10 Compassionate Reasons to be Vegetarian By Deliciously Miss V
As more and more people are opting to go vegetarian they often cite two reasons for their decision: either the plight of animals and/or the environment. As awareness and consciousness levels rise, there is also a realization and discomfort in treating animals in a cruel fashion for food, clothing, entertainment or animal testing etc. Surely animals, like human animals, have some basic rights and deserve to be respected? Here are 10 compelling reasons to go vegetarian:
1. Livestock treatment
Most people don’t even realise that the sliced ham they buy or the chicken they put in the oven is the result of a life of a misery. Most of these animals have endured an appalling life – chickens are often crammed into windowless sheds and confined to wire cages or gestation crates. Factory farms are simply there to make a profit, animal life is cheap and these inhumane and intensive farming methods enable the consumer to purchase cheaper meat.
2. Laboratory tests
Thousands of monkeys, dogs, mice, rats, rabbits, cats are locked in cages in laboratories around the world enduring untold pain for tests on products such as shampoo and make up. These tests are unnecessary and barbaric. Animal studies teach us next to nothing about how we might react to a substance because animals of a different species absorb, metabolise and eliminate substances differently from humans.
3. You wouldn’t eat your pets
Would you eat a friendly, intelligent, affectionate dog? If not, then why would you would eat a friendly, intelligent, affectionate pig? Pigs suffer with no hope of rescue because they are not our pets. Rescue is for those who we have decided are pets. But all animals have a nervous system and therefore feel pain. Pigs are perhaps the smartest, cleanest domestic animals known – even more so than cats and dogs, according to some experts.
4. Reduce pollution
A vegetarian diet reduces the destruction of tropical rainforests, and wildlife habitat. Rainforests are vital to life on earth – they regulate the global climate and the water cycle, absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and provide humans with medicines, food, and much more. Sadly, rainforests are cut down to make room to raise cattle. The United Nations Environment Programme claims that ‘every second, one football field of rainforest is destroyed in order to produce 257 hamburgers.’
5. Helps protect the oceans and marine life
Another benefit of eating a vegetarian diet is that it also reduces the depletion of our oceans’ marine lives and the destruction of corals & reefs, not to mention the depletion of the world’s fishing stocks.
6. Helps eliminate famine
Grain cultivated for animal feed could be used to help feed the starving people in the world. “If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million,” David Pimentel, professor of ecology in Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, reported at the July 24-26 meeting of the Canadian Society of Animal Science in Montreal. Enough said.
7. Avoid superbugs found in meat
Due to the way animals are kept on factory farms they often become sick due to the conditions in which they are kept. Overcrowding, lack of fresh air and sunlight contribute to the animals becoming ill. So the solution to this is of course to pump them full of antibiotics, which you are then in turn consuming. Meat has also been found to contain killer bugs like E.coli. These bugs pose a serious threat to human health and are becoming more resistant to antibiotics.
8. Horsegate scandal
Last year leading supermarkets in Britain and Ireland were found to be selling adulterated meat products. Favourites such as beef burgers, lasagna and cottage pies advertised as containing beef were in fact found to contain undeclared horsemeat or pork. Again, profit is king! Food manufacturers are not always interested in the rights of the consumer to know what they are eating.
9. It’s good for the spirit
A vegetarian diet reduces needless suffering and killing in the world and increases compassion for all earthlings (animals and human beings) as well a feeling of lightness in oneself. It’s said that when a person eats meat, they ingest the suffering of that animal. It’s not too difficult to see that chemically and biologically this make sense since when any animal is stressed, hormones are released to help deal with it, some of which stay lodged in tissue which meat eaters consume. Perhaps it is not surprising vegetarians live longer.
10. Sir Paul McCartney says it best:
“If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you could do. It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: cruelty, ecology, famine.”
For a tasty vegetarian meal pop into your local Sukh Sagar restaurant, dotted across the UAE, India and beyond
