Does the title bother you? Well…it shouldn’t, because it’s the pure truth. I can agree with you that it doesn’t sound too good, but I believe that we must know the reality and accept the facts. Even if, from now on, we still decide to consume meat, at least we will be aware about each aspect of our food choices, regarding the planet and the environment.

We hear all the time about pollution and about the bad treatment that we apply to our planet, but we don’t know exactly what this means and what we can do. We have an idea, we talk about this, but we do … merely NOTHING. On our planet we have a lot of sources of pollution and it seems that we develop others all the time; we are very “clever”. Very few of us know that meat consumption is one of the biggest sources of pollution on Earth…

Surprised? Let’s see what all is about:

I believe that you can guess that raising animals for food requires massive amounts of land, energy, food to eat, water and last, but not least, raising animals for consumption contributes to animal suffering…big time!

Taking the below facts into account I made a resume regarding the horrible influence that meat consumption has for the environment, inspired from PETA’s website – www.peta.org

FACTS:

• Raising animals for food occupies 30% of Earth’s land mass, according to United Nations
• The equivalent of 7 football fields of land is bulldozed worldwide every minute to create more room for farmed animals
• Commercial fishing methods virtually emptied millions of square miles of ocean and pushed many marine species to the brink of extinction
• While animals eat large quantities of grains, they only produce small amounts of meat, dairy products, or eggs in return. This is why more than 70 percent of the grain and cereals that we grow worldwide are fed to farmed animals
• It takes up to 13 pounds of grain to produce just 1 pound of meat
• It takes more than 11 times as much fossil fuel to make one calorie from animal protein as it does to make one calorie from plant protein
• Raising animals for food gobbles up precious energy.
• The farmed animal industry places a serious strain on our water supply
• It takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef, while growing 1 pound of wheat only requires 25 gallons
• According to Greenpeace, all the wild animals and trees in more than 2.9 million acres of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil were destroyed in the 2004-2005 crop season in order to grow crops that are used to feed chickens and other animals in factory farms
• According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the runoff from factory farms pollutes our waterways more than all other industrial sources combined.
• Animals raised for food produce far more excrement than the entire U.S. human population
• There are no meaningful federal guidelines that regulate how factory farms treat, store, and dispose of the trillions of pounds of concentrated, untreated animal excrement that they produce each year. This waste may be left to rot in huge lagoons or sprayed over crop fields; both of these disposal methods result in runoff that contaminates the soil and water and kills fish and other wildlife. The concentration of parasites, bacteria, and chemical contaminants in animal excrement can wreak havoc on the ecosystems affected by farm runoff and can sicken people who live near these farms
• Many of the millions of pounds of excrement and other bodily waste produced by farmed animals every day in the U.S. are stored in sprawling, brown lagoons. These lagoons often seep or spill into surrounding waterways and kill massive numbers of fish and other animals
• The massive amounts of feces, fish carcasses, and antibiotic-laced fish food that settle below fish farm cages also contribute to water pollution and have actually caused the ocean floor to rot in some areas
• A Consumers Union study in Texas found that animal feedlots in the state produce more than 14 million pounds of particulate dust every year and that the dust “contains biologically active organisms such as bacteria, mold, and fungi from the feces and the feed.” The massive amounts of excrement produced by these farms emit toxic gases such as hydrogen sulfide and ammonia into the air

And this is just a tiny part of the whole problem. It’s obvious that we have to change something, until it’s too late. The way we raise and treat animals it’s a horror story and in my opinion it must be forgotten and buried deep in human’s history. We are entitled to make mistakes, no doubt about this, but we are also entitled to correct them if we get to the conclusion that the results of some taken actions leads to horrible results from all points of view. Meat consumption is one of those actions that, in my opinion, should be reconsidered; taking into account the effects produced all over the world.

I hope you know, or at least you imagine, the tones of money that are involved in the meat industry. This is a big business! Don’t forget, that for money, people are capable of lots of things, like inventing, the well known sentence: “Meat is essential for human survival”…this is all that I have to say about this money subject. You are smart and you will read between the lines.

We can do something! We can give a vote with our money. Each one of us can decide how our future will look, because what you buy represents you and the things that you believe in and I am sure that no human being is defined by the above mentioned facts.

Rise above what you have always been told about meat, and look closely