Not only is the health and well-being of yourself and animals in risk by eating meat, but also the environment.
Every year, about 125,000 square miles of rain forest (along with 1,000 plant and animal species) are lost--more than half of it is now used for grazing cattle. Vegetarians save an acre of trees every year.
In an effort to conserve water, you install a water saver on your kitchen faucet, saving up to 6,000 gallons of water per year. Most of those savings will be lost if you consume just one pound of California beef (which requires 5,200 gallons of water per pound to produce). A typical American meat-based diet uses 4,200 gallons of water per person every day while a vegetarian diet uses only 300 gallons a day.
More than half of the total amount of water consumed in the U.S. is used to irrigate land to grow feed for livestock.
To produce a pound of protein from feedlot beef requires burning 40 times more fossil fuels than to produce a pound of protein from soybeans.
Every second, 125 tons of waste are produced by animals raised by the meat industry. A typical hog factory farm generates raw waste equivalent to that of a city of 12,000 people. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that almost half of America's surface streams and wells are contaminated by "agricultural pollutants."
Forty-five percent of the total land in this country is used to raise animals for food or for crops to feed these animals. Vegetarians require 1/6 of an acre of land to feed themselves each year; carnivores, 3 and 1/4 acres.
Of all the raw materials and fossil fuels used in our country, more than 1/3 go toward raising animals for food.
More than 3/4 of U.S. topsoil has been permanently lost; 85 percent of this loss was directly caused by the raising of animals for food.
Cattle feedlots produce 30-100 million tons of methane gas per year.
The price of meat would double or triple if the full ecological costs--including fossil fuel use, groundwater depletion and agricultural-chemical pollution--were included in the price tag.
