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Mid-Hudson Vegetarian Society, Inc.
38 East Market Street, Rhinebeck, New York 12572 USA -
845-876-2626
Vegetarian - Vegan - Animal Rights - Health - Nutrition - Environment
The mission of the Mid-Hudson Vegetarian Society, Inc. is to promote the vegetarian ethic in the Mid-Hudson (New York) region, educate the community and aid anyone in the pursuit of a totally vegetarian (vegan) cruelty-free and healthful lifestyle.
Newsletters
Articles From the Summer 1998 Newsletter
Vegetarians Are Helping to
Save the Earth
by Terry Sullivan
By not eating the flesh of other animals we're not just lowering our cholesterol counts and reducing our cancer risks. And we're not just saving farm animals from miserable lives and horrible deaths.
We're also helping the environment.
Farm animals produce over two trillion pounds of manure in the U.S. every year.
That's five tons of animal droppings for every human being, much more than can be legitimately used as fertilizer for crops.
Factory farms produce huge piles of animal waste, which eventually winds up not only in the soil, but also in the water that people bathe in and drink. Untreated manure is poisoning rivers and wells and making people sick, sometimes killing them.
Pollution from factory farms contaminate more miles of U.S. rivers than all other industry sources and municipal sewers combined.
By law, human waste must be sanitized. But there are no such standards for animal manure.
Pigs transmit many human diseases through their waste, including meningitis, salmonella, chlamydia and flu.
Cow manure has been blamed by some scientists for a 1993 outbreak of disease that killed more than 100 people and sickened 400 thousand others in Wisconsin.
Last year, a toxic microbe found in chicken waste forced the closing of the Pocomoke River in Maryland to fishing and swimming after people began suffering sores, breathing problems and memory loss.
600 million chickens are raised in that area every year. They produce over three billion pounds of raw waste. More about the effect of factory farming on the environment in our next issue.
Return to Summer 1998 Newsletter
We look forward to
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