Plants, the Plight of Animals, and World Religions
I grew up in Detroit when two bottles of milk were delivered in the milk chute by the milk truck (yes, I am old enough to remember). Elsie the Cow was a symbol on bottles of a smiling cow, full udder brimming with fresh white milk that ended up on my kitchen table as a child. It all seemed so innocent, and I felt a bond with Elsie. I never pondered the life that Elsie had or the fact that my cold glass of milk may have been at the expense of her pain and that of her calves. It was a different age when transparency was not paramount.
The growth of the population and a drive to adopt the production-line model of automotive factories to animal farming has led to the shrinking of old-fashioned family farms and the rise of large and concentrated farming facilities. This practice has been termed “factory farming.” (If you could do it for a Model T, why not a T-bone?) Factory farming is an industrial process in which animals and the products they generate are mass-produced. The animals are generally not seen as individual, sentient beings with unique physical and psychological needs but as eggs, milk, meat, leather, and other products to drive profits. Because the animals are seen as mere commodities, they are bred, fed, confined, and drugged to lay more eggs, birth more offspring, and die with more meat on their bones. The horrors caught on videos are gruesome. Factory farms cut costs by feeding animals the remains of other animals, keeping them in extremely small and soiled enclosures and without adequate bedding. Animals that live in such a manner and are denied normal social interactions experience boredom and stress so great that it leads to unnatural aggression. To curb this aggression and to conceal the disease that results from such horrendous living conditions and stimulate aberrant growth, farmers routinely administer drugs to animals, which in turn reach meat-eating consumers. The consequences of this agribusiness amount to institutionalized animal cruelty, environmental destruction and resource depletion, and health dangers.
The US Environmental Protection Agency describes large factory farms as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.1 There are over a quarter of a million animal feeding operations in the United States alone with over 15,000 of them large enough to be defined as a CAFO. The largest house, for example, has over 1,000 head of cattle. Livestock production has become increasingly dominated by CAFOs in the United States and other parts of the world. Most of the poultry consumed by humans began to be raised in CAFOs in the 1950s, and most cattle and pork CAFOs originated in the 1970s and 80s. CAFOs now dominate livestock and poultry production in the United States, and the scope of their market share is steadily increasing. For example, in 1966, it took 1 million farms to house 57 million pigs; by the year 2001, it only took 80,000 farms to house the same number of pigs.
Due to factors like the efficiency of CAFOs, the growth of the world population, the spread of fast-food restaurants worldwide, and the mixed messages from both social media and medical outlets that more meat may be healthier, the growth of animal production has been meteoric. Annually over 10 billion farm animals are produced and killed yearly with over 95 percent of them in a CAFO setting.
Are there ethical farmers? Those who love their animals until the day they are slaughtered? For sure there are, and they deserve recognition for opposing the more than 95 percent of factory-farmed foods that have a legacy of cruelty, disease, and worker injury. While some of the practices common to many factory farms today are unsettling, a consideration of their role in food production is necessary in understanding the full implications of choosing the Plant-Based Solution. A look at a few of the most common animals used for food production and how they fare in CAFOs is instructive, even if upsetting. The information comes from the nonprofit organization Last Chance for Animals.2
Cattle are frightened and confused when humans come to round them up and pack them onto trucks, and injuries often result. During transport, they are frightened, exposed to severe weather conditions, and deprived of food, water, and veterinary care. Cattle are then burned with a hot iron brand without anesthetic so that it is clear who “owns” them. Finally, they are castrated and dehorned without anesthetic.
Approximately 250 cows are killed every hour at the typical beef slaughterhouse. The animals are often treated rather cruelly. Although cattle are supposed to be rendered unconscious before being killed, workers frequently do not successfully “stun” the animals. As a result, conscious, struggling cows are hung upside down. Their throats are then cut.
Dairy Cows
Dairy cows live in crowded pens or barns with concrete floors. Milking machines often cut them and cause other injuries. Some machines give them electrical shocks, which cause extreme pain and even death. Dairy cows are forced to produce ten times more milk than they would produce in nature. As a result, they experience numerous health problems.
Veal Calves
Veal calves live in small wooden crates; some are chained. They cannot turn around or even stretch their legs. The floors of their stalls are slatted, causing them severe joint and leg pain. Since their mother’s milk is taken for human consumption, they are fed a milk substitute deficient in iron and fiber. In other words, they are deliberately kept anemic, and their muscles are atrophied so that their flesh will be pale and tender. Craving iron, they lick the metallic parts of their stalls, even those covered in urine. Water is often withheld from them.
Female pigs are kept pregnant continually. After being impregnated, sows are placed in eighteen- to twenty-inch-wide pens. There is barely enough room for them to stand up and lie down. Because straw is considered too expensive, they are not given bedding but instead forced to lie on hard floors, which, in part, cause crippling leg disorders. Sometimes they are tied to the floor by a chain or strap. The piglets are then taken away to be fattened up. By that time, approximately 15 percent of the newborns will have died. The sow is then reimpregnated, sometimes by being strapped to a table.
Broiler Chickens
Farmers get more money for chickens with enlarged thighs and breasts. As a result, they breed the animals to be so heavy that their bones cannot support their weight. The chickens have difficulty standing, and their legs often break. Like other factory-farmed animals, broiler chickens are raised in such overcrowded enclosures that they become aggressive. To stop them from fighting with one another, their beaks and toes are cut off without anesthetic. Some are injected with saltwater to pump up their flesh for sale, simultaneously driving the salt load in some chickens to dangerous levels.
Layer Chickens
Layer chickens lay 90 to 95 percent of all eggs sold in the United States. Newborn chicks are placed on a conveyor belt where a worker picks each one up to see if it is male or female. Newborn males are placed in trash bags and suffocated, decapitated, gassed, crushed, or ground up alive. Newborn females are placed back on the belt. The next worker then picks up the female chick, holds her up to a machine’s hot iron that cuts off her beak, and then places her back on the belt. The beaks of these birds are removed because five to eight of them are crammed into fourteen-square-inch cages, cages so small that the birds cannot even spread their wings. Such close confinement, which averts their natural social order, causes aggression among the birds.
Turkeys are given less than three square feet of cage space. The ends of their beaks are cut off, and their toes are clipped, both without anesthesia. They are bred to be so heavy that their bones cannot support their weight. Moreover, they are so heavy that they cannot reproduce naturally. Consequently, they must be artificially inseminated.
Turkeys are loaded onto a conveyor belt. Some fall onto the ground instead of landing on the belt. Because workers are in such a rush, they rarely pick up those that have fallen. As a result, some birds die after being crushed by machinery operated near the unloading area. Others succumb to starvation and exposure. Inside the slaughterhouse, the turkeys are hung by their feet from metal shackles on a conveyor belt. Their heads are dunked in the stunning tank, an electrical bath of water.
CASE STUDY
Animal Rights Liberation Activist Gary Yourofsky
A few years ago, I sat down to dinner with a friend and was introduced to a man named Gary, who lived less than five minutes from where I was born. It took me about fifteen minutes to realize that he was Gary Yourofsky, the internationally celebrated animal activist with a YouTube video called “The Best Speech You Will Ever Hear,” in which he compares our current treatment of animals to genocide. The talk was recorded at Georgia Tech in 2010 and has been viewed by millions of people.3
Gary had his life changed in his early twenties when his stepdad took him backstage at a local circus. He saw the animals chained and caged, and he reacted strongly to their cruel treatment. At the time, he ate anything anywhere. He began researching the production of his food and clothes. He realized that an “animal holocaust” was being tolerated unnecessarily, as plant-based diets provided all the nutrition humans need, and faux leathers were available. He decided to become an activist and has since been arrested thirteen times in his crusade to help animals. Most famously, he set 1,500 minks free from a farm in Ontario and was arrested and denied bail for ten days by a judge who had just granted bail in only one day to a sex offender. He ultimately served seventy-seven days in jail before being extradited. Today, Gary is banned from five countries, including Canada and the United Kingdom.
He has since been speaking to school groups and has given over 2,500 presentations to more than 60,000 people in more than thirty states, usually at high school and college campuses.
After Gary’s 2010 YouTube video went viral, several animal rights activists translated it into Hebrew and posted it on Israeli websites. Plant-based groups and eateries are popular in Israel, and a buzz quickly developed. A website was created to popularize the YouTube video, and several vegetarian food manufacturers printed the link on their product labels. Gary was invited to speak in Israel and has since achieved cult status, with people recognizing and mobbing him on Israeli streets. Recent data indicates that over 15 percent of the Israeli nation is vegetarian (among the highest in the world). After Gary conducted a speaking tour of Israel in late 2013, dairy and meat sales fell by about 5 percent. Domino’s Pizza in Israel announced they will start serving vegan pizzas. The largest state-owned dairy has a completely dairy-free line of products.4 
Science Corner: Ethical Veganism and Canadian Law
Raise your hand right now if you are or plan to be a health-based vegan? Keep your hand up. An ethical-based vegan? An environmental-based vegan? Everyone should have their hand up unless you are dating a vegan and just in it for romance and a romp! Actually, you do not need to declare your main goal of following the Plant-Based Solution, and you likely will find that all three reasons (health, ethics, and the environment) are strong arguments for never eating animal-based foods again. However, research has pointed out the importance of having a basis in ethical veganism to maintain this voluntary lifestyle long term. For instance, if you think of a hamburger as Elsie the Cow’s ground-up thigh muscle after Elsie’s life of misery with repeated insemination, infections, and confinement for milk production, you are far less likely to eat that hamburger than if you are motivated solely by achieving your optimal weight and cholesterol.
One interesting study researched the impact of whether 246 vegans were motivated primarily by ethical or health concerns and how that orientation influenced their journey toward the Plant-Based Solution.5 The hypothesis was that compared to those following the diet for ethical reasons, those doing so for health reasons would consume foods with higher nutritional value and engage in other healthier lifestyle behaviors. Indeed, those citing health reasons reported eating more fruit and fewer sweets than did those citing ethical reasons. Other findings were that individuals endorsing primarily ethical reasons reported being on the diet longer and had a higher consumption of soy, foods rich in vitamin D, high-polyphenol beverages, and vitamin supplements (like D and B12) than did those endorsing health reasons. There’s evidence to support the claim that people who become vegetarian or vegan for ethical reasons stick with it longer. Ethical vegans also frequently transition from vegetarian to vegan sooner than health-focused vegans.
It may strike you as odd, but advocating for the welfare of animals—even if you have not emptied out animal factories like Gary Yourofsky—has been challenging. The powerful meat and dairy industries often have legislation protecting them from those who try to make videos that expose the cruelty within their factory farms. The good news is that ethical beliefs are now protected under Ontario’s human rights law as a form of “creed.” Ontario’s Human Rights Code protects people from discrimination based on their creed.6
The Ontario Human Rights Commission issued a much-awaited updated policy that defined creed as “non-religious belief systems that, like religion, substantially influence a person’s identity, worldview and way of life.”7 This would include a belief system that seeks to avoid causing harm to animals, like ethical veganism. The policy recommends that a person in a hospital facility who has a creed-based need for vegetarian food be provided with appropriate food by the facility. Other protections included are: (1) Universities and schools have an obligation to accommodate students who refuse to perform animal dissections because of their creed; (2) employees do not have to wear animal-based components of a uniform, like leather or fur, based on their creed; and (3) an employer cannot exclude a vegetarian or vegan employee by, for example, holding regular company events at a steakhouse.8
Veganism and World Religions
Lessons of mercy to animals and respect for the planet found in many of the world religions are just one of the many paths that may lead you to choose a plant-based diet.
Judaism: In an early chapter of Genesis, it is written: “I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon the earth, and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit; they shall be yours for food.” The Book of Daniel is also viewed as a bedrock of religious support for vegetarianism. When the prophet Daniel and three fellow slaves were in captivity, they were offered the king’s rich diet but refused and asked for only “vegetables to eat and water to drink.” This verse has led to both a ten-day cleansing program and the highly successful lifestyle change program at the Saddleback Church in Southern California.9
Jewish dietary law stresses avoidance of cruelty to animals, whether in the production of food or as beasts of burden. The Jewish dietary laws of kosher and their Talmudic guidelines strive to create a more compassionate humanity. Tza’ar ba’alei chayim (the suffering of living creatures) is a Talmudic law that prevents unnecessary cruelty to all animals, including pets and livestock, and imposes specific obligations for those caring for animals. The ethical treatment of animals is a core Jewish value. In general, Judaism permits the eating of meat, provided the animal is a species permitted by the Torah and is ritually slaughtered. At the same time, the Torah stresses compassion for animals, such as not causing them pain and relieving their suffering.
Christianity: Among the many branches of Christianity, the strongest teachings about diet come within the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The importance of the health-related data derived from this group has been presented several times earlier. Founder Ellen White was a vegetarian, and lacto-ovo-vegetarianism is officially promoted.10 Research on followers of this religion has been helpful in demonstrating better health and lifespan in those adhering to plant-based diets. There are groups of scholars that maintain Jesus was a vegetarian.11
Islam: Vegetarianism among Muslims is an active movement stressing kindness, mercy, and compassion for animals.12 The mainstream Muslims who eat meat often follow laws called halal, which allow “clean” animals that are properly slaughtered. Certain animals are not permitted, depending on how they are killed, and pork is also forbidden.
Hinduism: There is a strong tradition of vegetarianism in the Hindu religions stemming from the Krishna path and the reverence for the sacred cow. Vegetarianism is viewed as a daily sadhana, or spiritual practice, by many Hindus.
Buddhism: There is a strong tradition of vegetarianism among many Buddhists, and Mahayana monks are strict followers, as are many lay practitioners.13
Jainism: Originating about the same time as the Hindu and Buddhist religions, Jainism stresses the practice of ahimsa, or nonviolence and noninjury.14 Jains believe in abstaining from meat and honey, and harming any living creature—even insects—is avoided.
Whatever basis forms your path toward whole-food and plant-based meals, you will share a strong tradition with many ethically concerned individuals. In the words of Albert Einstein, “Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”15
There is no justification for what goes on behind the closed doors of CAFOs. In fact, Paul McCartney is quoted as saying, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.”16 Or perhaps most everyone—sadly, some people just do not care.
Do humans have domain over animals even if they are boiled, skinned, branded, and cut while alive? In debates of the health attributes of plant-based versus other diets like the LCHF, Paleo, Atkins, and even MED diet, the ethics of raising animals for food is rarely brought up because there simply is no ethical response to the issue of animal mistreatment. Many of the pro-meat experts hide behind the terms “grass-fed,” “free-range,” and “cage-free,” even though these labels often fall short of ensuring that the animals are treated with kindness.
Leading a life based on ahimsa, the Sanskrit word for nonviolence and compassion, can add nobility and purpose at any age. A Sanskrit phrase, heard mainly in yoga studios, is also worth learning: Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu means “May all beings be happy and free, and may the thoughts, words, and actions of my own life contribute in some way to that happiness and to that freedom for all.” That is what the Plant-Based Solution can offer to elevate a life to further meaning and purpose, starting with your journey on your new eating plan.
THE PLANT-BASED PLAN Learn about the Animal-Rights Movement
• Watch Gary Yourofsky’s free video “The Best Speech You Will Ever Hear” or any of his other videos available on Gary’s website, adaptt.org, which is rich in resources for eating and living a plant-based life.
• Become a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) or sign up for its newsletter: peta.org.