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Okay, you have listed one possible negative and generally debunked it. Here are some more negatives for your viewing and researching pleasure:
1) Roughly 10 human beings could be fed on the amount of grain used to feed one cow being raised for beef.
2) Between 2,500 and 5,000 gallons of water are conserved for every one pound of beef given up by a human consumer.
3) At a feedlot of a mere 37,000 cows (many have upwards of 100,000), 25 tons of corn are dumped every hour. It takes 1.2 gallons of oil to make the fertilizer used for each bushel of that corn. Before a cow is slaughtered, she will eat 25 pounds of corn a day; by the time she is slaughtered she will weigh more than 1,200 pounds. In her lifetime she will have consumed, in effect, 284 gallons of oil.
4) Livestock now produces 130 times the amount of waste that people do. This waste is untreated and unsanitary. It bubbles with chemicals and diseasebearing organisms. It overpowers nature’s ability to clean it up. It’s poisoning rivers, killing fish and getting into human drinking water. 65% of California’s population is threatened by pollution in drinking water just from dairy cow manure. It isn’t just cows that produce this waste. Factory-raised hogs produce four times the waste in North Carolina as the 6.5 million people of that state do. Even the oceans are polluted: 7,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico are a dead zone.
5) 70% of the lands in western national forests are grazed; 90% of Bureau of Land Management land is grazed. These are public lands. These lands are trampled by the cattle, compacting the soil. When it rains, the land doesn’t absorb the water. Instead, it runs off, taking away topsoil, forming deep gullies and damaging streambeds. The government protects the cattle by killing off any creature that might threaten the livestock. They poison, trap, snare, den, shoot or gun down the wildlife. Denning, by the way, is the practice by federal agents of pouring kerosene into the dens of animals and setting them on fire, burning the young animals alive in their nests. According to Robbins, agents kill badgers, black bear, bobcats, coyotes, gray fox, red fox, mountain lions, opossums, raccoons, skunks, beavers, porcupines, prairie dogs, blackbirds, cattle egrets and starlings using these methods. These activities take place on public lands, which were created in large part to protect the environment! Your tax dollars subsidize these activities.
6) We import more than 200 million pounds of beef from Central America alone. Every second of every day, one football field of tropical rainforest is destroyed in order to produce 257 hamburgers. Every time you destroy rainforest land, you destroy rich plant and animal life, varieties of life we don’t even understand, and forms of which may provide the medicines we need to cure disease. Rainforests supply us with oxygen. They moderate our climates. When rainforests are destroyed, it’s only a matter of time before the land becomes desertified. Rainforests absorb some of the carbon dioxide we are spewing into the atmosphere.
We humans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 25% compared with any other period when humans were on this planet. Most of that has taken place in the last 50 years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, consisting of some of the best scientists in the world, says global warming is a fact. If uncontrolled, we will have ecosystem collapses, crop failures, weather disasters, coastal flooding, the spreading of previously controlled diseases, the death of coral reefs and new insect pests.
Carbon dioxide is largely produced by the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal, and especially our use of inefficient vehicles for transportation. But not often mentioned is the fossil fuel used to raise farm animals. When you eat beans, for example, you use 1/27 the amount of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of energy as you do when you eat beef. You get the same food energy producing only 4% of the carbon dioxide that a person eating beef does. Another fact we don’t talk about: cattle produce almost one fifth of global methane emissions. Cattle fart. Big time. Their gas is methane. Methane is actually 24 times as potent as carbon dioxide in causing climate chaos.
7) Animal extinction: we are losing several thousand species per year, and maybe tens of thousands (as opposed to the average 10-25 per year in preindustrial times). The driving force behind all these extinctions is the destruction of wildlife habitat, especially the rainforests. The driving force behind the destruction of the rainforests is livestock grazing. The leading cause of species in the United States being threatened or eliminated is livestock grazing. A 1997 study of endangered species in the southwestern United States by the Fish and Wildlife Service found that half the species studied were threatened by cattle ranching.
So, hormones and mad cow aren't everything (though these are what most people worry about). There are so many reasons to avoid eating beef, and other animal products, it would take days for me to list them all here.
(*Some stats and info from earthsave.org)
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