http://www.petaasiapacific.com/issues-nottoeat.asp
Quote:
Animals Are Not Ours to Eat
Four Good Reasons Why You Should Go Vegetarian
1. Because eating meat is murder.
We know that hamburgers and chicken wings don’t grow on trees.
They come from animals we’ve sentenced to death long before they’re
even born.
Everyone who eats animal products is responsible for the abuse
and deaths of beings with lives and personalities of their
own—beings who did not choose to be carved up and put on the dinner
table.
2. Because eating meat is torture.
Forget about green pastures, fresh air, and sunshine. Animals
raised for food are separated from their mothers shortly after
birth and spend their brief, miserable lives crammed together by
the thousands in factory farms, sometimes unable to move or to take
a single step in any direction.
Chickens raised for their flesh are bred to grow so big so fast
that their legs collapse beneath them. (How big and how fast, you
ask? Well, if human babies were forced to grow at the same rate,
they would go from 7 pounds to 1,500 pounds within 11 weeks.) As a
result, chickens suffer painful joint and bone conditions and heart
attacks. Unable to move, some die of thirst just steps away from
their drinking water.
Chickens raised for their eggs are kept in stacked cages, where
feces from the top rows fall onto the birds below. Male chicks are
worthless to the egg industry, so they’re tossed in the trash or
thrown into a meat grinder—while they are still alive—to be
grounded up and fed back to other farmed animals, even other
chickens.
Because animals raised for food are so stressed and fearful,
factory farmers think that the only way to prevent them from
fighting is through systematic mutilation. Chickens’ sensitive
beaks are cut off with a hot blade, and pigs’ teeth and tails are
cut off—all without the use of painkillers. On the killing floor,
many animals are still conscious when they are skinned and cut into
pieces.
And let’s not forget about fish. Whether they’re hooked through
the mouth, dragged out of the ocean in nets, or “harvested” from
fish farms, fish and other marine animals feel pain and don’t
deserve to die.
3. Because eating meat is hazardous to your health.
It’s not just the saturated fat and cholesterol. For one thing,
humans simply were not designed to eat animal products even in
their most natural, unprocessed form. And because of modern farming
methods, each mouthful of meat, eggs, and dairy products can come
with the following:
Antibiotics and steroids: Animals in factory farms are given
these drugs to prevent outbreaks of disease in the crowded,
unsanitary conditions in which they live and to make them grow
faster.
Feces: Intestines of dead animals can and do get punctured when the
carcasses are “cleaned,” thus contaminating the flesh with
excrement. (In the case of ground beef, feces from one animal get
mixed in with almost every other animal’s.) The grain that animals
are fed has excrement, other dead animals, expired dog and cat
food, and leftover restaurant food mixed in as “fillers.”
Pus, blood, and scabs: Up to three times a day, cows used for their
milk have electric milking machines hooked up to their massively
swollen udders, resulting in cuts and infections—”souvenirs” of
which end up in the milk.
Toxins: Fish absorb and ingest whatever is in the water in which
they live, and they pass it on to us when we eat them. So no matter
how clean the water that we drink is, we’d still be getting
mercury, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), and other toxins
whenever we eat fish.
Pathogens: Many kinds of bacteria are harmless and even beneficial.
For example, only bacteria can synthesize vitamin B12. But some strains of bacteria cause dangerous and
even fatal diseases. E. coli 0157:H7 poisoning is known as “the
hamburger disease,” campylobacter bacteria can be found in chickens
and turkeys, and salmonella outbreaks have been related to almost
every food of animal origin, especially eggs.
And if heart disease, cancer, and other diseases won’t convince you
to stop eating animal products, maybe the havoc that the meat
industry wreaks on the environment will.
For one thing, raising animals for food depletes our oxygen
supply. In Central America, two-thirds of the rain forests have
been cleared to make way for cattle ranches. At the same time, the
world’s livestock account for 15 to 25 percent of overall global
methane emissions—and methane is 24 times more potent a greenhouse
gas than carbon dioxide.
In the United States, nearly half of the country’s water, more
than one-third of its raw materials and fossil fuels, 80 percent of
its agricultural land, and 70 percent of its grain are used to
raise animals for food—who, in turn, produce a whopping 87,000
pounds of manure every single second! This waste, which is 130
times the excrement of the entire human population, leaks into
streams and rivers, contaminating water sources.
4. Because eating meat just isn’t fair.
The suffering of humans and the suffering of other animals are
interconnected. By alleviating the suffering of other animals, we
also help alleviate human suffering.
For example, around 840 million people go hungry every single
day of their lives. Cattle worldwide consume enough calories to
feed 8.7 billion people. Crops that could be used to feed the
hungry are instead being used to fatten animals raised for food.
Instead of growing grain, feeding it to animals, killing the
animals, and then eating their flesh, why not just grow crops for
human consumption? Simply put, the more meat you eat, the fewer
people you feed. You can feed 20 vegetarians on the amount of land
needed to feed one person on a meat-based diet. And speaking of
land, big corporations buy land at rock-bottom prices and use them
to grow food that only richer societies can afford. The farmers,
who could’ve grown their own food if they didn’t have to devote
their land to raising animals, end up hungry and poor.
By boycotting animal products, we also boycott slaughterhouses
and animal-processing plants, which are notorious for low wages,
unsafe working conditions, and poor labor relations.
The farmed-animal industry in the United States, for instance,
deliberately recruits immigrants, minors, and poor rural Americans
because they will accept low wages and can be easily manipulated
for fear of losing their jobs. Some meatpacking giants have even
been charged with smuggling undocumented workers into the U.S. Far
away from their homes with no support network, many of these
migrant workers are treated like slaves by the farmed-animal
industry. In some slaughterhouses in the U.S., two-thirds of the
workers are immigrants who cannot speak English.
Day in and day out, these workers must struggle against animals
fighting for their lives, using dangerous equipment meant to cut
through meat and bone. Sometimes training consists of little more
than watching a video, and the up to 400 percent job turnover rate
at some slaughterhouses means that workers are replaced before they
get the hang of operating the machines without accidentally hurting
themselves or others.
Often, these workers are too worried about making their quota or
keeping up with the line speed to think about taking extra
precautions, even the simplest ones such as keeping their knives
sharp. As for safety gear, the animal-processing industry usually
makes workers pay for this out of their own pockets, despite the
fact that many of the workers are too poor even to feed their
families. Not surprisingly, one in three slaughterhouse workers
suffers from illness or injury every year, compared to one out of
every 10 workers in other manufacturing jobs. Repetitive stress
injury is 35 times more common among slaughterhouse workers than in
any other manufacturing job.
As bad as it may already sound, it’s very likely that these
figures are even higher: Workers, human resources staff, and
management are discouraged from reporting work-related injuries in
order to get hefty bonuses and keep insurance costs from cutting
into the company’s bottom line. Many ill and injured employees are
required to report for work anyway, are forced to pretend that they
were injured at home, or are even fired outright just so companies
can avoid having to pay for medical treatment or having to report
injuries to occupational safety authorities.
In addition to exploiting poor people, immigrants, and children
and doing little to protect workers from workplace hazards, the
farmed-animal industry has also been charged with union busting.
When workers try to unionize, the industry uses illegal
intimidation and harassment tactics to ensure that pro-union
employees are silenced. According to Human Rights Watch, “Many
workers who try to form trade unions and bargain collectively are
spied on, harassed, pressured, threatened, suspended, fired,
deported or otherwise victimized for their exercise of the right to
freedom of association.”
