Four Good Reasons Why You Should Go Vegetarian

1. Because eating meat is murder.
We know that hamburgers and chicken wings don't grow on trees. They come from animals we've sentenced to death long before they're even born.
Everyone who eats animal products is responsible for the abuse and deaths of beings with lives and personalities of their own—beings who did not choose to be carved up and put on the dinner table.

2. Because eating meat is torture.
Forget about green pastures, fresh air, and sunshine. Animals raised for food are separated from their mothers shortly after birth and spend their brief, miserable lives crammed together by the thousands in factory farms, sometimes unable to move or to take a single step in any direction.

Chickens raised for their flesh are bred to grow so big so fast that their legs collapse beneath them. (How big and how fast, you ask? Well, if human babies were forced to grow at the same rate, they would go from 7 pounds to 1,500 pounds within 11 weeks.) As a result, chickens suffer painful joint and bone conditions and heart attacks. Unable to move, some die of thirst just steps away from their drinking water.

Because animals raised for food are so stressed and fearful, factory farmers think that the only way to prevent them from fighting is through systematic mutilation. Chickens' sensitive beaks are cut off with a hot blade, and pigs' teeth and tails are cut off—all without the use of painkillers. On the killing floor, many animals are still conscious when they are skinned and cut into pieces.

And let's not forget about fish. Whether they're hooked through the mouth, dragged out of the ocean in nets, or "harvested" from fish farms, fish and other marine animals feel pain and don't deserve to die.

3. Because eating meat is suicide.
It's not just the saturated fat and cholesterol. For one thing, humans simply were not designed to eat animal products even in their most natural, unprocessed form. And because of modern farming methods, each mouthful of meat, eggs, and dairy products can come with the following:

Antibiotics and steroids: Animals in factory farms are given these drugs to prevent outbreaks of disease in the crowded, unsanitary conditions in which they live and to make them grow faster.

Feces: Intestines of dead animals can and do get punctured when the carcasses are "cleaned," thus contaminating the flesh with excrement. (In the case of ground beef, feces from one animal get mixed in with almost every other animal's.) The grain that animals are fed has excrement, other dead animals, expired dog and cat food, and leftover restaurant food mixed in as "fillers."

Pus, blood, and scabs: Up to three times a day, cows used for their milk have electric milking machines hooked up to their massively swollen udders, resulting in cuts and infections—"souvenirs" of which end up in the milk.

Toxins: Fish absorb and ingest whatever is in the water in which they live, and they pass it on to us when we eat them. So no matter how clean the water that we drink is, we'd still be getting mercury, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), and other toxins whenever we eat fish.

Pathogens: Many kinds of bacteria are harmless and even beneficial. For example, only bacteria can synthesize vitamin B12. But some strains of bacteria cause dangerous and even fatal diseases. E. coli 0157:H7 poisoning is known as "the hamburger disease," campylobacter bacteria can be found in chickens and turkeys, and salmonella outbreaks have been related to almost every food of animal origin, especially eggs.

For one thing, raising animals for food depletes our oxygen supply. In Central America, two-thirds of the rain forests have been cleared to make way for cattle ranches. At the same time, the world's livestock account for 15 to 25 percent of overall global methane emissions—and methane is 24 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

In the United States, nearly half of the country's water, more than one-third of its raw materials and fossil fuels, 80 percent of its agricultural land, and 70 percent of its grain are used to raise animals for food—who, in turn, produce a whopping 87,000 pounds of manure every single second! This waste, which is 130 times the excrement of the entire human population, leaks into streams and rivers, contaminating water sources.

4. Because eating meat just isn't fair.
The suffering of humans and the suffering of other animals are interconnected. By alleviating the suffering of other animals, we also help alleviate human suffering.

For example, around 840 million people go hungry every single day of their lives. Cattle worldwide consume enough calories to feed 8.7 billion people. Crops that could be used to feed the hungry are instead being used to fatten animals raised for food. Instead of growing grain, feeding it to animals, killing the animals, and then eating their flesh, why not just grow crops for human consumption? Simply put, the more meat you eat, the fewer people you feed. You can feed 20 vegetarians on the amount of land needed to feed one person on a meat-based diet. And speaking of land, big corporations buy land at rock-bottom prices and use them to grow food that only richer societies can afford. The farmers, who could've grown their own food if they didn't have to devote their land to raising animals, end up hungry and poor.