The best personal thing we can do for the worst global problems is to avoid animal products and embrace a plant-based lifestyle. Should teens delete meat? The answer is clear.
[Article originally published on VeganTeen.net]
It’s sometimes hard for me to understand how compassionate young people,
including feminists, environmentalists, civil rights activists, socialists,
and other social justice warriors can be so regressive on the issue of meat
and dairy.
For them, perhaps it seems like a personal choice, perhaps because “we’ve
always done it that way,” perhaps because they think it tastes good, perhaps
because it’s easy, perhaps because of family pressure. But this means that,
as Matthew Scully recognizes, “The most basic animal needs are always to be
subordinated to the most trivial human desires.”
The exciting news is that more and more teens and twentysomethings are
eating cleaner and greener, becoming vegetarian and vegan. As a sociology
professor, I see this every semester.
Take teens, for example.
Isabella Hood, age 15, is fairly typical: “The main reason I became vegan
was because I see all animals as my friends and I would not want to eat a
pig, just as I would not want to eat a dog. Every animal is a living,
breathing and feeling creature who doesn’t want to die. I don’t want to
contribute to their deaths.”
Isabella adds: “There is so much I could say about why veganism is the only
sustainable choice for people. I could spout so many shocking statistics and
facts. For example, animal agriculture is the leading cause of CO2
emissions, deforestation, and pollution of our waterways.”
Abigail Wheeler, age 17, relates “I went vegan for three reasons: animals,
health, and the environment.” She says “My dad thought it was really strange
at first,” but her mom was on board right away and her dad came around.
Genesis Butler, age 13, went vegetarian at only 3 years old, later vegan,
after finding out where her food came from. At 10, she became the youngest
person to give a TEDx talk. “According to many scientific studies,” Genesis
says in her bubbly way, “raising animals for food is the primary cause of
global climate change, loss of biodiversity, pollution, and water shortage —
just to name a few.”
Sarah Goody, age 15, tells me “As a climate activist, I understand that I
cannot fight for climate justice without fighting for animal rights.
Veganism isn’t just an animal rights issue, it’s an issue of climate
justice, racial justice, economic justice… Veganism isn’t just a diet, it’s
a lifestyle. It’s prioritizing compassion, kindness, and morality.”
Coleen Brennan, age 14, exclaims “Veganism is a lot more popular among teens
these days.” She continues with a common sentiment: “Becoming vegan has
affected every aspect of my life. It’s the best decision I’ve ever made.”
We may not always want to think about it, but we know that eating meat
contributes to confinement, cruelty, torture, rape, terror, violence, and
murder — a major violation of our ethics. Every year, billions of individual
animals (millions per day!) are tortured and killed in a variety of horrible
ways. The cruelty is an endless abomination. Yet, like Rai Aren, we “know
that the same spark of life that is within you, is within all of our animal
friends, the desire to live is the same within all of us.”
Take chickens, for example.
Chicken meat mostly comes from the objectified breasts of very young females
(killed at about 6-7 weeks) with tight confinement, torture, and murder
along the way. They are typically stuffed into cages, tightly crammed
together, beaks cut off without anesthesia, with poor lighting and
ventilation. This happens to about 9 billion chickens each year in the U.S.
And this horrific treatment is inflicted on even more chickens for their
eggs, while the unproductive males are summarily killed as babies by being
pushed into grinders or garbage bags.
The accumulating litter, feathers, and feces produced by so many chickens
and other captive birds create serious environmental problems. Mass-produced
chicken is also a substantial public health threat: “If there were no
poultry industry,” concludes Neal D. Barnard, M.D., “there would be no
epidemics of bird flu.” It’s worth noting that the so-called Spanish flu
pandemic of 1918 that killed tens of millions of people worldwide was a type
of bird flu that originated on a chicken farm in Kansas.
Photo source: Animal Equality
Take cows, for example.
Cows are branded, injected with hormones, transported long distances,
crowded together, fed unnatural diets, stunned, hung upside down, bled out,
and eviscerated, not always in that order. Given the pitifully weak state of
U.S. law for farm animals, these animals do not even have to be dead before
being skinned or cut into pieces on the disassembly line.
Dairy cows are forced to calve every year, being forcefully artificially
inseminated and re-inseminated on what the industry calls “rape racks,”
constantly forced to endure pain and then repeated pregnancy, with their
newborns separated from them shortly after birth, exacerbating the trauma.
Female calves are channeled into the dairy industry to replace their
mothers, while male calves are pushed into the meat industry, mostly for
beef, though about a million male calves are quickly turned into veal in a
torturous process.
Dairy cows are fed unnaturally rich diets, are pumped with antibiotics (in
some cases, every day) and hormones (e.g., BGH), and are subjected to other
cruelties to further increase milk production to about a 1000% of what they
would normally produce for their babies. About half the dairy cows in the
U.S. suffer from painful mastitis and many more from other illnesses,
diseases, and indignities. Instead of living to about 25 years, dairy cows
are worn out after about 3 or 4 years of hyperexploitation, at which point
they are shuttled from milk production to meat production.
Cows on a truck to the slaughterhouse. Photo from Toronto Cow Save,
Facebook, October 19, 2019.
Each cow produces about 120 pounds (55 kg.) of wet manure every day, in
addition to their burping and farting, all of which emits a tremendous
amount of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, the major greenhouse
gases, as well as ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. The amount of water used to
produce the meat from a single cow is enough to float a large ship. Tropical
rainforest, including the amazing and precious Amazon Rainforest, is
destroyed to create cheap land for cattle grazing, as well as the
genetically-engineered and monocropped soy and corn to feed the hundreds of
millions of cattle. If there were no cattle industry, there would be no E.
coli outbreaks or mad cow disease; if there were no cattle industry, there
would be much less deforestation, climate change, and species extinction.
Take pigs, for example.
Approximately 100 million pigs — crowded, crated, mutilated — are raised for
slaughter in the U.S. every year for the production of hot dogs, pork, ham,
bacon, salami, sausage, pepperoni, prosciutto, etc. A typical hog factory
farm generates raw waste equivalent to a city of 12,000 people. The swine
flu pandemic originated on a hog farm in North Carolina.
According to Hog Farm Management, “What we are really trying to do is to
modify the animal’s environment for maximum profit … Forget the pig is an
animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory.” Pigs, who are cute,
social, and can be quite smart, are usually slaughtered at around six months
young.
This is not nearly all the cruelties and tragedies that transpire and we
have not even spoken about turkeys, geese, ducks, sheep, goats, fish,
shrimp, lobsters, octopuses, and other living beings that are forced to
suffer.
At the 2012 Empowering Women of Color Conference, Angela Davis stated we all
must challenge “the whole capitalist industrial form of food production.”
Davis mentioned that “Most people don’t think about the horrendous suffering
that those animals must endure simply to become food products to be consumed
by human beings.”
Pigs on a truck to the slaughterhouse. Photo from Toronto Pig Save,
Facebook, January 15, 2020.
Farmed animals, also known as livestock, are unwilling captives, who have no
choice, no defense, no rights, and no alternative options against their
cruel and unusual punishment for which they committed no crime. “[Animals]
were not made for humans,” Alice Walker has pleaded, “any more than black
people were made for whites or women for men.” Animals — whether livestock,
wildlife, or pets — seek pleasure and avoid pain while trying to protect
their lives, just as we do, just as our pets do. They have intelligence,
fears, desires, hunger, thirst, compassion, and experience friendship, joy,
trauma, grief, and a range of emotions.
Writing for Harvard Political Review, Joseph Winters makes the case that
this “pandemic provides an opportunity to more deeply interrogate the
structural injustice of this system. It is animal agriculture that is
wrong.” Jane Goodall, perhaps the world’s top expert on chimpanzees,
suggests we need to change our ways. “We have brought this on ourselves
because of our absolute disrespect for animals and the environment,” Jane
said. “Our disrespect for wild animals and our disrespect for farmed animals
has created this situation where disease can spill over to infect human
beings.” And yet the barbarism against these innocent animals continues.
Take workers, for example.
Working conditions are notoriously horrible with Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder (PTSD) and repetitive stress injuries, headaches, nightmares,
amputations, and worse, making meat a critical labor, human rights, and
social justice issue, as well. Many of the workers on factory farms and in
slaughterhouses are immigrants, some undocumented, and they are less likely
to complain about their unjust conditions and less likely to unionize, while
engaging in dangerous, underpaid labor. The workers are apparently as
sacrificial as the animals, all in the name of profit and blood lust.
Image from TheCounter.org
Slaughterhouses are one of the most dangerous workplaces for humans.
According to Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, “at least 1/3 of
meatpacking workers are injured every year.” Human Rights Watch calls
meatpacking “the most dangerous factory job in America.”
Further, the waste products of the meat industry are disproportionately and
unfairly dumped onto poor communities of color in yet another poisonous
example of environmental racism and classism. It is not “out of sight, out
of mind” for those without the requisite economic wealth, political power,
and social status who are forced to live with it. These are critical issues
of social, racial, and economic justice.
Take the environment, for example.
“Behind virtually every great environmental complaint,” declares Lee Hall,
“there’s milk and meat.” The livestock industry is the one of the largest
contributors to environmental destruction, along with the fossil fuel
industries. The environmental implications of meat are disastrous and meat
is substantially implicated in climate change, deforestation, habitat
destruction, species extinction, air and water pollution, soil erosion and
degradation, overuse of resources, epidemics and pandemics, etc. “Shifting
away from meat and dairy,” Michael Pellman Rowland reports, “is the single
most effective way to regenerate our ecosystem and prevent its destruction.”
Climate change is a mega-disaster, overheating our planet to alarming levels
with catastrophic consequences and evidence suggests that livestock raised
for meat and dairy is responsible for 51% — a majority! — of greenhouse
gases that lead to climate change, according to “Livestock and Global
Warming,” a report by the Worldwatch Institute (Nov/Dec 2009). And, writes
Jonathan Safran Foer, “if cows were a country, they would be the
third-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world.”
Greta Thunberg became vegan for the environment and convinced her parents to
join her. That success inspired her to go bigger. Greta, age 17, started her
School Strike for Climate, now known as Fridays For Future, in Stockholm,
Sweden in August 2018 when she was 15. Having spoken at the United Nations,
the European Union, and the World Economic Forum, and having won numerous
awards, she is changing the world after changing her family.
Take you, for example.
“We treat animals how we used to treat human slaves. What possible
justification could there be for that?” writes Gary Francione in “One Right
For All.” Like racism, sexism, and homophobia, we engage in unfair and
unjust species-ism when we treat — and eat — animals as means to our own
selfish ends, simply because we have the physical force, political power,
economic means, and social privilege to be able to do so.
Every action we take is a vote — an economic vote, a social vote, and a
moral vote. Every time meat, poultry, or fish — and any other animal product
— is purchased or consumed, it is a vote for that to continue, a vote for
brutality, a vote for more innocent and defenseless animals to be
commodified and killed, a vote for more trees to be cut or burned down, a
vote for more wilderness to be encroached upon, a vote for the overuse of
chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, water, and fossil fuels, a vote for the
poisoning of our air, land, and water, a vote for monoculturalism and a loss
of biodiversity, a vote for the overconsumption of a few and the exclusion
of the many, a vote for more disease and ill-health, a vote for force and
violence and selfishness. Regardless of your intentions, these are the
results.
Holocaust survivor Alex Hershaft grew up in the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland.
Hershaft likens American attitudes toward farm animals to German attitudes
toward Jews and other religious, racial, sexual, and physical minorities
targeted for death during World War Two. “Millions knew about the death
camps in their midst, but pretended not to notice,” Hershaft intones, “just
as we pretend not to notice factory farms, slaughterhouses, and factories.”
Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer famously wrote that “In relation
to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal
Treblinka.”
Whatever behavior is accepted toward one living being will be applied to
other living beings, both human and animal. “In the moral universe,”
Hershaft declares, “it really shouldn’t matter who the victims are.” This
truism has been known for thousands of years, resulting in many religions
having some version of what’s called the Golden Rule.
We are responsible for the logical consequences of the actions we take. Any
willing participation in the meat production-and-consumption process, even
passive acceptance, also implies responsibility for the dire consequences of
that process. Meat-eaters — regardless of their ideologies, philosophies,
theologies, beliefs, and intentions — effectively vote for continuing
otherwise-unnecessary mass suffering, death, and environmental destruction.
“Given the horrible treatment of farm animals, tremendous environmental
damage done by animal agriculture, and health risks associated with
consumption of meat, dairy products, and eggs,” Gordon Ehrman wonders, “I
can’t understand why anyone would choose to eat those foods.” It’s not good
for our personal health, spiritual health, public health, animal health,
worker health, and environmental health.
“Animal agriculture not only exploits animals, it exploits us,” Dr. Will
Tuttle laments. “As we exploit and abuse, we will be exploited and abused.
Each one of us, as we purchase meat, dairy, or egg products, becomes an
invisible killer to the cows, pigs, hens, and fishes we are exploiting. We
directly but invisibly cause terror, pain, and death, and we compound it
further by eating it and feeding it to our vulnerable and innocent children,
ritually indoctrinating them as we were.”
But the animals and the Earth have you: your daily choices and your
advocacy. Meat is highly regressive in so many ways and compassionate youth
— feminists, environmentalists, civil rights activists, socialists,
communists, anarchists, animal lovers, those who want to silence the
violence and increase the peace, those who support public health, social
justice warriors, and other solutionaries — should not support this violent,
destructive, and fascistic industry.
No one is forcing us to be progressive, to care about our fellow beings, to
improve on the past, to be better, to be part of the solution, not the
problem. It’s our choice.
The best personal thing we can do for the worst global problems is to avoid
animal products and embrace a plant-based lifestyle. Should teens delete
meat? The answer is clear.
Dan Brook, PhD teaches sociology at San Jose State University, where he is Faculty Advisor of the Spartan Veg Club, is on the Board of San Francisco Veg Society, the Advisory Board of Jewish Veg, an Administrator of Vegetarian & Vegan Chiang Mai (on Facebook), has edited the non-profit veg cookbook Justice in the Kitchen, and is author of the forthcoming Eating the Earth.
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