| Ecological
More
than 40 per cent of the world's tropical rainforest has been destroyed
in the last hundred years.
The current rate of disappearance is 50 hectares a minute. Most
people might think it fatuous to suggest that becoming a vegan
could have the slightest effect on this. Yet it is a simple fact
that most of the vast areas that are being destroyed and laid
down to grass in South America are being leveled for no better
reason than the raising of beef cattle for the North American
hamburger market. As a result, the world is losing rare species
at a frightening rate.
Similar
pressures apply wherever land is farmed intensively. Britain's
countryside is being turned into a vast, bleak, prairie-like landscape
devoid of hedgerows or trees simply in order to produce yet more
contributions to the EU grain mountains, most of which are sold
off as animal feed. Countless species of our wild birds, animals,
butterflies and wild flowers are threatened as a result.
At sea, intensive fishing has destroyed the vast
herring shoals that once roamed around Britain's shores (and the
North Sea fishing industry with them) and everyone knows how near
several species of whale have come to extinction.
The list, alas, goes on and on. There are hundreds
of other species whose habitats are threatened by the millions
of omnivores our species counts among its members.
"The average Briton now consumes
up to 8 beef cattle, 36 pigs, 36 sheep and 550 poultry birds in
the average lifetime." (The Animals Report, Richard
North, Penguin, 1983.)
Multiply this by the 56 million
people in the UK and you begin to realize the scale of the problem.
Clearly, every single person who becomes vegan
immediately ceases their personal contribution to this inexorable
demand for the products of the intensive farming of animals. So
everyone who becomes vegan ceases to be a part of the problem
and becomes part of the solution - helping to ease the intolerable
pressure that humanity now exerts on every other species to the
farthest reaches of the globe. |