You Have A Choice, They Don't

When you were younger, have you ever gone to a petting zoo? Do you remember your young innocent self being fascinated by cupping your hand and letting those adorable baby goats and piglets eat pellets out of your hand? You would laugh as it’s tongue tickled your hand and you were so content and happy. If that was you, flash forward to now. Do you still have that love and contentment for animals? Cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and all the other animals you pet at those petting zoos are [highly intelligent creatures] (https://www.lcanimal.org/index.php/campaigns/other-issues/veganism) that live [short, fearful lives] (https://navs-online.org/articles/veganism-animal-rights/) in extremely tight crates in modern factory farms. You can start to answer this question by looking down at your plate during dinner.

The [image] (https://sentientmedia.org/slaughterhouses/) above displays terrified, dirty, and cramped pigs waiting to be killed at a horrifying slaughter house.

For this project, I was drawn to vegetarianism and animal cruelty because I was very passionate about compassion for animals, and I myself ate plant based. I would watch videos about animal cruelty and think back to those summers when I would go to a petting zoo and cry because my parents wouldn’t let me keep this one baby pig that I loved so deeply. These videos shattered my heart and that’s all it took for me to not eat meat. But I know that not all people are like this. Not all people care about animals like I do, and that’s okay. It doesn’t make you a bad person. My goal for this project was to bring awareness to the extremely negative outcomes of eating meat. Going into this research, I encouraged vegetarianism because it’s ethically wrong, but the more I got deeper into this topic, I realized that it’s not just about killing animals.

Animal agriculture doesn’t just affect animals, it’s what animal agriculture is doing to us humans and the earth all wrapped up in one. Some people might take it as gratitude and compassion towards animals, but eating meat from animals is also largely contributing to global warming and terrible for our human health. We can attack the topic of eating meat from so many different areas: Compassion, climate crisis, and human health. There are so many red flags that point humans away from consuming animal meat but they choose to ignore it for a short euphoric state of enjoying a medium rare steak. People don’t want to lower their meat consumption because they think they have to be fully vegan and master commitment, but the truth is [lowering your daily meat consumption] (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/19/why-you-should-go-animal-free-arguments-in-favour-of-meat-eating-debunked-plant-based) will help the environment tremendously. There are many more layers to vegetarianism than you might think.

The first point I wanted to hit was compassion. Animals are just like us, they are living breathing creatures with the same pain tolerance as humans and consciousness. The only difference between humans and animals is that animals are incomplete. Animals can’t use words like, “Hey, human! That really hurts and I am extremely in pain and uncomfortable.” Us humans take advantage of this incompleteness because animals can’t speak for their rights in this human dominant world. Animals are injected with hormones and live in horrifying conditions in factory farms. This is why us humans have to speak up for animal rights because they can’t for themselves. Meat eaters never see the horrors of slaughterhouses in the average animal product industry. The documentary [“Earthlings”,] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gqwpfEcBjI&t=1652s) directed and written by Shaun Monson, really put eating animal meat in a different perspective. The film stated, “Killing an animal is in itself a troubling act. It has been said that if we had to kill our own meat, we would all be vegetarians.” What if as humans, we ate our own kind, and we had to go through all the suffering in animal slaughterhouses? We would have a choice right? To eat our own meat or switch to a vegetarian diet. Of course we would choose to go vegetarian because it is the most humane thing to do and we would do this to save our own skin. Why can’t we do the same for animals? Humanizing the animals and seeing it through their perspective makes you human, the good kind.

The image above showcases the horrific and unhealthy conditions animals have to face in factory farms. Image credit: [Tia Schwab] (https://www.nationofchange.org/2019/12/04/if-factory-farm-conditions-are-unhealthy-for-animals-theyre-bad-for-people-too/)

It was really interesting seeing this topic intersect and merge with another problem I’m passionate about; the climate crisis. Cutting down rainforests, greenhouse gasses, burning fossil fuels, plastic pollution, and now I can add farming livestock to the list. Livestock production contributes to [15%] (https://www.worldanimalprotection.org/blogs/not-convinced-you-could-become-vegetarian-eating-less-meat-still-better-farm-animals-planet) of global greenhouse gas emissions. This is further than cars, planes, buses, and other forms of transportation put together. Rainforests are also essential to life on earth because they regulate the water cycle on this planet and absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but rainforests are getting cut down to raise more cattle and livestock. This means, [for every 257 hamburgers produced every second, one football field of rainforest is destroyed.] (https://www.happycow.net/vegtopics/why-vegetarian)

The picture above shows many examples of how animal agriculture affects our planet and it’s big impact on climate change. Credit: [Cowspiracy] (https://www.cowspiracy.com/infographic)

If you’re still not convinced to switch to a more plant based diet, just know that there are benefits for you too. According to the American Diabetic Association, “Vegetarians have a reduced risk of heart disease, obesity, colon cancer, adult-onset diabetes, osteoporosis, gout, gallstones, kidney stones, lung cancer, and breast cancer.” You can avoid future health problems and stress about medical bills by simply avoiding animal meat. It’s better for the body and the spirit as well. Some people think that we need to eat meat in order to get protein, but the truth is there is no lack of protein. All the protein our body needs can be found in plant based sources like beans, nuts, and whole grains. You don’t have the weight and guilt of eating a living creature on your shoulders to be healthy, and that feels great.

The research I’ve done has really taught me to be open minded. To not expect and have a full picture of a problem in your mind. I went into this research knowing that eating animal meat was ethically wrong, and my goal was to convince others to have compassion for animals and eat plant based. Coming out of this research, my gears shifted and I noted that eating meat is a much bigger problem than I thought, and my interest for this topic expanded. It did not just kill highly intelligent and conscious animals, but it’s also slowly killing our earth and our bodies. After doing this research, it made me realize how important our role is in this situation. How important our actions are, but I know how extremely hard it is to switch to this lifestyle. I remember not being able to resist bacon on a Saturday morning when I first decided to become vegetarian. I knew all the negative impacts it had on animals, the earth, and our bodies, but I still couldn’t hold back. This made me further question if this has something to do with the reward system in our brains. What if some people just can’t stop eating meat because it increases their dopamine level which is the brain’s reward system, even if they know all the damage animals meat can do? I think learning about the brain’s reward system can get me one step closer to help convince others to eat plant based.

[Annotated Bibliography] (https://docs.google.com/document/d/11OZfEtHJE1pv1S6ib5i2BsnjN8tAx580aM9n3JArBVE/edit?usp=sharing)