Death: Calorie For Calorie
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There’s a new visual from Animal Visuals that finally puts to rest the anti-vegan argument regarding animal deaths from harvesters and other plant agriculture methods. Calorie for calorie, a diet of fruits, veggies, and grains causes less suffering and death than a diet of poultry, eggs, and other animal products.
The explanation and discussion is long (found here) so I just pulled a few quotes from it. The main point is that the above visual is conservative. Calorie for calorie, a plant-based diet results in far fewer animal deaths than a meat-centered diet:
- “Removing chicken and eggs alone from your diet will greatly reduce the animal suffering and death associated with what you eat.”
- “Egg-laying hens are not bred for meat, so those who are slaughtered have low carcass yields, and yield low-quality meat that may go into soups or other processed foods for human consumption. They may also be buried on site, or ground up and added to livestock feed.”
- “Dairy cows are impregnated three times in their 4-year life [their natural life span is 10-20 years] so that they keep giving milk, and their calves must be taken away so that we can collect the milk for ourselves. The female calves become more dairy cows, and the males, having no economic value as a dairy breed, are raised for veal.”
- “There are other possible sources of animal death associated with our diets, such as predators killed in defense of livestock, animals prevented from existing by the destruction of their habitat, and human deaths from food poisoning, disease, or accidents on farms or in slaughterhouses.”
- “To produce fruits, vegetables, and grains, it is not necessary to kill any animals directly.”
- “The results of this estimation show that a diet that includes animal products will result in more animal deaths than a plant-based diet with the same number of calories.”
The introduction to the study mentions that it didn’t take into account the animals that are not brought into existence because of habitats destroyed for agriculture. I wish it had, because that is the argument that The Vegetarian Myth puts forth – that it would be more ecological and better for the animals to eat fish, for instance, than to dam a river and destroy all the fish to grow vegetarian corn and wheat. It’s still an interesting study, but the argument over how many animals are killed during harvesting is a silly one, and it’s kind of obvious that more direct death results from eating animals than from eating grains. I guess it would be too hard (or even impossible) to study the indirect death of the animals that never came into being because of agriculture. That puts us in a lose-lose position, though, unless someone comes up with another way to prove that the Veg Myth thinking is wrong (Which I KNOW that it is, but how do we show it?)