TOP 5 REASONS why eating meat is NOT a personal choice

Many people say that eating meat is a personal choice but let’s have a look more closely at this issue and go through the top 5 reasons why eating meat is actually NOT a personal choice.

Reason 5: Emissions

In western countries, if your car puffs out plumes of black smoke, this is a traffic violation and offence under anti pollution laws. An illegal act. It certainly wouldn’t pass it’s yearly inspection because of high emissions and you can even end up in court over such a violation. Meanwhile in Thailand, most of the taxis leave trails of black smoke in their wake when they drive their battered old songthaews around town. Nobody is fined and the police don’t really care. But if a certain culture doesn’t care about a problem, it doesn’t mean that the problem goes away. There are anti red taxi stickers all around town in Chiang Mai from people protesting the poorly regulated taxis and the air quality is noticeably reduced by poorly regulated vehicles and this is one of the main downsides quoted by tourists who visit the city. But actually there is a much larger environmental problem than cars puffing out black smoke. Animal agriculture produces at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year which is 51% of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. That’s significantly more than all types of transportation combined. Not only poorly maintain cars but also trains, planes, ships and everything else. Eating meat produces such humongous emissions it would be like driving a car around town that not only puffed out black smoke but so much black smoke that it filled the entire street and killed innocent bystanders because of the extreme pollution.

Reason 4: Human casualties

If you don’t understand why innocent bystanders are killed by the pollution caused by eating meat, you’ve never visited a village near pig factory farms. The people who live there have a severely heightened risk of various diseases with a staggeringly high cancer mortality rate. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Animal agriculture is the leading cause of global warming as a result of the pollution it creates, which is already negatively effecting climates around the world leading to food shortages, droughts, respiratory and air pollution related deaths as well the the increased transmission of malaria and dengue fever, estimated by experts to cause upwards of 150,000 deaths per year. Global warming also increases the intensity of heat waves. Heat waves are dangerous because vulnerable people die during extremely hot weather. A country’s overall mortality rate increases a whopping 5.74% during such hot weather, killing huge numbers of people. If this isn’t already horrible enough, the huge areas of land around the world dedicated to growing grain and other foods for the sole purpose of feeding livestock, could actually just be used to feed starving people around the world instead. Meat production is very inefficient requiring huge amounts of plant foods to be wasted to produce small amounts of meat. In many cases the grain is farmed in poor countries such as parts of South America and Africa where the people are starving and malnourished but instead of them getting any food, it is used to feed animals which we eat in richer parts of the world. This is literally taking food away from starving people and letting them die. Eating meat is prioritising your tastebuds over the lives of starving children, the height of selfishness.

Reason 3: Eating meat is completely unnecessary

All plant foods contain all 8 essential amino acids and therefore, contrary to extremely popular belief, animal foods are not higher quality proteins than plant foods. You do not have to combine protein sources. The only incomplete protein source I know of is an animal food: gelatine is an incomplete protein. I do not know of a single normal plant food which is an incomplete protein. This is pseudoscientific propaganda propagated by the meat industry to make people think they need to eat meat for some health related reason when in fact eating meat is 100% unnecessary for human health and many scientists argue that humans actually are not even supposed to be eating meat from a biological point of view, any more than a horse is supposed to eat meat. Sure, we can eat meat. But horses can eat meat too. But because someone can do something, it doesn’t mean it is a good idea. I can also eat my own faces or hit myself in the face or do many other things which are completely unnecessary but just because I regularly engage in a stupid activity it doesn’t change the fact that it is completely unnecessary.

Reason 2: Health

Not only is it completely unnecessary to eat meat, it is actually harmful to human health. Eating meat, dairy and eggs raises your cholesterol and is the main risk factor for coronary heart disease. Heart disease is the number one killer world wide, killing 8,750,000 per year and this is mostly as a result of eating animal foods. There are some industry funded studies which claim eating animal foods such as eggs do not raise your cholesterol but these studies have since been proven to be misleading and legitimate science has proven that animal foods do indeed raise your cholesterol. This has lead to further industry funded studies suggesting that cholesterol does not even play a role in heart disease but this has again been proven to be more deliberately misleading information. Legitimate science shows that cholesterol is at least the main risk factor, or even the exclusive risk factor, for coronary heart disease. Peer reviewed studies have shown it is even possible to reverse heart disease by eating a low fat diet devoid of animal foods. Obesity, stroke, diabetes, Alzeimers, hypertension, osteoporosis, gout and many more diseases all have been linked to the consumption of meat and animal based foods.

Reason 1: There is a victim

Something can not be considered a personal choice if there is a victim, even if you derive pleasure from the act or think it is necessary in some way. If you raped someone and said in the court of law, “Your honour, it is my personal choice to rape women as I enjoy having sex” this will earn you a lengthly stay in prison. If you robbed someone it would also not end well in court if you said to the judge “it is my personal choice to rob people as I like money”. If you killed another human, chopped them up into pieces and ate them, like Jeffrey Dahmer did, saying that it is your personal choice to kill people because you want to eat, you would mostly likely spend the rest of your life behind prison walls. But what is the difference between killing a human, chopping them up into little pieces and eating them, and killing other living sentient beings and chopping them up into little pieces and eating them? That’s a very good question and one I can’t answer. Other animals want to live and avoid pain and suffering just like we do. Why do we love dogs and lock pigs in tiny cages and kill them when they are more intelligent than dogs and just as innocent? Unnecessarily killing a dog is a criminal offence under animal protection laws but unnecessarily killing millions of pigs on a mass scale is considered perfectly OK.

It’s time to realise the status quo is idiotic and leading to the demise of our own health, mass suffering of animals and the destruction of the planet we live on. It’s time to step up, take responsibility and do something about it. You can make a difference right now, starting today, by simply eating a healthier plant based diet and stop funding animal agriculture with your own money. It’s as simple as that.

Be smart. Be vegan.