10 Things that Drove me to Vegetarianism, Part 1

Friends and acquaintances frequently ask why I became a vegetarian (and cook vegan at home) and to be honest that can sometimes be a bit difficult to answer. There is no one reason I chose to give up eating animals, but rather it was a conclusion drawn after confronted with information about the realities of modern American factory farming as well as nutritional information about the benefits of eating a plant-based diet. Here follows ten bits of information (to be posted in three parts) that made my personal conclusion about vegetarianism inescapable. These items are not ranked in any particular order.

1. Buying milk supports the veal industry. In order to keep dairy cows producing milk they have to be impregnated once very year. Once the calf is born he or she is taken away from his or her mother within a day (lest it drink any of the milk that could be sold to American consumers). The females become dairy cows while the males are shackled in veal crates where they live their brief lives immobilized, usually by the neck, and fed an anemia-inducing diet to create the prized pale meat veal eaters want. Veal crates have been banned in Arizona, California, Colorado, Michigan, and Maine, but the first ban won’t go into effect until next year (Maine). In addition to the cruelties they suffer in life, veal calves don’t face a better slaughter than their full-grown counterparts.

This video is from the Humane Society. Please be warned that it does contain graphic and disturbing images and some coarse language (apparently people who drag infant calves to slaughter don't use delicate language).

Once a diary cow has been worn out (within 5 years) she is sent to slaughter and becomes canned soup or low-grade ground beef.

2. Slaughterhouse “stun” mechanisms for meat and poultry are woefully inaccurate resulting in the thousands of animals being scalded, skinned and/or butchered alive every day. Folks, beef slaughterhouses WANT the cows to be alive when their throats are slit so they bleed out completely before they are broken down. The point of the stunner is to render them unconscious, but it is temporary and even if it does its job as well as advertised the cows frequently regain consciousness before they bleed out completely. Chickens are dragged through water than has been electrically charged in order to knock them out before the automatic throat slitter does its job (if there is an automatic). Unfortunately it frequently happens that neither work properly and live chickens are fully conscious when scalded for easy feather removal.

To Be Continued . . .