diet is still the only clear and consistent ethical choice we can make where animals won’t be bred, abused and inevitably butchered on our behalf. We share the planet with an array of amazing beings, and if we would prefer not to contribute to their extreme suffering, we should not eat them.

Twenty years ago, scientists, the ones who were telling us we could smoke low tar cigarettes, were still telling us that other animals don’t feel pain in the same way that humans do. Now, no reputable scientist believes that. Everyone now understands that cattle, pigs, chickens, fish—all farmed animals—feel not only pain but joy, sorrow, fear, distress, and an array of other emotions as well, just as we do. They share these and other capacities with us.

As just a few examples, among many: Scientists at the University of Guelph have learned that pigs and chickens will choose to turn on the heat in a cold barn if given the chance and to turn it off again when they are too warm, and University of Bristol researchers have observed that chickens will complete a difficult maze to reach a nest instead of laying their eggs on the barn floor. Perhaps you read the recent New York Times article about the ability of sheep to recognize the faces of 50 or more other sheep or humans from photographs, even if they haven’t seen the other sheep or humans in two years? In Pennsylvania, a farm welfare researcher has shown that sows like to play video games, and that they play the games better than some primates. And a researcher in Saskatchewan is studying the complex social lives of cattle, finding that they interact in ways very similar to the ways we interact. These scientists join sanctuary owners and many small farmers in recognizing that animals are individuals, with feelings just like our own.

The final reason I hear for adopting a vegan diet, and this may be the most important reason for teens and college kids, is the growing understanding that animals feel pain in the same way we do—in fact, it’s this realization, that animals are not automatons, that forms the basis of the modern animal rights movement.

Before coming to PETA, I spent six years working in a shelter for homeless families and helping to run a soup kitchen in Washington, D.C. While there, a friend of mine sent me a book by a theologian at Oxford University, Dr. Andrew Linzey, who argues that animals were designed with certain needs, desires, species-specific behaviors and inclinations, and so forth and that animals have the capacity for pain and suffering, just as human beings. From Dr. Linzey’s perspective, denying animals the things they were designed to do and inflicting pain on them for reasons of convenience are categorically unethical. Linzey argues that causing pain to an animal is the moral equivalent of causing pain to a human being.

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