Eating for a Healthy Planet

A COMPASSIONATE DIET

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Articles:

According to the Worldwatch Institute, globally some 56 billion animals are raised and slaughtered for food each year. Of these 67 per cent are grown on industrial 'factory' farms. Factory farms are sources of cruelty and waste on scales unimaginable to most of us. These facilities rely on commercial breeds of animals that gain weight quickly on unnatural diets of high-protein feeds. Here animals live in crowded, stressful and often unhygienic conditions. Many of the world's 17 billion chickens, for instance, each live in an area that is less than the size of a sheet of paper. Cattle in such farms often stand knee-high in their own waste.

Under such conditions, animals are kept 'healthy' with regular doses of antibiotics — traces of which remain in the meat we eat, and which have been associated with the rise in antibiotic resistant bacteria in animals and humans.

See also Animal Welfare Facts (58 kb PDF file)

There are simple ways to begin making a difference today:

Buy Local Food — through Farmers Markets, Farm Gate Sales, etc. (find yours here)
Buy Organic — avoid GMOs, pesticides and support sustainable agriculture
Reduce or eliminate your consumption of animal products.

A Mother's Day Story about Milk Cows and Veal Calves

Mario was born on a dairy farm. On the day of his birth, he was taken away from his mother. She cried and searched anxiously for days after losing him. She carried him for nine months, but only got to meet him for a brief moment.

Mario was a male calf born to a dairy cow. He was never to see his mother again. The day after he was born, Mario ended up at a livestock auction to be sold for veal. His umbilical cord was still attached to his soft baby belly.

Had Mario been a perfect little calf, he would have sold to a veal farmer at the auction— and then either slaughtered that very same day to make “bob veal”, or chained up to a tiny stall, deprived of movement for six months and then slaughtered to make “fancy” or “white veal”. The veal industry is simply a by-product of the dairy industry, consisting entirely of unwanted male calves like Mario.

Read more of this article at the Georgia Straight.

Downloadable PDFs

Guide to Cruelty-Free Eating www.opposecruelty.org	Compassionate Choices www.opposecruelty.org	Even If You Like Meat... www.opposecruelty.org
Do Animals Have Rights? earthsave.ca	Why Vegan? www.opposecruelty.org	A Meaningful Life www.opposecruelty.org

Video Clips

Videos about Animals:

If you've heard that eating fish is better than red meat, please consider watching this (warning: some blood, and depictions of routine violence against fish and marine mammals...). BUT very important information!:

LINKS:

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“Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”

— Albert Einstein

Sir Paul McCartney sums it all up: "If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That's the single most important thing you could do. It's staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty."