WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO EAT FOR THE PLANET?
Imagine going into the fridge and taking out a plate of food, and throwing it in the garbage. And then going back to the fridge, taking out another, and throwing that one out as well. And doing this 8 or 9 times before you take out a plate of food and sit down to eat. And then turning on a tap, and letting thousands of litres of water wash down the drain.
When we eat animal products, this is what we’re doing.
We don’t think about it, but non-human animals need to eat food and drink water just like us … for months or years before they’re killed for food. If we ate the food directly, rather than second-hand, it would have much less impact on the planet.
Numerous studies from well-respected universities around the world tell us how destructive animal agriculture is to our environment and our climate. We have so little time to make massive and unprecedented change…less than 10 years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report to the United Nations.
GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS & ANIMAL AGRICULTURE
The United Nations says animal agriculture creates more greenhouse gas emissions than all of the world’s transportation.
Most of us know that cows produce methane gas. But did you know that methane has about 20 to 30 times the heating power of CO2? It dissipates more quickly, however, so if we can eliminate more sources of methane, we can make impactful change quickly.
Nitrous Oxide, also produced in animal agriculture, burns 265 times hotter than CO2.
According to the United Nations, animal agriculture is responsible for 5% of anthropogenic (human-caused) CO2, 44% of anthropogenic methane, and 53% of anthropogenic nitrous oxide.
Every time we eat an animal or animal product, we’re essentially consuming all of the food and all of the water that the animal consumed.
Estimates vary, but one beef burger can use between 1,500 and 2,000 litres of water … closer to 3,000 if topped with cheese or bacon.
One egg can require up to 189 litres of water to produce.
The average dairy cow drinks 115 litres of water per day, per the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, in addition to the water required for cleaning and growing food for her.
Cows’ milk requires 3 times more water than soy milk to produce.
Cheese is concentrated milk, and takes many times more water to produce … so one pound of cheese can take 10,000 litres of water to produce.
FOOD & WATER WASTE IN ANIMAL AGRICULTURE
EXCREMENT AND WASTE in ANIMAL AGRICULTURE
There’s a lot of excrement created from animals in animal agriculture. On top of that, there are many animals that are considered a bi-product of the industry or die during their upbringing or transport.
The excrement from farmed animals, unlike human waste, is untreated, and pollutes our waterways and our land. Stats Canada says one milk cow creates up to 62 kilos of waste every day, and one beef cow 37 kilos.
Roosters don’t lay eggs, and bulls don’t produce milk, so half the chicks and many of the calves born are considered waste.
The Canadian food inspection agency says that 1 & 1/2 million animals die during transportation to slaughter in Canada yearly. They cannot be used for human consumption if they die before they reach the slaughterhouse, so they are considered waste.
During this pandemic, slaughterhouses have been hit hard with cases of COVID-19, so that they have not able to slaughter as many animals. The result has been that hundreds of thousands of animals in Canada have been killed and gone to landfill. This means that all of the food and water used to raise these animals has also been wasted.
Fishing and farming fish are also killing the oceans and killing the planet. We take 170 million tons of fish out of our oceans and lakes every year, the UN says. So many fish that we can only count them in tons.
The United Nations says that one in three fish caught are thrown back, dead.
Farmed fish, like other farmed animals, are kept in very close quarters, and are breeding grounds for diseases that infect and kill off wild fish.
Scientists say that wild fish will likely disappear by the year 2048 if we keep fishing at the current rate. That’s less than 30 years from now. Fish have been on Earth for more than 500 million years. They are a crucial part of their ecosystems, including the oceans, where we get the majority of our oxygen. If we kill the oceans, we will not survive.
Nearly half of the plastic and garbage found in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating Island of garbage three times the size of France that contains about 90,000 tons of plastic and garbage, has been found to be lost or discarded fishing gear and fishing nets.
OCEANS AND WATERWAYS
LOSS OF BIODIVERSITY
According to the United Nations, nearly 1 million species are at risk of extinction right now.
Farmed birds now make up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% being wild.
60% of all mammals on Earth are livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, 36% are humans, and just 4% are wild animals.
That 4% figure pre-dates the wildfires in Australia this past year, where estimates say more than a billion wild animals may have died, so it could be even lower.
As humans destroy forests, natural grasslands, bush and wetlands to make room for us, for crops, and for the animals that we eat, we lose more and more habitat for wild animals.
Numerous wild animals are also hunted to make room for farmed animals … in Canada and the U.S. coyotes, bears, wolves, wild horses, squirrels, gophers, mountain lions, bobcats, otters, beavers and prairie dogs are all killed to protect farming.
Thousands of dolphins, whales, seabirds, turtles and other animals are caught in discarded or lost “ghost” nets every year and die.
Livestock and the food grown to feed them use up over 80% of the world’s farmland, but provide only 18% of the calories we eat.
A Yale University study found that cattle ranching was responsible for 80% of tree loss in Amazon countries.
While some grasslands are natural, grazing livestock has historically been the main cause of human-caused deforestation, and the resulting release of CO2 (when trees die, they release the CO2 that they’ve sequestered).
The idea that most free-range animals are grazing on land that couldn’t be used for anything else isn’t true, according to Grazed and Confused, out of Oxford University and other institutions across the world.
Our planet is finite, so it doesn’t really make sense that raising animals free-range could solve our problems. It would take up more land; we would need an extra planet to just spread out the animals currently being raised in factory farms; and the demand for animal products is growing.
We know that trees sequester carbon for us, and release carbon when they’re cut down or burned, which they are, increasingly, as our demand for animal products increases.
Cattle ranchers are responsible for 80% of land clearing in the Amazon, and particularly in Brazil, fires are set to clear land for raising farmed animals and grow food for them.
The Amazon rainforest is also a significant source of oxygen for the planet.