by Stephanie Heckman

Created on: February 27, 2007   Last Updated: May 04, 2007

Do you care about your life, health, the planet, environment, animals, starving children or even your weight? Then why eat meat?
Flesh consumption is linked to heart disease, heart attacks, diabetes, osteoporosis, impotence, infertility, and several types of cancers including ovarian, prostate, and breast cancer. Meat eaters are much more likely than vegetarians to die or become inflicted with these preventable diseases. Vegans have the longest lifespans.

The United States alone slaughters 10 billion farm animals every year. If you are not a vegetarian, you are eating 100 animals a year and several thousand in your lifetime. These cattle, chicken, pigs, and sheep are raised in horrible conditions with thousands of other animals where they can barely move and live in stench. Chickens and pigs are raised in tiny metal cages on concrete. These animals are fed hormones and chemicals that not only negatively affect them but harm the people who consume them. Due to the growth hormones fed to them, most are sent to the slaughterhouse at extremely young ages like 2 months old as in chickens. Some animals like pigs are boiled alive without any pain killers or are fully aware. Other animals are sliced up alive or have their skin ripped off. If you eat meat, you are paying encouraging this industry to slaughter more animals inhumanely. If these were people, the murders would be in jail for life or executed. However, it is illegal to slaughter animal after animal. I have seen videos of chickens being beaten to death and worse.
And what about people? Cattle consumes thousands more grain and corn than people would. Over 2/3 of our crops are fed to livestock. With just a quarter of what we feed to livestock, we could feed 1 and 1/2 Billion more people. Billions of humans are starving to death and if everyone just gave up half of their meat intake, no one would die of starvation. Feeding the food that should go to humans to animals is extremely wasteful. It would be a good start in ending world hunger to use the food on people instead of livestock.
One pound of beef takes thousand times more water than one pound of wheat. By turning up a hamburger, you are saving 40 showers worth of water. The environment is another pressing problem. Cattle takes up a half of the world's land. They destroy the land. A half of our country's land is now unable to have crops grown on them because of this. Livestock farming is the greatest cause of soil erosion. The waste from these billions

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