Don’t Eat Animals; Delicious, Delicious

   

Animals

Brady Ehler, OP Opinions

I love animals, especially with barbeque sauce. And they aren’t
just delicious, they are also healthy; they contain a ton of
protein. It’s easy to stay healthy if you eat animals. Besides, it’s
sO convenient to eat meat; 90% of the menu items in 90% of
restaurants contain the flesh of at least one tasty critter.

Despite all these fantastic reasons to kill animals and put
them in our stomachs, there are actually some good reasons to
avoid stuffing your craw with the species of ‘the day.

The most obvious reason to give up meat is that it’s not
moral to kill things and eat them if you don’t have to. True, it
can be argued that it’s not moral to eat plants, because they
have feelings too (see “The Secret Life of Plants,” by Peter
Tompkins), but so what? Plants don’t have a neocortex, let
alone a cerebellum. Hell, they don’t even have eyes. Besides,
we have to eat something, and I for one have a simple rule
about that; the closer the organism resembles me, the less
acceptable it is to eat it. For-example, it’s fine to eat water
chestnuts; they have no moving parts, they have no nervous
system, and they won’t scream when you eat them raw.
Conversely, it’s really bad to eat human beings; because they
break all the rules that make it okay to eat water chestnuts.

I understand that some people view animals as. nothing
more than a food source and that’s okay, I get it, I was an
uncompromising omnivore for most of my life. However, I
think we all care about the global environment, or at. least
human beings, both of which are effected greatly by the mass
consumption of animal meat. Every year, in the US alone,
over 41 million cattle are transformed into TV dinners and
beef stew (wow, that’s enough beef to make nearly 78 trillion
McDonald’s hamburgers). It takes a lot of land to raise that

many cows, grazing on land that has to be cleared by slashing
forests.

Sure, there isn’t all that much slashing in the US anymore,
but as of the 90’s, the Amazon was being chopped down at a
rate of 7,000. square miles per year. That land is being cleared
for agriculture and livestock. Agriculture isn’t such a bad idea
(providing it’s for corn and not cocaine), but you have to feed
livestock a lot of vegetation. It takes somewhere between 7 to
40 times more land to grow a pound of meat than a pound of
produce. If all the land on Earth that is devoted to raising
livestock were converted to agricultural land, we could end
world hunger without breaking a sweat. Not only that, but we
could save the Amazon Rainforest.

I’m sure a lot of you are still not convinced it’s better not
to eat meat. Perhaps you think it isn’t possible to be healthy
subsisting on a diet devoid of meat protein, and that human
beings are meant to eat meat, so why resist it? Well, it is per-
fectly healthy to survive without meat. Almost everything has
protein in it: grains, legumes, vegetables, dairy products, eggs,
nuts, seeds. Basically, as long as you're not trying to survive on
lemonade, then you are getting protein. The trick is getting all
of the proteins, and this can be solved easily by eating a wide
variety of different foods.

Animals are delicious, there is no arguing against that to a
meat-eater, but is it really necessary to eat meat? Maybe it was
100 years ago, but now, we have alternatives, supplements, and
wide variety of different foodstuffs available to us. So no, it’s
not necessary to eat meat, especially with an ever-increasing
global population, and growing environmental concerns.

 

 

 

 

FT LLG
(BOARD, BOOTS & BINDINGS) «4

TAAL aa e

bec PURCHASE OF SNOWBOARD OUTERWEAR

ae ae 604-468-0404
#2 - 1449, PRAIRIE DR. PORT COQUITLAM, BC