One thing we atheists seem to pride ourselves more and more these days over religious folks is our sense of morality – if we do good without the need for a supreme supernatural overseer to tell us to, then we must be morally superior. Is this really so I wonder? For starters, do atheists donate more to charity than the religious? Do we offer up our seats to the elderly more often? Do we treat our neighbours better, or contribute more to our communities? More often than not, I think, we would find that the answers to those questions would be a no. Of course, I am not in any way insinuating that atheism leads to immorality. Instead, I am trying to point out that if we want to claim to be morally superior, we have to put our money where our mouths are. Since this website is supposedly also advocating secular humanism, I should think these ideas aren’t very contentious. But what does vegetarianism have to do with anything? Well, here are some facts about the meat we eat everyday:
The Waste of Meat-Eating
Most of the meat we eat in North America come from factory farms, which are inherently extremely wasteful and inefficient. Consider that when we grow grains to feed the animals that in turn feed us, most of the energy in those grains go towards growing bones, skins, and self-repair mechanisms of the animals. In fact, it takes over 10kg of grain to raise 1kg of beef. How does it look like for other animals? Well…
Producing livestock requires a large amount of resources in terms of water and land on which to build farms and facilities. It also necessitates the use of even more land in order to grow the food to with the animals with. To put it into perspective, 1 hectare of land can feed 1 person per year if it produced beef, while it can feed 22 if it grew potatoes. The land used to produce meat would be several times more efficiently employed if used to grow soybeans, rice, corn, or wheat, both in terms of calories and proteins.
Growing meat, as it happens, also takes a huge amount of fresh water – a commodity the world is starting to seriously lack these days. Here is a chart showing exactly how much water that steaming juicy steak on your plate last night costs:
The world, as a whole, cannot sustain such a great strain on freshwater. This is especially true when the freshwater used for irrigation depletes rivers or underground aquifers faster than they are being replenished, as is happening in many parts of the world.
Really, eating meat is like driving a car to your next door neighbour’s for dinner – it makes no sense.
The Environmental Costs of Eating Meat
Cow vs Car
When asked about what the main contributors to global warming are, an average person would probably never pause to think about meat-eating. It would be pretty shocking then to find out that growing meat is actually one of the greatest producers of green house gases. This is because CO2 is produced when fossil fuels are burnt to produce fertilizers used to produce feed; methane is released from the breakdown of fertilizers and manure; fossil fuels are used during feed and animal production, and the transport of processed and refrigerated animal products.
A study in the New Scientist found that if an average American changed from eating meat to being vegan, he/she would manage to produce 1.5 tons less of CO2 per year, while changing to a hybrid fuel-efficient car would only save 1 ton per year.
Farm animals also produce methane and nitrous oxide, which, respectively, have 23 and 296 times the greenhouse effects of carbon dioxide. The decomposition of fertilizers and manure is responsible for 80 percent of agricultural methane emissions and about 35-40 percent of total anthropogenic methane emissions; and as for nitrous oxide, livestock produces 65 percent of the total anthropogenic emissions. Animal farming is thus one of the greatest contributors of global warming.
The Threat of Meat to Rainforests
Thanks to globalization and the reduction of trade barriers, the world is increasingly becoming a single market. This means that a global increase in meat consumption causes forests in other countries to be cut down to grow food for feeding animals. In Brazil, for example, vast areas of forest are being destroyed each year in order to grow soybeans that are exported to the US and Europe for feeding livestock. In 2002, 25,500 km of rainforest – an area the size of Belgium – was cleared, with the main reason being soyabean cultivation. All of this forest clearing then releases tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, while decreasing the amount of trees that soak up carbon dioxide.
The Ethical Dimensions
What Happens in Factory Farms
The chickens you buy in supermarkets are raised in very large sheds that hold tens of thousands of chickens, with each chicken given about an average of 96 square inches of room – the size of a standard 8.5 inch x 11 inch page of printing paper. In these sheds, chickens are unable to move without pushing through each other, unable to stretch their wings at will, or to flee aggressive birds.
These chickens suffer from a large variety of problems ranging from blindness, respiratory diseases, sores, and severe tearing caused by a build-up of feces, to chronic bone pain caused by having a growth rate many times the speed of normal chickens from selective breeding. As a side-effect of the selective breeding, these chickens have an enormous appetite, which if satisfied, will cause them to grow grotesquely large and die before reaching sexual maturity, and as a result, are consistently fed 60-80 percent less than their appetites desire.
Cattles, on the other hand, in order to be fattened as quickly and efficiently as possible, are kept on a diet of high-energy grains and corn instead of the roughage they eat normally. However, cattle’s digestive system evolved to break down grass, and when they do not eat it, a great amount of lactic acid accumulates in their rumens, causing gas problems so severe that cattle could suffocate from it. Liver abscesses are also another consequence of this. Giving cattle only corn to eat is equivalent to feeding humans with candy bars; and to prevent them from getting sick and dying before they can be slaughtered, they are injected with huge amounts of antibiotics.
So What?
As secular humanists, we should be cognizant of the ethical implications of our actions. It isn’t good enough to point out the moral sinkholes of bronze-age superstitions – we have to show the world that we can do better. It is frighteningly obvious that eating meat is a luxury for us living in the developed world, contributes to climate change, and is on highly shaky ethical grounds. So why wait? Do the right thing.
Sources and Further Reading
John Robbins, The Food Revolution, Conari Press, 2001
CAST (Council for Agricultural Science and Technology), 1999. Contribution of Animal Agriculture to Meeting Global Human Food Demand.
Livestock Revolution. Implications for Rural Poverty, the Environment, and Global Food Security, World Bank Report 23241, November 2001
D.Pimentel et al, “Water resources: agriculture, the environment, and Society,” BioScience, vol. 47 (1997), pp. 97-106.
J.L.Beckett and J.W.Oltjen, “Estimation of the Water Requirements for Beef Production in the United States,” Journal of Animal Science, vol.71 (1993) pp.818-826
D.Pimentel et al, “Water resources: Agricultural and Environmental Issues” BioScience, vol. 54 (2004), pp. 909-918.
Eshel, Gidon and Pamela Martin, “Diet, Energy and Global Warming,” Earth Interactions, May 2005
“Challenge to Fishing: Keep Unwanted Species Out of Its Huge Nets,” Otto Pohl, The New York Times, July 29, 2003
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 2nd edition, New York: Avon Books, 1990
J. Mason and P. Singer, The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, Rodale
Comments (2) 
Themocracy