Slaughterhouse 55: An Environmental Appeal
The meat industry is a villain relentlessly attacking the environment on multiple plains. Every year seventy-billion animals are born to be eaten by humans. Animal farming disproportionately contributes to global warming, deforestation, water contamination, and the depletion of natural resources.
Livestock have many of the same basic needs as humans, for in fact we too are animals. Starting with food, animals need nourishment. One third of harvested grain in the U.S. is fed to livestock. Proportionally, the land used for crops fed to humans amounts to four million acres while feeding our animals takes up fourteen times that- adding to a whopping fifty-six million acres of land. Such an investment is not even paying off.
Animals are not being fed according to their needs. You may have heard that cows are responsible for much of the methane in the atmosphere, the most potent greenhouse gas. Animals are fed conglomerations of corn and soybeans, giving way to excess bovine stomach gas- excreted into our atmosphere causing this overload. Tally up these numbers and suddenly 44% percent methane can be traced to animals of the factories, caused by what we feed our food.
Read more at: https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/meat-environment/
Animals must also drink. Disparity is stark when comparing the price of milk and meat in dollars versus gallons of water. One gallon of milk takes six hundred and eighty-three gallons of water to produce. Similarly, a pound of beef uses two thousand four hundred gallons of water. Aside from absorbing an excessive amount of water in production, the industry also contaminates our existing water bodies.
Read more at: https://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming/factory-farming-and-the-environment/
Of course, aside from gas excretions, animals shit solids. Our employed animals produce eight times the amount of sewage than we do, totaling to around 500 million tons of manure every year. Some of their manure is used as fertilizer, but according to an investigation by the Human Society, there is “…more manure than can be assimilated by available land…”. Excess manure is arbitrarily deposited on vacant land lots untreated. PETA even makes the following accusation, “Factory Farms dodge water pollution limits by spraying liquid manure into the air creating mists that are carried away by the wind.” This practice poses major threats to public health. It is also the way contaminants make their way into our waterways. These same toxins evaporate into the air when piles of manure are left to stink untreated, or intentionally sprayed. Nitrogen, a potent element in animal waste, poses a particular threat because it evaporates as ammonia into the atmosphere causing short-term and long-term health problems and even death. Of course, this is the product of negligence and apathy on the part of the factory owners but it is also their only response to the pressing demands of production they struggle to meet.
We need shelter while they [livestock] need space. In addition to the land harnessed to grow feed, the animal farming industry spreads out on one third of the occupiable land on our shrinking planet. Grazing over the land physically alters the lands ability to continue its natural processes. Once forest becomes pasture, there is no going back.
Read more at: https://www.humanesociety.org/sites/default/files/docs/hsus-report-industrialized-animal-agriculture-environment.pdf
https://climatenexus.org/climate-issues/food/animal-agricultures-impact-on-climate-change/
Continuous pressure and occupation of these pastures can have any of the following consequences, “…soil erosion, degradation of vegetation, carbon release from organic matter decomposition, loss of biodiversity owing to habitat changes and impaired water cycles,” according to the seminal book on factory farming, Livestock’s Long Shadow released by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. Actually, “…In the United States, with the world’s fourth largest land area, livestock are responsible for an estimated 55% of erosion and sediment.” We are designating land to fulfill our short term “needs” instead of understanding its impact on our long-term needs. Instead producing animals, we should be letting our ecosystems flourish in a natural way to promote biodiversity instead of threatening it.
Though the environmental impact of factory farming occurs on a global scale even a single individual has the potential to impact the issue. The average American eats 124kg of meat per year. Give that up, and you can save nearly 219,000 gallons of water in a year. Factory farming plays the game of supply and demand. The greater our demands, the more the factory farms animals are exploited as commodities, simultaneously traumatizing our environment. Our American diet robs the world of its biodiversity, soils our clean air, and wastes our already limited resources leaving a legacy of infertile soil for future generations. These crimes cannot be undone.
A warm world cannot be cooled, and methane cannot be eradicated. We can’t breathe out the manure we breathe in. Extinct species do not resurrect themselves and ecosystems do not regenerate on land that has been violated. We can however prevent the course of environmental destruction through our diets, all it takes is a little less meat.
