What Would Captain Planet Do?

Archive for the ‘Vegetarianism’ Category

Attack of the killer minks!

Fashion designer Karl Lagerfield recently defended the fur industry saying; ‘it is justified as the beasts fur comes from would kill us if they could’.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/fashionnews/4075783/Karl-Lagerfeld-defends-fur-industry-saying-beasts-would-kill-us-if-we-didnt-kill-them.html

Now I wasn’t aware that large primates were in the diet of minks, or of other animals that people customarily wear on their backs. Maybe Karl Lagerfield’s friends wear tiger coats?

In seriousness though, he makes a really good point when he says; “In a meat-eating world, wearing leather for shoes and clothes and even handbags, the discussion of fur is childish.” I think that’s true, if you criticize someone for wearing fur & then you order yourself a steak dinner, you are a hypocrite.

I also agree with what he said about the media’s exaggeration of models being too skinny. How many times do you hear people really say, ‘wow people are too skinny in this country’. Never happened. If we’re saying that skinny women can’t be in public eye because it might make 1% of girls too skinny. Then I am saying take all fat people off of television because it has made 30% of people too fat. And that is one of the greatest health crises of our time.

But still, ‘kill us if they could’, really?!

Facts you might not know

Half of the grain produced in the world is later consumed by animals that are slaughtered for their meat.

The grain & soy fed to U.S. livestock alone could feed over one billion people.

Twenty vegetarians could be fed on the land it takes to feed one meat eater.

Al Gore… we meet again

You Can Help Stop Global Warming Today
The most effective way to fight the global warming crisis is to stop eating meat, eggs, and dairy products. Please also take a few moments to encourage Al Gore, the most prominent voice in the fight against global warming, to add going vegetarian to his list of solutions to our climate crisis.

Write to Al Gore Now!

The real cost of eating meat

Wasted Resources
Vast tracts of land are needed to grow crops to feed the billions of animals we raise for food each year. Of all the agricultural land in the U.S., nearly 80 percent is used in some way to raise animals—that’s roughly half of the total land mass of the U.S.10 More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals.

The U.S. certainly isn’t alone in its misuse of land for animal agriculture. As the world’s appetite for meat increases, countries across the globe are bulldozing huge swaths of land to make more room for animals and the crops to feed them. From tropical rain forests in Brazil to ancient pine forests in China, entire ecosystems are being destroyed to fuel our addiction to meat. According to scientists at the Smithsonian Institute, the equivalent of seven football fields of land is bulldozed every minute to create more room for farmed animals.

In the United States and around the world, overgrazing leads to the extinction of indigenous plant and animal species, soil erosion, and eventual desertification that renders once-fertile land barren. Livestock grazing is the number one cause of threatened and extinct species both in the United States and in other parts of the world. Philip Fradkin, of the National Audubon Society, states, “The impact of countless hooves and mouths over the years has done more to alter the type of vegetation and land forms of the West than all the water projects, strip mines, power plants, freeways, and subdivision developments combined.” As more and more land both in the U.S. and around the world is irreparably damaged at the hands of the meat industry, what little arable land does remain may not be enough to produce crops to feed the burgeoning world human population.

Overgrazing leads to the extinction of indigenous plant and animal species, soil erosion, and eventual desertification that renders once-fertile land barren.

While factory farms are ruining our land, the commercial fishing industry is pushing entire oceanic ecosystems to the brink of collapse. Commercial fishing boats indiscriminately pull as many fish as they can out of the sea, leaving ecological devastation and the bodies of nontarget animals in their wake. Fishing methods like bottom trawling and long-lining have emptied millions of miles of ocean and pushed some marine species to the brink of extinction.

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