Animal argiculture is destroying our pla ...

Animal argiculture is destroying our planet!

Jan 16, 2021

Animal agriculture is bad for our planet. There are many reasons for people to go plant based or vegan, but one of the most common reasons next to ethical decisions based on how we treat animals is for environmental reasons. It's a fact, that animal agriculture is destroying this planet and makes us sick, but still companies who participate in animal agriculture distract from this fact and show us happy pictures from cows or happy pigs, while the reality often looks much different. However, I will concentrate onto the environmental impact of animal agriculture in this article.

Animal agriculture needs unbelievable amounts of space on our planet

Because we need more plants to feed a cow, so the cow produces meat for us, we also need much more place for animal agriculture on our planet, than we'd need if we'd eat the plants, we could produce ourselves. In fact, we could feed much more people, if we'd switch to a global plant based production of food. Livestock systems occupy 45% of the global surface area of the earth. Therefore, nearly half of the land mass of this planet is covered with animals harvested for our consumption and the resources we need for those animals to grow. We could use this space much more efficiently if we'd stop using it to use animals as our products and producing inefficient meat and other animal products. Also, while we have this amount of land mass used for animal agriculture, how is it, that we don't see that many animals? Well...there's a quote which goes by "If every slaughterhouse would be made of glass every human would be vegan". The industry likes to show us pictures of happy animals, so we buy their products instead of showing us the reality of the industry. If they showed us the reality, they would lose many customers, because the majority of their customers would switch to existing plant based alternatives.

We are wasting huge amounts of water

Okay. Think about going to a fast food chain and ordering a hamburger made of beef. What do you think how much water was needed to produce the meat of your hamburger? 10 liters, 20 liters or more? Maybe you think, that you'd need some water, but it can't be that much, right?
Well...you need 660 gallons of water. That's about 2500 liters! To make a good example how much water this really is: When showering you'll consume the same amount after about 2 months! McDonald's representatives say that the company sells a consistent daily average of 75 hamburgers a second. At that rate, the corporation sells roughly 225 million burgers worldwide every year. Let that amount sink in. You can do the math yourself of how much water that alone consumes every year. Even if you go vegetarian and not directly vegan you already reduce your water consumption by around 60%. However, being vegan of course saves the most water possible and is the solution you should try to achieve if you care about your water use and the planet.
What do you think how much water of all the water we consume every year in general is used for animal agriculture alone globally? To give you a fast and simple answer: animal agriculture is using more than two-thirds of the global consumed water on the planet. It's shocking for me to research those numbers and just proves to myself that being vegan is the best choice I've ever made. The following graphic is a comparison between Beyond-Meat burgers and regular beef burgers (not sponsored).

Ocean "Dead-Zones"

Animal agriculture is creating so called "Dead-Zones" in our oceans. They're also called "biological deserts". Livestock operations have created more than 500 low-oxygen (or hypoxic) areas known as dead-zones in our oceans. In these areas marine life can't thrive.

Source of air pollution

Animal agriculture is a leading cause of climate change. It emits about 13.5% of the world's greenhouse gases into the air. This is more than all the greenhouse gas emissions produced by all sorts of travel in the world combined. Every minute animals raised in the US for food alone produce more than seven million pounds of excrement. A single dairy cow produces the same amount of waste in one day as twenty to forty human beings.
And then there's also a major problem regarding air pollution in connection with animal agriculture. More than 70% of all ammonia emissions on earth come from animal agriculture. Ammonia causes respiratory disorders and contributes to acid rain. This isn't the nice kind of rain we want to have in summer. Believe me.

The sixth mass extinction

According to biologists, we are currently facing the sixth mass extinction. Gerardo Ceballos González, a professor of ecology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and one of the authors of their study found that in the past 100 years, more than 400 vertebrate species went extinct. In the normal course of evolution, such extinctions would have taken up to 10,000 years, they said. Natural predators, such as the Wedge wolf pack in Washington state, are murdered to keep cattle alive, who are only slaughtered not long after. If we keep destroying our planet with animal agriculture and other activities that destroy our planet our grandchildren will never see the earth, and it's animals the same way as we can do today. We are currently acting in order to have pleasant consumption and luxury and do not think about what we will leave behind for our future generations with our actions. If we continue like this we will be one of the last generations to colonize this planet.

If you care about our planet go vegan and make a good step into the right direction to save the planet. I've often talked with protesters and climate activists, who cared about the planet and who demonstrated for better regulations regarding climate change and only a few of them were vegan or even knew animal agriculture is such a big problem. We should spread the word of this and educate people that the happy cow producing our milk and is good for our climate is not the reality and only marketing. At the moment the earth is dying because of us. Because we want to forcefully impregnate a cow, take their babies away and milk them with machines for our morning glass of milk. Because we raise cattle to slaughter it only to have 5 minutes of taste. I'm sure, that if we somehow be able to save our planet future generations will look back at today and be ashamed of how humanity treated our wonderful planet and its animals and how companies did their marketing to let us believe milk and beef is good and healthy for us and isn't destroying our planet.

Thank you very much for reading! It would be awesome if you would share this article with your friends to spread the message. Also, if you want you can buy me a pizza on here to support my work and finance my hobby of writing articles, so I can continue to publish them for you free to read. Have a wonderful day and stay safe and healthy!

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