Animal Agriculture - Meat And The Environment - Animal Testing
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Meat And The Environment

According to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, animal agriculture - even on small farms - contributes more to global warming than does automobile use. This is caused primarily by the massive amounts of ammonia and methane released from the waste generated on animal farms, as well as the large amount of fossil fuels required to feed farmed animals. The U.N.'s data makes clear that the single biggest thing any of us can do to help stop global warming is to switch to a plant-based diet.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, animal agriculture is also the leading cause of water pollution and the second leading cause of air pollution in the United States. Animals used in food production in this country generate 160 times more waste than the human beings. This waste contains multiple pollutants such as heavy metals, antibiotics, pathogens, nitrogen and phosphorus, all of which enter riverways and the water table through leaks, spills, manure runoff and absorption into the soil. Over two-thirds of the nation's waterways have been contaminated by runoff from animal agricultural facilities.

Animal agriculture, whether large or small in scale, requires a massive amount of oil, water and land resources. Producing animal protein requires 8 times more fossil fuels than producing the same amount of plant protein. Producing meat can also require up to 300 times more water usage compared to producing one pound of grain. In fact, you could take six months worth of showers with the amount of water it takes to produce a single hamburger patty.

70% of the grain grown in this country goes to feed farmed animals, an amount of grain that could feed approximately 800 million people if it had not been channeled into the resource-wasting farm animal food system. Because animal agriculture - and growing grain for animals - requires so much land, animal agriculture is the number one cause of the desertification of much of the western United States, as well as the leading cause of rainforest destruction worldwide. More than 50% of forests and rainforests worldwide, including 300 million acres of American soil, have already been cleared for livestock grazing or animal feed crops.

If you're concerned about environmental destruction - be it global warming, land and resource use, water contamination or air pollution - the number one thing that you can do to help reduce all of these problems is to switch to a plant-based diet.