image credit: excerpt from the book “Sapiens”
Every factory farmed animal lives a fraction of its normal life. The time it is alive is spent in a cage that barely allows movement, while being packed into tight spaces alongside other scared, lonely animals that can barely move. Babies are immediately separated from their mothers, to be sent to their own small cages for the rest of their life. Male chicks born to egg-laying hens are just tossed straight into a grinder at birth, because they aren’t of enough use to raise to adulthood since their particular breed isn’t worth enough to raise for meat.
Global fish populations are down by half and demand outpaces the fish population’s ability to reproduce.
A common argument is that the farming of massive amounts of land results in the death of countless amounts of voles, field mice, snakes, etc. due to the machinery used throughout the process. Two points on this. 1) Sadly, veganism does not and cannot eliminate all animal suffering but it is possible to minimize it as much as we can. 2) The less crops grown that are used to feed factory farmed animals, the less that will happen anyway. Again, minimizing suffering.
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What are the three pillars of veganism? They are the three big reasons to go plant-based – personal health, environmental health and animal welfare. Any one of these three is a good enough reason on its own.
