Why Vegan?

I remember several years ago wen I was a vegetarian, someone asked me why I was a herbivore and I gave the usual answers: I couldn’t eat something that was once living and breathing, it’s better for my health, I don’t like consciously contributing to all the suffering in the world, etc… Curious, they then asked me about veganism and how it differed from a vegetarian diet. Ashamedly, I was quick to reply that I though a vegan diet was far too extreme and radical for my simple life. It was merely a har-leftist attempt for animal-rights activists to gain recognition and attention.

After several years of reading about, learning about, and most of all seeing the horrible way both meat and dairy animals are treated, I have fully transitioned from a vegetarian diet to vegan indulgence. My reasons for my eating habits are not only for the animals, but also for my personal health as well as the health of the environment. VegNew’s Dan Piaro sums it up well in his Sept/Oct 2007 issue: 

      ” Enough plants and water to feed more than a dozen people is fed to livestock to produce a single meal for a meat-eating human. [...] If we weren’t breeding and feeding the world’s 55 billion farm animals, we’d solve the human hungar crisis in approximately four-and-a-half minutes. Not to mention that animal agriculture accounts for the majority of water and soil degradation, contributes more to global warming than all transportation combined, and is responsible for virtually all the rainforest destruction on the planet. Farmed animals in the US alone create 86,000 pounds of excrement per second, and none of it goes through sewage treatment plants. The damage that commercial fishing has done to the oceans cannont even be accurately measured because it is hidden from view, but experts estimate that between 40 and 70 percent of ocean life has been eliminated by commercial fishing in the last 100 years, and as many as 90 percent of large fish are gone, probably forever.”

That’s all well and good, but Piaro doesn’t say much about why you should go vegan. I found the Vegan Action website to be quite helpful for that:

“On U.S. farms, an average of 7 egg-laying hens spend their entire lives in a battery cage with a floor area the size of a vinyl record cover. Living on wire floors that deform their feet, in cages so tiny they cannot stretch their wings, and covered with excrement from cages above them, these chickens suffer lameness, bone disease, and obsessive pecking, which is curbed by searing the beaks off young chicks. Although chickens can live up to 15 years, they are usually slaughtered when their egg production rates decline after two years. Hatcheries have no use for male chicks, so they are killed by suffocation, decapitation, gassing, or crushing.

As with any mammal, cows produce milk only when pregnant and stop after their calves have been weaned. When a dairy cow delivers a female calf, the calf becomes a dairy cow herself, born to live in the same conditions as her mother. But when a dairy cow delivers a male calf, the calf is sold to a veal farm within days of birth, where he is tethered to a stall, deprived of food and exercise, and soon slaughtered for meat. Life is only a few years longer for the mother. Because it is unprofitable to keep cows alive once their milk production declines, dairy cows are usually slaughtered at 5 years of age. Thus, a cow’s normal lifespan of 25 years is cut 20 years short just to cut costs and maximize production.”

From the Vegan Action website

This is not to say that I condemn anyone who eats dairy or eggs. I believe in locally supported agriculture, and yes, that often does include sustainably produced milk and cheese. I’m from Vermont where farming is a way of life and there are many farms where the animals are treated humanely and their milk or eggs gathered with love and respect. As for sustainably raised beef and meat – that’s one step closer to becoming vegetarian.