It’s year 8 at school. School meals over the past few years have been filled with plastic and rubbery meat. My desire for meat items is slowly decreasing piece by piece. Growing up I’ve always had a strong connection with animals and it’s only when a friend gets a chicken from a factory farm, encouraging us to all follow a vegetarian diet that I really begin to connect with what it all means.
Forward to 8 years later, I’m doing an internship for a girl that runs her own vegan food start up. I’m full of my own misconceptions that veganism is impossible. That I will never find a tasty vegan chocolate, that if you take the dairy and the eggs it’s not that bad.
But bit by bit, I opened my eyes – I remembered my own dad breaking a male cockerels neck as male chickens cannot reside together. I connected the dots and saw in every drop of milk a mother forcibly impregnated and separated from her child just a few days from its birth. In more intensive farming I learnt of male chicks being put into a shredder.
But that’s not even all of it, it is reported that up to 93 % of pigs are kept indoors, often in cages without even the possibility to turn around. The majority of these animals bred for the animal agriculture industry don’t even live a quarter of their natural life expectancy. These are sentient beings that can feel both pain and joy, with a desire to live and create a family.
Turning vegan has made me realise that it doesn’t stop there. I can barely even buy a shampoo, a beauty product or a piece of clothing without the product being tested on or by using products derived from the exploitation of animals. That doesn’t even include the pharmaceutical industry. Just last year videos were leaked of monkeys and dogs being tested in a lab in Hamburg.
I recently watched a documentary from the BBC called the “Private Life of Chickens”. Here I discovered that there are generally two types of factory farmed chickens in this country. They were both originally imported from America. One type are specifically designed for eggs and the other for meat. The chickens designed for meat will never even lay an egg in their lifetime. 60 percent of the products that come from these farms go into processed food. The documentary goes on to show that the chickens are not the bird brains we once imagined. I can only imagine that the same applies for the dairy industry.
Then I turned to the environment. A 2013 report published by the United Nations cites animal agriculture as the second largest contributor to human-made greenhouse gas emissions after fossil fuels. But there’s more…
Summer last year we witnessed huge fires over the Amazon, 70 percent of which could be attributed to cattle ranching. The animal agriculture industry has an undeniable impact on deforestation, but also on water, air pollution and biodiversity loss. For more please refer to this article.
A vegan diet can cut carbon emissions from food by 70 percent. Yet many reports such as this one from the Telegraph will discuss the environmental impact of a vegetarian diet with misleading titles. However, on reading deep into it, you can only find that the best thing you can do for the environment is go vegan. That is of course not to say a vegan diet compromised largely of water intensive items such as avocados or almonds is best. It is also understandable that a vegetarian diet with an increased amount of dairy and egg products can produce more waste as opposed to direct meat consumption. For instance, every pint of milk would require one female cow to give birth (up to 3 times) and male born offspring to be disposed of, if not used as veal.
I believe I am very much part of a wave and a future as the demand for and awareness of good quality locally sourced plant based products increases.
To end I would like to share a quote from Sergeant Nyaradzo Hoto, leader of an all female, vegan anti-poaching squad based in Zimbabwe, “It is not good to kill animals for the sake of turning our desires into needs”