Plea for the Animals

Before even considering the moral questions involved, people who like eating meat—and are willing to come to terms with the fact that we massacre billions of animals per year so we can eat them—should, for the sake of themselves and their children, worry about the real-world consequences of excessive consumption of meat and its corollaries, industrial livestock breeding and industrial fishing.¹ Animals are the first victims, and certainly they ought to be protected for their own sake. However, the fact that sixty billion land animals and a thousand billion marine animals are killed every year for our consumption also has a deleterious effect on the environment and, thus, on human beings. Every year, 775 million tons of grain and 200 million tons of soy (90 percent of world production), which could be used to feed the inhabitants of the countries where they are grown, are set aside to feed livestock used for meat production in the developed countries. This of course aggravates the already grave situation of the poorest populations of the world.² Moreover, the conclusions of scientific research presented by several synoptic reports to the United Nations (GIEC and FAO)³ as well as by the Worldwatch Institute and several other organizations indicate that this disproportionate emphasis on the industrial production of animals has significant negative impacts on the environment. That means that it will have significant negative impacts on the conditions future generations will face, and it is already having negative effects on human health. The following few statistics should enable the reader to form his or her own judgment:

• To produce 1 kilogram of meat (2.2 pounds) requires 10 kilograms of food materials, which could be used to feed the populations of the poor countries that produce them.⁵

• Sixty percent of the available land in the world is used for animal breeding.

• Animal breeding by itself consumes 45 percent of all the water used for the production of food materials.

• By reducing the consumption of meat, 14 percent of annual human premature deaths in the world could be avoided.

Up until the Industrial Revolution, human influence on the environment was limited and easily absorbed by the natural environment, which could recycle the by-products of human activities. The development of agriculture and animal breeding was gradually transforming the planet, but it remained unthinkable that human activity could create disturbances on a planetary scale.

In our day, the rate of change is continuously being accelerated by ecological disturbances provoked by human activity. In particular, the “great acceleration” that has been taking place since 1950 has defined a new era on our planet, the anthropocene era (literally, “the era of humans”). This is the first time in our history that human activities have profoundly modified (and up to now, degraded) the total system that maintains life on earth. We never “decided” to overexploit the earth; the changes that brought us to the present point took place very gradually along with our increasing prosperity, almost without our noticing them. As Jared Diamond has shown in his book Collapse, many prosperous societies have gone into decline and disappeared because of overexploitation of their environments.⁶ What will the consequences of overexploiting the entire planet be? We already know that some of them will be very painful.

But the period of time in which this will remain possible is very limited. Study of the resilience of the terrestrial system and its complex dynamic have enabled scientists to point to definite “thresholds” beyond which we are in danger of producing potentially irreversible imbalances. Today, two-thirds of the most important ecosystems on the planet are overexploited,⁸ and according to the formula arrived at by Pavan Sukhdev, director of the global study group TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity), “We are in the process of consuming the past, present, and future of our planet.”⁹ Thus the biosphere has entered a danger zone, and big agro-business and the industrial breeding of animals for meat and dairy production are among the principal risk factors.

Nearly two-thirds of the land available for cultivation is used for animal breeding (30 percent for pasture and 30 percent for the production of feed).¹⁰ According to the FAO, animal breeding is responsible for 70 percent of the deforestation currently in progress. A Greenpeace report estimates that 80 percent of the deforestation of the Amazon region is caused by the increase in the number of cows pastured there.¹¹ And we know that the humid tropical forests account for 50 percent of the biodiversity of the planet.

To produce 1 calorie of beef by means of intensive breeding, it takes 8 to 26 calories of vegetable matter that could have been used to feed humans directly.¹⁴ By planting oats, one can obtain 6 times more calories per acre than by using this same acre to produce pork, and 25 times more calories than by using it to produce beef. Clearly the yield of land used to produce meat is deplorable. Thus it is not surprising that Frances Moore Lappé described this sort of agriculture as a “backwards protein factory.”¹⁵

As we have seen, animal breeding consumes 775 million tons of grain and corn per year, which would be enough to adequately feed 1.4 million of the poorest human beings.¹⁶ In 1985, during the famine in Ethiopia, while the population was dying of hunger, this country was exporting grain to feed English livestock.¹⁷ In the United States, 70 percent of grain production is used for animal breeding, whereas in India this figure is only 2 percent.¹⁸

Thus eating meat is a privilege of the rich countries that is only made possible at the expense of the poor ones. During the past thirty years, the amount of meat eaten in the world has increased exponentially, and at the same time the number of undernourished people has doubled. According to the FAO and the Action Contre la Faim (Action Against Hunger), more than 900 million people currently suffer from malnutrition, and a child dies every six seconds for lack of food; at the same time we produce enough calories on a global scale to feed everyone.¹⁹

Jocelyne Porcher carries out research at the INRA and is one of our most eminent specialists on the global food question. She explains:

The industrial systems for animal production have profit as their only aim. They have no other vocation. They do not have the primary objective of ‘feeding the world,’ contrary to what many animal breeders would like to believe. We all know very well that when the industrial chains push our children by means of advertising to have sausage for their four o’clock snack . . . their interest in doing so has nothing to do with the 900 million undernourished people in the world. Obviously the thing that interests the industrial chains is their bottom line.”20

The richer populations become, the more meat they eat.²¹ A Frenchman eats 85 kilograms (187 pounds) of meat per year and an American eats 120 kilograms (265 pounds), while an Indian eats only 2.5 kilograms (5.5 pounds) of meat per year. On average, rich countries eat ten times more meat than poor countries.²² The world consumption of meat increased by a factor of five between 1950 and 2006, which is a rate of increase twice as great as that of the population. If this current tendency continues, meat consumption will have doubled again by 2050.²³ Although in the rich countries over the last decade, consumption of red meat is gradually decreasing as a result of the reputation it has begun to acquire for harmful health effects, at the same time consumption of poultry is greatly increasing. In the United States, the number of cows killed in slaughterhouses every year decreased by 20 percent between 1975 and 2009; during the same time, the number of chickens killed increased by 200 percent.²⁴ The same tendency can be observed in France. On the other hand, the consumption of meat has tripled over the past forty years in the developing countries and is growing spectacularly in China, especially among middle-class consumers. Now in China’s big cities there are restaurants that serve only meat and young children who eat meat at every meal. In the course of the past twenty years in China, the consumption of chicken has increased 500 percent and that of beef 600 percent.²⁵

Every year, a bit more than a third of the world production of grains is used by the animal breeding industry, and a quarter of the world production of fish is used to feed cows, pigs, and fowl, in the form of “fish meal.”²⁶ As Éric Lambin, professor at the universities of Louvain and Stanford, tells us, “This competition between humans and livestock in the consumption of grain results in an increase in the price of the latter, which has tragic consequences for the poorest populations.”²⁷

Fresh water is a rare and precious resource. Only 2.5 percent of the water on the planet is fresh water. Almost three quarters of it is contained in glaciers and eternal snows.³⁰ In many poor countries, access to water is very limited. The people, a majority of whom are women and children, often have to travel several miles on foot to reach a water source.

It is estimated that half of the earth’s potable water is consumed in the production of meat and dairy products. In Europe, more than 50 percent of water pollution results from intensive animal breeding, including fish breeding. In the United States, 80 percent of potable water goes for animal breeding. Production of one pound of meat requires, depending on the case, from five to fifty times the amount of water required to grow one pound of grain.³¹ Newsweek magazine described this volume of water in an imaginative fashion: “The amount of water used in the production of one pound of beef would be enough to float a destroyer.”³² In his work entitled No Steak, journalist Aymeric Caron illustrates this situation by calculating that, to produce one kilo of beef, the average amount of water required is almost as much as that used by a person taking one shower per day for a whole year: 15,000 liters.³³

Animal production is currently using up vast amounts of the ground-water on which innumerable dry regions of the world are dependent. At the present rate, the amount of fresh water used in industrial breeding will increase another 50 percent by the year 2050.34 Already today, the scarcity of potable water is a threat on a global scale: 40 percent of the population of the world, in twenty-four countries, are suffering from lack of adequate water, deficient in both quantity and quality.³⁵ More than three million children of less than five years of age die every year from diarrhea essentially caused by contaminated water and pathogenic substances transmitted in their food. Already at this time, 70 percent of our freshwater resources are tainted or polluted.³⁶

The environmental impacts of meat production are particularly serious in the case of intensive breeding operations. Production of one pound of beef generates fifty times more greenhouse gas emissions than production of one pound of grain.³⁷ Let us recall that intensive breeding for the production of meat and other products derived from breeding (such as wool, eggs, and dairy products) is quantitatively the second largest cause of greenhouse gases and represents 14.5 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activity.³⁸ This figure includes the gases emitted in the course of the various stages of meat production: deforestation to create pasturage, production and transportation of fertilizer, fuel for agricultural machinery, manufacture of growth hormones and dietary supplements, flatulence from the digestive systems of the livestock, transport of livestock to the slaughterhouses, treatment and packaging of meat, and transportation of the meat to points of sale. In total, breeding operations serving the production of meat contribute more to climatic warming than the entirety of the transportation sector (which accounts for 13 percent of greenhouse gas emissions) and is surpassed only by the construction industry and its fuel consumption across the globe.

As for carbon dioxide, the expansion of the meat industry has contributed in a major way to the increased concentrations of this gas in the atmosphere. This is because industrial meat production depends on the mechanization of agriculture in order to produce the enormous amounts of animal feed that it requires; it depends on the manufacture and use of petroleum-based chemical fertilizers, on deforestation, and on other processes that are significant sources of carbon dioxide.

Nitrous oxide is the most aggressive of the greenhouse gases. It is 320 times more active than carbon dioxide. It is also a stable compound that has a life span in the atmosphere of 120 years. The main sources of nitrous oxide emissions are treatment of fields with nitrogenous fertilizers, the dissolution of these fertilizers in the soil, and the waste products of animal breeding. Sixty-five percent of nitrous oxide emissions are produced by breeding operations. The contribution of nitrous oxide to the greenhouse gas effect is roughly 6 percent.⁴¹

Production of beef and lamb is responsible for the highest emissions in relation to the energy provided by these foods. It is estimated that by 2050 beef and lamb will be responsible for half of all greenhouse gases resulting from food production while contributing only 3 percent of the caloric requirements of the human population.

A United Nations report of 2010 estimates that the passion of developed countries for meat consumption will not be satisfiable beyond the point when the human population approaches 9 billion—around 2050. According to the GIEC report of spring 2014, if the problem of emissions from food production is not ameliorated, emissions of greenhouse gases connected with animal breeding could double between now and 2070. Just this factor alone would make it impossible to maintain current objectives for the climate. According to Fredrik Hedenus, this increase in emissions would probably take us beyond a level compatible with the goal of limiting the increase in global temperature to two degrees centigrade.⁴³ Hedenus reaches the conclusion that changes in diet—meaning less meat and smaller amounts of dairy products—are crucial if we are to have a chance of keeping global warming below this limit of two degrees centigrade.

A cow produces on average 23 tons of excrement per year.⁴⁴ In the United States alone, industrial animal breeding produces 130 times more excrement than humans, that is, about 88,000 pounds per second. Animal excrement is responsible for more water pollution than all other industrial sources combined.⁴⁵ For example, the Smithfield Foods company, which every year kills 31 million pigs, has entirely polluted the rivers of North Carolina.

Animal excrement generates enormous quantities of ammonia, which pollutes rivers and marine shores and also causes infestations of algae (green algae in particular). Green algae tends to stifle marine life. Vast areas of Western Europe, the northeastern United States, and the coastal regions of Southeast Asia, as well as vast plains regions of China, at the present time are receiving considerable amounts of nitrogen.46 These agricultural surpluses of nitrogen as well as of phosphorus gradually infiltrate into the soil by means of leaching or seepage, polluting groundwater, aquatic ecosystems, and humid zones.⁴⁷

Intensive, commercial fishing today has increasingly sophisticated means at its disposal, such as sonar, untearable nets several miles long, factory boats, and so on. These means are progressively leading to the extinction of numerous species of fish, which is having a tremendous impact on marine biodiversity. Today fishing operations from all countries go after fish in all the seas of the world. After having exhausted the supply of fish living near the surface, commercial factory boats continue to drop their nets to deeper and deeper levels. They are now scraping the ocean bottoms. Trawling of the great ocean deeps has a devastating effect on the fragile balance of biodiversity that has developed over the course of thousands of years.⁴⁸ The purpose of all this is to provide cheap fish to the large distribution chains of the world’s rich countries. These activities in no way contribute to the nourishment of the world’s hungry, nor is any thought given to the irreversible damage that results from them. Numerous nets lost by fishing boats are adrift in the ocean, continuing to trap fish and marine mammals. It is estimated that these nets will take several hundred years to decompose in the water.

Moreoever, the quantity of fish actually caught in the world is much larger than the catch that is declared. To give just one example, according to the estimates of marine biologist Daniel Pauly and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, China annually catches 4.5 million tons of fish, a major proportion of them along the coasts of Africa, but they declare only 368,000 tons to the FAO.⁴⁹ Innumerable pirate fishermen are on the water who ignore the quotas imposed on certified fishermen, and they make their contribution to the increasingly rapid exhaustion of marine populations.

Take shrimp, for example. The average shrimp-trawling operation throws 80 to 90 percent of the sea animals it captures overboard, dead or dying, as bycatch. (Endangered species amount to much of this bycatch.) Shrimp account for only 2 percent of global seafood by weight, but shrimp trawling accounts for 33 percent of global bycatch. We tend not to think about this because we tend not to know about it. What if there were labeling on our food letting us know how many animals were killed to bring our desired animal to our plate? So, with trawled shrimp from Indonesia, for example, the label might read: 26 POUNDS OF OTHER SEA ANIMALS WERE KILLED AND TOSSED BACK INTO THE OCEAN FOR EVERY 1 POUND OF THIS SHRIMP.

Or take tuna. Among the other 145 species regularly killed—gratuitously—while killing tuna are . . . ⁵¹

A friend who was one of the pioneers of Greenpeace and a participant in many of the campaigns undertaken on the Rainbow Warrior, told me how off the coasts of California and Mexico the big tunafishing operations use helicopters to spot schools of dolphin. When the dolphin are seen leaping from the water, this indicates the presence of the shoals of tuna on which they feed. With the help of a fleet of inflatable rubber boats, the fishers then drop immense nets in the indicated area, which are afterward pulled tight with drawstrings like a purse. In this way they take huge numbers of dolphin in the nets along with the tuna. When the nets are finally pulled aboard by powerful winches, the dolphins, which are usually on top of the tuna, are frequently crushed in the winches.

According to a United Nations report on human development (2007–2008), the risk of colorectal cancer diminished by about 30 percent with each reduction of 100 grams (3.5 ounces) in daily consumption of red meat. Countries where the national diet is very high in red meat, such as Argentina and Uruguay, are the same countries where the incidence of colon cancer is the highest in the world.⁵³ Consumption of processed meats, such as deli meats, on the other hand, was associated with an increased risk of stomach cancer.

According to a study published at Harvard University in 2012 by An Pan, Frank Hu, and their colleagues, in a sample of 100,000 individuals followed over many years, daily consumption of meat was associated with an increased risk of death from cardiovascular causes in 18 percent of men and 21 percent of women, while the increased risk of death from cancer was 10 percent and 16 percent, respectively.⁵⁴

Among people who ate a great deal of red meat, simply replacing the meat with whole grains or other sources of vegetable protein reduced their risk of early death by 14 percent.

In the United States, 80 percent of antibiotics are used for the sole purpose of keeping animals alive in industrial breeding systems until the time when they are slaughtered. Since the large commercial animal production enterprises are not able to treat sick animals individually, massive amounts of antibiotics are added to the feed of all the animals. From 25 to 75 percent of these substances end up in rivers, in the soil, and in drinking water, resulting in increased resistance to antibiotics in humans and also other undesirable effects.

The authors of a British study involving 65,000 people, including 17,000 vegetarians or vegans, conclude: “National governments that are considering an update of dietary recommendations in order to define a ‘healthy, sustainable diet’ must incorporate the recommendation to lower the consumption of animal-based products.”⁵⁷

Insurers are not mistaken: in the United States, Kaiser Permanente, a large health insurance company with over 9 million members, encourages doctors to “recommend a plant-based diet to all their patients.”⁵⁸ In the United Kingdom, a life insurance company even offers 25 percent off for vegetarians and vegans.

Seven million years ago, our australopithecine ancestors were essentially vegetarian. They fed themselves on nuts, tubers, roots, and fruit. They also ate some insects. Occasionally, but rarely, they ate small mammals. Around 2.5 million years ago, Homo habilis began to increase their consumption of meat, especially by scavenging the kills of other animals. Hunting took on importance with the Homo erectus—who was also the discoverer of fire—about 450,000 years ago according to some estimates. Hunting was important to the Neanderthals, who were mainly carnivores and ate more meat than Homo sapiens, who appeared 200,000 years ago. When the hunter-gatherers became sedentary about 12,000 years ago and began to practice agriculture and raise animals, greater consumption of cultivated grains and dairy products resulted in a decrease in meat eating. Only in the twentieth century did the consumption of meat increase significantly.59

Nonetheless, in spite of this global increase in meat eating, a growing attraction to vegetarianism can also be observed. In France there are between one and two million vegetarians, representing from 1.5 to 3 percent of the population (a percentage as big if not slightly bigger than that of hunters).⁶⁰ This is one of the lowest percentages in Europe, where the average number of vegetarians is estimated to be 5 percent. Great Britain has the largest number (13 to 14 percent), followed by Germany and Switzerland (10 percent). These numbers are expected to grow, since vegetarianism is much more prevalent among students (20 percent in the United States, as opposed to 4 percent in the general population).⁶¹ With around 450 million individuals, that is, about 35 percent of the population, India, as we have seen, is by far the country with the largest number of vegetarians.⁶²

In 2009 the town of Gand in Belgium became the first town in the world to become vegetarian—at least once a week. The local authorities decided to establish “one meatless day a week” during which, according to the UN report, at least the town officials ate vegetarian. Posters were distributed encouraging the population to participate in these meatless days as well as maps of the town showing where the vegetarian restaurants were located. This policy was later extended to the town schools.⁶³ “A day will come when the idea that for the sake of food the people of the past raised and massacred living beings and with complete equanimity displayed their flesh in bits and pieces in shop windows, will no doubt inspire the same revulsion that the cannibalistic meals of the Americans, Oceanians, or Africans inspired in the travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”⁶⁴

Another piece of good news is that the world would be able to feed 1.5 billion undernourished people simply by giving the billion tons of grain used annually to feed cattle headed to the slaughter to them instead. If all the inhabitants of North America abstained from eating meat one day a week, that would make it indirectly possible to feed 25 million deprived persons every day for an entire year! It would also be an effective contribution to the struggle against climate change. That is why, according to Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and director of the GIEC (Groupe d’experts Intergouvernemental sur l’Évolution du Climat,⁶⁶ a United Nations organization), a movement toward worldwide adoption of a vegetarian diet is essential for combating hunger in the world, as well as energy shortages and the worst effects of climate change. In his opinion, “in terms of immediate action and the feasibility of obtaining reductions in the short term, this [vegetarianism] is clearly the most attractive option.”⁶⁷

These assertions are confirmed by the GIEC report of March 2014: “We have demonstrated that reduction of the consumption of meat and dairy products is a key point in our ability to bring climatic pollution from food production down to dependable levels,” Fredrik Hedenus explains. “Major changes in diet take time, so we should begin thinking right now of the ways in which we can make our production of food more respectful of the climate.”⁶⁸

According to another coauthor of this report, Stefan Wirsenius, emissions of greenhouse gases “can definitely be reduced by increasing the efficiency of production of meat and dairy products by drawing upon new technologies. But if the consumption [of these products] continues to grow, the reductions these measures can bring about will probably be insufficient to keep climate change within tolerable levels.”⁶⁹