Vegetarianism: Making the case against waste

By Jon Monteith

Last week, fellow columnist Lally Gartel explained why she doesn’t lose any sleep over her consumption of meat – and why you needn’t, either. According to her, humans have no moral obligation to avoid the slaughter of animals, provided that we do it in what she calls a humane fashion.

I may not be personally convinced by Lally’s chest-thumping on behalf of the human race – this chicken isn’t advanced enough to discuss Rousseau with me over a cup of coffee, so I clearly have a right to eat it – but I do respect her freedom to deny the existence of an ethical dilemma when it comes to her status as a meat-eater. I’m not particularly surprised to see her arguing this position, just as I wasn’t exactly shocked when Lally the smoker managed to find a very persuasive health-based objection to bans on indoor smoking in public places. The ability to rationalize one’s habits is an incredibly useful skill.

No matter how definitively she tries to state it, Lally’s position on the ethical significance of killing and consuming animals is highly debatable. According to Dr. Joan Sabate, chairman of the Loma Linda Nutrition Conference, “For the average sedentary adult living in a Western society, a vegetarian diet meets dietary needs and prevents chronic diseases better than an omnivore diet.”

In a developed nation such as the United States, we are now fully capable of living healthy – and as Dr. Sabate points out, healthier – lives without meat in our diet. I don’t think it is all that unreasonable to have a moral objection to the clearly unnecessary slaughter of billions of animals in America, especially when these animals do in fact possess nervous systems that cause them to feel great pain.

If I can do just fine without live chickens getting their beaks ripped off or terrified farm animals being sliced into pieces on an assembly as they fight for their lives because they were not rendered unconscious, then I feel a moral urge not to eat meat. You may not share that ethical discomfort, but surely it is possible to see how it could exist.

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In any case, vegetarianism as an alternative goes far beyond a sense of goodwill toward those below us on the food chain. For many practicing vegetarians, self-interest is the most compelling reason to avoid eating meat.

According to the American Heart Association (those bomb-throwing leftists), when vegetarian diets incorporate essential nutrients such as protein, iron and vitamin B-12, they can be a major boost to your health: “Many studies have shown that vegetarians seem to have a lower risk of obesity, coronary heart disease (which causes heart attack), high blood pressure, diabetes mellitus and some forms of cancer.”

Lally was kind enough to devote an entire sentence to vegetarianism as an environmentally responsible choice. Let me expand on that a little. According to a report released last year by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, cattle-rearing produces more global warming greenhouse gases, as measured in CO2 equivalent, than all of the world’s transportation combined.

Unfortunately, there’s more. The livestock industry has led to the widespread clearing of forests. In Latin America, for example, expansion of grazing lands has accounted for roughly 70 percent of deforestation in the Amazon. The report goes on to state the following: “The livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the earth’s increasingly scarce water resources, contributing among other things to water pollution from animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and the pesticides used to spray feed crops.”

At the current rate of environmental degradation, clearly spurred on by the meat industry, the long-term sustainability of Earth’s population is a pipe dream. Combined with the needless loss of life in developed nations and the demonstrated benefits of a vegetarian diet, avoiding meat in one’s diet seems the most responsible choice. In a country so notorious for over-consumption, even a modest but widespread reduction would make a difference.