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You can’t call yourself an environmentalist if you eat meat. The environmental problems caused by the meat, dairy, and egg industry are practically endless. What was once harmless breeding of animals on farms has turned into a science experiment on animals and mass reproduction. They want to see how many animals they can breed, how big they can make them, and how fast they can make them grow. All of this takes a huge toll on our air, water, and land quality. Not to mention this industry is one of the leading causes of global warming.
As we all know, global warming is on the rise and people are trying to cut back. What people probably don’t know is that eating one pound of meat is the equivalent of driving an SUV forty miles. Yep, that’s right, forty miles. In a 2005 United Nations report they found that the meat industry produces more greenhouse gasses than all of the cars, SUVs, trucks, planes, and boats in the world combined. You are probably thinking about carbon dioxide, the most popular greenhouse gas, but the meat industry produces two other major greenhouse gasses. One of them is methane. It is twenty times more powerful than carbon dioxide. This is created during the digestion and feces from the billions of animals crammed into factory farms. The other gas is nitrous oxide, three hundred times the potency of carbon dioxide. Sixty-five percent of all nitrous oxide emissions come from the meat, dairy, and egg industry. Seems impossible to slow down global warming now, huh? Well, it isn’t. If every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted it for vegan options, it would be the same as taking a half a million cars off of U.S. roads.
Have you ever wondered what happens to billions of animals’ feces? Well, they just pollute the planet we live on. Millions of pounds of excrement are stored in lagoons. These lagoons overflow into nearby waterways, like rivers, killing vast numbers of fish and other animals. Chicken, hog, and...