October 1 is World Vegetarian Day, and October is
Vegetarian Awareness Month. If you are not a vegetarian yet, please take
this time to consider the many reasons to adopt a meatless diet.
Of course there are the health reasons. Everyone knows
by now that a vegetarian diet reduces the risks of heart disease,
stroke, certain types of cancer and other diseases. Here's something
else to consider, if we all invested in preventative medicine by
choosing a vegetarian diet there would be less need for animal medical
research.
The environmental reasons for vegetarianism are what
motivate me the most. Every year millions of animals are killed because
they are a threat to or a competitor with livestock. Wolves, coyotes,
buffalo, prairie dogs, bears, birds of prey even protected and
endangered animals are killed to make more profits for the meat
industry. We have cut down three-fifths of the rainforests of the world
to make more cow pastures and more land to grow crops for cows and in
doing so have lost countless species that once lived there. We have
disrupted the web of life.
We have overfished the seas, driving many species to
extinction. The manure from factory farms has become the largest factor
in water pollution of our country's fresh water streams, surpassing
chemical discharges from industry. And that manure has flowed to the
oceans, where it kills fish along our seacoasts. It also contributes to
the death of the coral reefs, the rainforests of the ocean, where 75% of
the ocean's species live.
You can't be an environmentalist and eat meat.
Nine billion animals suffer and are killed each year for
food in our country alone. This number does not include the fish and
other creatures we pull from the oceans. Of those nine billion farm
animals eight billion are chickens. I have known people who thought that
eating fish and chicken was somehow more compassionate than eating cows.
They believed that cows were able to suffer more, I suppose. So they
wind up eating hundreds of small animals instead of one large one. Where
is the logic in that?
Nine billion animals...more than the total of all the
dogs and cats that are euthanized, the lab animals destroyed and the
animals killed for fur combined. Can you be concerned about the welfare
of animals and eat meat?
We don't have to be a part of this waste, this
pollution, this suffering. It is easy to choose a vegetarian diet and it
makes all the difference in the world.
Join us in celebrating life, World Vegetarian Day,
October 1.
Go on to Korean
Dogs & Cats
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