People go vegan for a variety of reasons: preventing animal suffering and cruelty, environmental advantages, health benefits, allergies, religion, or a combination of these. A lot of people choose to go vegan for all these reasons, while some feel more strongly about one specific cause. Going vegan for the animals is definitely one of the most common reasons for switching to a plant-based diet, and here you can find out exactly how being vegan can help the animals.
Helping Farmed Animals
The first thing that springs to mind when we talk about veganism, or even vegetarianism, is animal agriculture, or farmed animals. But it’s important to be aware that we are not only talking about saving animal lives, but also about improving the quality of life for the existing farmed animals.
While factory farms are notorious for their brutal practices of exploiting animals, it’s crucial to point out that animal suffering is not limited to factory farming alone. Animals from free-range farms suffer as well.
For example, the male chicks on free-range egg farms, just as on factory farms, are killed a day old, because getting rid of them is more cost-effective than investing time and resources into fattening them up enough to make them suitable for meat production, as they were never bred to produce meat anyway.
On dairy farms, mother cows are forcibly impregnated and then separated from their calves shortly after birth, so that the milk can be bottled for human consumption. The cycle repeats so often that cows end up exhausted, often physically disabled and no longer able to bear calves in as little as three to four years, at which point they are sent to slaughter as well, and turned into lower-quality meat products, such as sausages and minced meat pies.
I’m not mentioning any of this to make anyone feel guilty for eating animal products, or to convince them to go vegan today. But I do think it’s important to be aware of all the facts about where our food comes from, because this is the only way we are able to make informed decisions about how to live our lives in a way we find most fulfilling.
If you’d like to learn more about the conditions of farmed animals, I strongly recommend watching the documentary Earthlings, which is available on YouTube.
But What Would Happen to Farm Animals If We Stopped Eating Them?
One of the most common counter-arguments for saving farmed animals by not eating meat is that if everyone went vegan today, enormous numbers of currently living farm animals would be slaughtered anyway, because it wouldn’t make sense anymore to keep providing for them. The second most common argument is that the species bred for human consumption only (such as broiler chickens) would go extinct.
First of all, the basics of veganism lie in the economic law of supply and demand. If demand decreases, the supply will eventually decrease as well. If the majority of the world’s population stopped buying animal products, or even just stopped buying inhumanely sourced animal products, this would send a signal to the industry that there is no demand for their products and that they need to drastically change their methods or even their products in order to survive in the business. It’s as simple as that.
If the majority of people would find the killing of large amounts of farmed animals unacceptable, then businesses, or even entire industries, looking to survive in a highly competitive world would need to reconsider their decisions.
“Going vegan is one of the best things you can do to help stop animal cruelty. By refusing to pay for animal products, you reduce the demand for them, which ensures fewer animals are bred to suffer and die on farms and in slaughterhouses.”
Animal Aid
Secondly, artificially bred animal species are often created with certain deficiencies that make them more profitable for the industry, but make their short lives unnecessarily difficult and painful. An example of this is the broiler chicken. Pedigree breeding of broilers began around 1916, and the time required to reach 1.5 kilograms live-weight decreased from 120 days to 30 days by 2005. The feeding and management procedures to support such growth have led to various welfare problems in modern broiler strains. This includes cardiovascular dysfunction (0.1% to 3% of chickens die of a heart attack) and skeletal dysfunction (because their legs can no longer support their unusually large bodies, most broilers find walking extremely painful and a lot of them are lame), as well as other issues, such as dermatitis and glaucoma.
If the demand for such animals dropped, then the artificial breeding of these animals would stop, they would breed among each other naturally and yes, the specific artificially created breeds made for human consumption would eventually cease to exist, and their physical characteristics would return to a more natural form, less suitable for human exploitation.
Helping Wild Animals
While saving domestic animals from abuse is the most obvious result of going vegan, this also causes a whole chain of events that can help non-farmed animals as well. Below are some of the ways going vegan can help wild animals.
Habitat Destruction
Currently, livestock systems occupy 45% of the earth’s total land and the land cleared for animal agriculture continues to increase year after year. In fact, 1 to 2 acres of rainforest are cleared every second, mainly for livestock and feed crops. This isn’t only bad for the environment, but wild animals as well. Up to 137 insect, animal, and plant species, including monkeys, jaguars and deer, are lost every day.
Ocean Depletion
Ocean “dead zones” refer to a region of the ocean with so little oxygen left that life there becomes nearly impossible. Most marine animals either die or leave the area. These zones can occur naturally, but scientists are concerned about the areas created or enhanced by human activity.
The main cause of this is nutrient pollution: excess nutrients (human waste) run off land or are piped as wastewater into rivers and coasts, which stimulate an overgrowth of algae, which then sinks and decomposes in the water. The decomposition process consumes oxygen and depletes the supply available to healthy marine life.
Another reason for oceans becoming lifeless is excessive fishing. For every 1 pounds of fish caught, 5 pounds of marine species (this is known as by-catch) are accidentally captured and killed. Species such as seahorses, sea turtles and dolphins are on the verge of extinction.
Species Lost Due to Climate Change
Going vegan is one of the most important lifestyle changes you can make to help stop global warming. And for things to come full circle, global warming isn’t just making the planet uninhabitable for humans, but for other species as well.
Global warming impacts entire ecosystems; sea levels and temperature change, animal cycles shift, and food chains are altered. Additionally, it has been stated that climate change puts animals such as polar bears, penguins, tigers, elephants, and giant pandas at risk of extinction.
Helping Animals Used in Science
Veganism doesn’t refer only to eating a plant-based diet, but abstaining from using all animal products, and choosing not to contribute to animal exploitation in any area of life. This means that a vegan lifestyle also spares animals used for their skin and fur, as well as animals used in laboratory experiments, testing food items and cosmetics.
By purchasing cruelty-free products (that do not contain animal products and are not tested on animals), animals such as mice, dogs, cats, monkeys, rabbits, and birds are also spared. Luckily, in the past decade or so, we’ve seen a major shift in the right direction by more and more companies choosing to become cruelty free and a lot of developed countries (UK, EU, New Zealand, India, parts of South America) banning animal testing on cosmetics or their ingredients. We’re thankfully entering an age where finding cruelty-free cosmetics and other products is becoming much easier than it was only a couple of decades ago.
So, by going vegan you can help the animals directly and help save the environment, which saves not only animal but human lives as well.
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