Understanding The Facts About Animal Agriculture

Milk and Meat

 

The process of producing animals for milk and food is not a nice one.

 

For milk, animals, including cows, goats and camels, are forced to have babies then those babies are taken away so that we can take their milk. These young animals are then grown to make meat, or they are disposed of.

 

They live in tight, cramped conditions, often not being able to walk outside.  They are fed food that they wouldn't naturally eat, but it makes them grow rapidly so that they will be ready to be made into food faster. This means that farmers can make more money.

 

Farmers only grow these animals to sell them and make money; these animals are not their pets. If no one bought the meat, eggs and milk, farmers would find another job.  Maybe growing potatoes for all the vegans.  It's important to remember that the animals don't want to be there; it makes them lonely, it causes them pain and makes them incredibly sad.

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Every year, 80 billion animals are killed for meat, eggs and other animal-based products. This is a fact of animal agriculture. But by being vegan, you save 1 animal everyday.

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The harm done to animals isn't all about farming, though; there's also using animals for testing, using feathers, wool and skins for clothes and furniture.

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Animal Testing

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Animals are used to test all kinds of different things, from make up to medicine.  The animals can be made to eat things, have injections or even be made ill just to see what happens to them.

 

When testing makeup and other items scientists will put the substance on the animals fur, up their noses and in their eyes to see what happens.  This doesn't always make the scientists bad people, they often think that this is the best way to make sure that items are safe for people to use, but there are other ways.

 

Skin and other body parts, such as the liver, can be grown from only a few body cells and used for testing or companies can use ingredients that we already know are safe.  When buying makeup and other items, choose those that are cruelty free and don't contain any animal products.

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What about wild animals?  How are they being harmed?

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Have you ever been to the zoo?

 

It's fun, you see animals that you'd normally only see on the television right in front of you.  You can enjoy watching them eat and climb and see just how big or tiny they are.

 

In zoos, big and small, the animals suffer.  They don't have the space that they would get in the wild. Birds cannot fly as high or as far as they want. Animals that live on the ground can only walk as far as their enclosure will allow. Aquatic animals are trapped in pools.

 

Animals also suffer in the wild.  Deforestation, the clearing of forests, is happening everyday leaving the animals that live there nowhere to go as their homes and food are gone.  Cutting down the trees also means that carbon dioxide in the air increases. The trees, being dead, can no longer remove carbon from the air and the carbon stored within their leaves, trunks, branches and roots, is released into the atmosphere. This is especially true when trees are burnt.

 

The Amazon rainforest is the largest rainforest, and it is being destroyed for farming animals and growing crops, but it's not the only one.  Across the world forests are being cleared to grown food for animals that are then used for meat.  If no one wanted to eat the animals then there would be no need to cut down the forest to get the land. Not only that, if everyone stopped eating meat, the forests would be able to grow back.

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There are lots of ways that we can make changes that would stop animal suffering. We can buy items that don't harm animals, we can tidy up our local parks, we can make sure that we're not wasteful and support causes that help the environment. We can definitely not eat them. If we all work together we can make a huge change.​