Chew on This

I generally tend to think that the people at PETA are a bunch of wackos, and I'm always mildly irritated that people tend to think that my veganism means I'm a member of PETA. But the following video is really powerful. Really well done. If it's more than you can handle, I copied and pasted the text from the video below. But if it's more than you can handle, maybe you should re-think the way you eat. ;)

I should probably preface this stuff by saying that I love my non-vegan friends and family. I don't browbeat them with the veganism message. I don't think they're horrible people, but I disagree with eating meat. Doesn't mean I love them any less.

I also removed from the text some of the more offensive points (and many of the points involving environmentalism) that were made, or the ones that make me shake my head and want to run as far as possible away from PETA. Feel free to watch the video, though. It's all there. I just didn't see much point in putting up something that, in not such a nice way, says, "Eating meat makes you overweight". That's not necessarily true. Obviously. And it just seemed mean.

So let's try to keep the hate comments to a minimum.




CHEW ON THIS
GO VEGETARIAN

1.) Because heart disease begins in childhood.
Meat has no fiber but is laden with fat and cholesterol, which is why the late Dr. Benjamin Spock, in the final edition of his book Baby & Child Care, recommended against feeding children any kind of meat.

2.) Because a vegan diet reverses heart disease.
On the American Heart Association (AHA) diet, which includes meat, patients’ arteries continue to clog, while Dr. Dean Ornish’s vegan diet unclogs arteries. In one study, AHA dieters experienced a 28 percent average worsening of clogged arteries, while dieters on Ornish’s program experienced an 8 percent improvement in their arteries.

4.) Because you shouldn’t have to lie to your kids about the food you eat.
Children would be horrified to learn about the cruelty and violence involved in turning chickens, pigs, and other animals into nuggets and other “foods.”

5.) Because in every package of chicken, there’s a little poop.
A USDA study found that 98 percent of broiler chicken carcasses had detectable levels of E. coli, indicating fecal contamination.

6.) Because meat is filthy and bloody.
There are more than 50 million cases of meat-related foodborne illness every year in the United States, thousands of which lead to death. Animals accumulate dangerous chemicals in their flesh and fat (which meat-eaters consume), including dioxins, antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, and even the most toxic form of arsenic.

7. ) Because it isn’t fair.
Killing other animals is an act of exploitation and violence, and we do it only because we have the power to.

8.) Because no living creature wants to see her family slaughtered.
Cows love their calves, sows love their piglets, and chickens love their chicks. Farmed animals love their families and mourn their loss.

10.) Because you wouldn’t eat your dog.
Most people are horrified that some cultures eat dogs or whales, but these animals suffer no more than animals commonly consumed in the U.S. The difference is only cultural, not moral.

11.) Because mad cow disease is in the U.S.
Any animal with a brain could contract a version of mad cow disease, yet millions of pigs and chickens are still being fed the remains of diseased animals—in violation of World Health Organization recommendations and the laws of Japan and Europe.

12.) Because it’s violence that you can stop.
We may feel powerless to stop war or other forms of violence, but we can choose not to support slaughterhouses by rejecting flesh foods.

13.) Because no one should have to kill for a living.
Slaughterhouse workers have among the highest rates of injury and illness in the country, and working in a slaughterhouse would dull anyone’s sense of compassion.

14.) Because it takes a small person to beat a defenseless animal ... and an even smaller person to eat one.
If you’re eating meat, you are paying others to commit acts so cruel that if committed against dogs or cats, they would warrant felony cruelty charges in most U.S. states.

15.) Because no animal deserves to die for your taste buds.
A human being’s desire for a momentary taste of flesh is not as important as another animal’s desire not to be tortured and violently killed.

18.) Because you can’t eat meat and call yourself an environmentalist.
Funneling crops and water through animals rather than using those resources directly is our country’s top way of wasting water and polluting. Factory farms demand more water than all other users combined and produce 130 times as much waste as the entire human population of the United States. Farming animals also requires more than one-third of all greenhouse-gas-emitting fossil fuels used in the U.S. and has destroyed three-fourths of our topsoil, a permanent environmental catastrophe that can’t be corrected.

19.) Because they’re defenseless.
Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer called speciesism the “most extreme” form of racism because animals are the least able to defend themselves and the easiest to victimize.

20.) Because when animals feel pain, they scream, too.
If you burn them, they feel it. If you give them electric shocks, they feel it. Animals feel pain in the same way and to the same degree that we humans do.

21.) Because they don’t want to die.
Animals value their lives as much as humans do.

22.) Because they feel fear.
Their hair stands on end, they urinate on themselves, and they shake, just as we do when frightened out of our minds with the prospect of being hurt or killed.

23.) Because no matter how you slice it, it’s still flesh.
Other animals are made of flesh, bone, and blood, just as we are, so “meat” is just a euphemism for a decomposing corpse used as food.

24.) Because commerce is no excuse for murder.
The chicken, pork, and other animal mass-murdering industries are huge, but it’s time for them to go the way of the slave trade (which also had strong economic incentives).

25.) Because even prisons aren’t this crowded.
Animals on factory farms are crammed into so little space that many of them are unable to do anything natural to them for their entire lives.

26.) Because this is not what wings are for.
Chickens, pigs, and other farmed animals never get to breathe fresh air, feel the sun on their backs, build a nest, nuzzle their young, or do anything at all that they were born to do.

27.) Because everyone wants to be free.
We know that it’s true of birds let out of a cage and of dogs taken to the park, and it’s equally true of farmed animals: They desire freedom, just as humans do.

28.) Because eating fish doesn’t make you a vegetarian.
Fish have the same ability to respond to pain that birds and mammals have and are also interesting individuals in their own right. According to a review of the science published in Fish and Fisheries, fish are “highly intelligent”—they have long-term memories and learn from one another, use tools, form social hierarchies, and “can even be favourably compared to nonhuman primates.” Explains marine biologist Dr. Sylvia Earle, fish are “so good-natured, so curious. You know, fish are sensitive, they have personalities, they hurt when they’re wounded.”

29.) Because might doesn’t make right.
In our moral development as a species, we’ve reached the point where it’s time to recognize that other species deserve consideration, just as we finally recognized that slavery was wrong, that women deserved the vote, and that children should not be abused as a method of child rearing.

30.) BECAUSE YOU KNOW THIS IS WRONG
Common sense tells us, and we know in our hearts, that our fellow animals have the same kind of feelings and desires that we do and that we should not kill and hurt others in order to eat them.

For more information and for a free vegetarian
starter kit, visit GoVeg.com or call 1-888-VEG-FOOD.

For more information on all these
issues, please visit GoVeg.com.