If Slaughterhouses Had Glass Walls . . .
Many people are not aware, worldwide, about the truth behind the meat industry. To be able to look at a McDonalds quarter pounder with cheese, or a Burger King whopper and know what happens in the process to produce the time bomb we see advertised everywhere sickens me.
Meat production is an outrageous waste of our Earths limited resources. Many people in the third world are starving, which is not a secret. However, what may be more of a secret is that much of this starvation is a result of rich nations demand for meat. Seventy-five per cent of third world imports of corn, barley, sorghum, oats and others are fed to livestock destined for slaughter and not to hungry people! The minority of people in developed countries who eat meat contribute to millions of deaths in the third world due to malnutrition. In the period humans have walked the Earth, never has there been a larger amount of people overweight, in contrast; never before have there been so many people malnourished (twenty-five per cent). All the cattle on the planet consume more than the entire human race put together. If one person chooses to eat a meal of beef they deprive fifteen other people from eating, although not intentionally. This is due to what that cow has eaten to be fattened up for slaughter; it takes 16kg of grain for 1kg of beef. Also, all of the land, which is used to graze cattle, can feed twenty times as many people on a vegetarian diet than a meat diet.
This is not taking into account the many environmental issues the meat industry contributes towards. The year 1999 saw the Union of Concerned Scientists remark that meat eating was one of the most damaging factors on the environment, along with driving lorries and cars. Roughly half of the Earths total land mass is used as pasture for cattle and other livestock. Thirty per cent of all land in the USA for example is used for grazing cattle, which is intended for slaughter. ‘Topsoil’ which is the most valuable part of the soil and takes thousands of years to redeposit is being lost all of the time; the meat industry is responsible for about eighty-five per cent of the total losses of this valuable component for growing vegetation. Water is another major environmental concern when it comes to consuming meat. Twenty-five thousand litres of water are needed to produce one kilogram of beef for consumption! Furthermore, it takes two hundred times more water to make a pound of beef than a pound of potatoes. Many people are also not aware that the meat industry is the single greatest polluter of our waters. The animals, which are raised for killing, produce 130 times more waste than the entire population of the human race. The current issue of global warming is also aided by the meat industry. Livestock, mainly cows, contribute massively to the ‘green-house effect’. It accounts to fifteen to twenty per cent of total global methane emissions. In the US, a third of all fossil fuel uses is used to raise animals for food. Additionally, animal protein production requires more than eight times as much fossil fuel energy as production of comparable amount of plant protein.
