Vegan/Vegetarian? More animal blood on your hands.

[Phedder]

Very thought provoking article;
 

The ethics of eating red meat have been grilled recently by critics who question its consequences for environmental health and animal welfare. But if you want to minimise animal suffering and promote more sustainable agriculture, adopting a vegetarian diet might be the worst possible thing you could do.

Renowned ethicist Peter Singer says if there is a range of ways of feeding ourselves, we should choose the way that causes the least unnecessary harm to animals. Most animal rights advocates say this means we should eat plants rather than animals.

It takes somewhere between two to ten kilos of plants, depending on the type of plants involved, to produce one kilo of animal. Given the limited amount of productive land in the world, it would seem to some to make more sense to focus our culinary attentions on plants, because we would arguably get more energy per hectare for human consumption. Theoretically this should also mean fewer sentient animals would be killed to feed the ravenous appetites of ever more humans.

But before scratching rangelands-produced red meat off the “good to eat” list for ethical or environmental reasons, let’s test these presumptions.

Published figures suggest that, in Australia, producing wheat and other grains results in:

• at least 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein
• more environmental damage, and
• a great deal more animal cruelty than does farming red meat.

How is this possible?....

[Dinahlady]

Loll this is great. Probaby annoy a few veggies though - doubt they would take it seriously! 

[Leeroid]

Good read. The only real solution is to reduce the Earth's human population drastically IMO. Nobody (on a personal and national level) is going to make the necessary sacrifices to save the ecosystem and biodiversity from further damage.

 

I wonder what the ecological footprint of a bodybuilder is compared to a normal person with their excessive meat consumption and calorie requirements.