A vegan diet offers an incredibly effective way to protect animals, the environment, and your health.
If you don’t want your food dollar to support animal slaughter, a vegan diet is really the only way to go. That’s because there are no retirement homes for dairy cows and egg-laying hens. They all go to slaughter, typically before they’ve reached even half their natural life expectancy.
Apart from animal slaughter, there are intractable ethical problems associated with dairy products and eggs. One of the key objections to the dairy industry is that, in order to maximize milk yields, dairy cows are typically kept pregnant nine months out of every year. And as a result, the dairy industry is awash with unwanted calves. And since male dairy calves are obviously unable to produce milk, and aren’t the correct breed to be raised as beef, they are generally raised for veal or slaughtered at birth. The male counterparts of egg-laying hens don’t fare any better; most of these animals are either smothered or ground up alive immediately after hatching. In the United States alone, about 200 million male chicks are discarded in this manner each year.
Leaving aside the fact that nearly all dairy cows and layer hens go to slaughter, these animals are often subjected to even greater cruelties than those who are bred for meat. You can become acquainted with the ethical problems of the dairy and egg industries by watching the short video Farm to Fridge or by reading books like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals or Mark Hawthorne’s Bleating Hearts.
From an environmental point of view, a vegan diet likewise makes enormous sense. There’s no doubt that raising crops directly for food requires fewer resources, and generates less waste, than feeding crops to animals. What’s more, scientists are unanimous that the methane production associated with livestock is one of the key factors in global warming—quite possibly exceeding the impact of all greenhouse gases generated by cars, airplanes, trains, and ships.
The health advantages of a vegan diet aren’t as pronounced as many animal advocates contend, and it’s certainly possible to eat an extremely healthful diet that contains some animal products. That said, a vegan diet will automatically eliminate many of the the most unhealthful foods that people regularly eat: hamburgers, hot dogs, sausages, fried chicken, ice cream, and so forth. When you replace these foods with more healthful vegan choices, it’s likely that you’ll feel better while simultaneously reducing your risk of cardiovascular disease and certain types of cancer.