12 Important Reasons To Go Vegan Today

Source Free From Harm

Source Free From Harm
By Ashley Capps

1. Animals Want to Live; They Love Life and Fear Death.

We’re taught to think of animals raised for food — if we think of them at all — as an abstract category: “farm animals”— the nameless, faceless herds and flocks whose generic characteristics are merely recycled through an endless stream of indistinct entities. But farmed animals are individuals with unique personalities and emotions, just like cats and dogs. They feel joy, affection, and pleasure, as well as fear, grief, and pain. Like us, they form deep friendships and emotional bonds and like us they seek to preserve their only lives, which they cherish.

2. The Egg and Dairy Industries Also Cause Immense Suffering and Death

It is a common misconception that animals are not harmed in the production of eggs and dairy. In fact, the egg and dairy industries cause enormous suffering and kill billions of hens and baby chicks, and millions of cows and calves, every year.

In nature, wild hens lay only 12 to 20 eggs per year. But domesticated chickens have been genetically manipulated to produce between 250 and 300 eggs annually, leading to painful and often fatal reproductive disorders. More than 95% of chickens used for eggs are confined in cages so small they cannot even spread their wings, and the majority of “cage-free” and “free range” eggs come from miserable hens packed inside filthy warehouses by the thousands. Most hens used for eggs have a portion of their beaks painfully cut off to prevent nervous pecking in overcrowded conditions, and at the hatcheries where new hens are hatched to be sent to egg farms — including humane label farms, small farms, and backyard hen operations — 6 billion male chicks are destroyed every year by being suffocated or ground up alive.

Similarly, all dairy farming depends on the exploitation of female reproduction, and on the destruction of motherhood. Like all mammals, cows only make milk to feed their babies. On dairy farms, including small and humane label farms, calves are permanently removed from their mothers within hours of birth so that humans can take the milk intended for them. Male calves are slaughtered for veal or raised for cheap beef. Female calves spend their first 2 to 3 months of life isolated in lonely hutches, with no maternal nurturing during the time they seek it most.

Hens used for eggs and cows used for milk are also slaughtered when their production declines, at only a fraction of their natural lifespans.

Learn more about the hidden harms of eggs and dairy, even on so-called humane farms, at our features Eggs: What Are you Really Eating? and 10 Dairy Facts the Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know.

3. Science Confirms: We Have No Need to Consume Animal Products

A well-balanced vegan diet can easily provide all the nutrients we need to thrive. Government health experts worldwide are finally catching up with the large body of scientific evidence demonstrating that a vegan diet is not only a viable option for people of any age, but that eating plant foods instead of animal-based foods can confer significant health benefits, including reduction in incidence of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart attack, stroke, and some types of cancer.

In their official position paper on vegetarian and vegan diets, the American Dietetic Association— the U.S.’s oldest, largest and foremost authority on diet and nutrition— states that well-balanced vegan diets “are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases,” and that they are “appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.”

Learn more at our features Catching Up With Science: Burying the “Humans Need Meat” Argument and Vegan Diets: Sorting Through the Nutritional Myths.

Please see rest HERE

Order a FREE vegan kit: http://www.peta.org/living/food/free-vegan-starter-kit/

Take PETA’s Cruelty-Free Shopping Guide along with you next time you head to the store! The handy guide will help you find humane products at a glance. Order a FREE copy HERE

Searching for Cruelty-Free Cosmetics, Personal-Care Products, Vegan Products, or more?
Click HERE to search.

Click HERE to find out How to Wear Vegan!

Want to do more than go vegan? Help others to do so! Click below for nominal, or no, fees to vegan literature that you can use to convince others that veganism is the only compassionate route to being an animal friend:

PETA: https://www.petaliterature.com/

Vegan Outreach: https://veganoutreach.org/order-form/

Get your FREE Activist Kit from PETA, including stickers, leaflets, and guide HERE

Have questions? Click HERE

ALL lives matter
ALL have a right to live
animals are our heartbeats
and each beat has so much
to give!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson