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i wanted to start today with an exercise. i’d like you to imagine that the day you were born, your entire life had already been planned out for you. in fact, someone else had even decided when you would be born. they decided who your parents would be and they decided for your parents to conceive you. they decided where you would live and how old you’d be when you were taken from your mother. they decided how you would be housed and how you would be treated. they decided what you would eat and when, and how much you would have to drink. they decided when you would go to the bathroom and where. they decided if you got to have any friends.
and they decided exactlywhen and how you would die. this may sound like something happeningin a faraway land or the distant past - a remnant of human slavery. if someone did this to people today, the world would erupt in justified outrage. but the thing is, most people today in this world, are playing the role of the monster every single day of every single year. the only thing that's different fromour imagined scenario and the everyday reality is the identity of the victims. when we replace the human victimwith non-human animals, suddenly it’s
no longer slavery, it’s lawful ownership. it’s no longer criminal, it’s protected by law. it’s no longer the works of a monster,it’s good business practice. and it's no longer sadism, it’s what needs to be done to feed the world. but to the animals whose eyes you just so brieflylooked through, they don’t care what species they are. they just know they are terrified, confined,abused, beaten, raped, separated from their family, and murdered. and they have a desire for life and love as strong as any of us in this room. all you have to do is go to a slaughterhouse - watch them fight to escape.
they know what is coming, and they want no part of it. this is not a contract they’ve entered into willingly. as yiddish author, holocaust survivor andnobel laureate isaac bashevis singer wrote, “what do they know—all these scholars,all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world? they have convinced themselves that man, the greatest transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. that all other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, and pelts to be tormented and executed. in relation to [the animals], all humans are nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal treblinka." my name is emily moran barwick. i’man animal liberation activist, an artist, an educator and a vegan. i created the youtubechannel and accompanying website, bite size vegan,
where i educate people about veganismthrough an array of video styles and subject matters. i want to preface this talk by saying thati’m going to be transparent with you and i’ll even tell you when i don’t know something. for anyone unfamiliar with the term vegan,vegans do not eat, wear, or use anything that came from someone else’s body. we don’teat meat, drink milk or eat cheese. we don’t consume eggs or honey. we don’t wear leather,wool, silk, or down. we don’t use products that were tested on animals or contain byproductsfrom their slaughter. we don’t attend circuses, zoos, bullfights, or any other event that exploits living beings for our momentary pleasure. now you may think this is an extreme way oflife. many people do. but i’d like you to
return to how you feel putting yourself inthe place of the animals. in all honesty, seeing what they are going through for a sandwich,a beverage, a purse, a coat, or any human pleasure, is eating plant based foodsinstead of paying people to perform sadistic acts for us really the extreme choice? if this feels heavy-handed, pleasestay open minded throughout this talk. i will be addressing issues other than ethics, aswell as including small and local farming, and issues specific to portugal. believe it or not, i am not here to force anyone to be vegan. i don't pretend to have that power.
and no one makes any lastingchange through force. i'm here to show you what's really going on every second of every day all around the world behind closed doors. i’m here to give you the opportunityto live the values that you already have. most people don’t want to cause the suffering and death of innocent beings. there's a reason that we pay others to slaughter our animals for us. most people don’t want to destroy the earth for future generations. most people want to feed the hungry people of our world. and most people want to live a long and healthy life.
far from being extreme, veganism is simply living in a way that's already in line with these common values. before we get into specifics i’ll tell youa little about my own vegan story. it's pretty brief. my mother tells me that i started refusing to eat meat when i was around 4 years old. that if i could tell it had everbeen alive i refused to eat it. now, this is pretty typical of children. activist gary yourofksy has often said that if you put an apple and a lamb, or a calf, or a chicken into a child’s playpen, they’re going to eat the apple and play with the animal. we have to be taught to consume their bodies and their secretions.
you don’t ever see babies pouncing on the family dog and ripping through their fur and flesh. we eat our animals cut up, cooked, spiced, glazed, and looking nothing like they did when they were alive. most people consider themselves animal lovers. in america, we love our dogs, and our cats, and our other pets, and we eat our cows, and pigs, and chickens. of course which species is acceptable for consumption, depends on where you are. one country will eat dogs, one holds cows sacred, one consumes pigs, and another shuns their consumption. the fact that who is and is not acceptable to kill varies so greatly by geography highlights the completely arbitrary nature of our distinctions. before we start, i’m going to throw out some numbers to help us
grasp the enormity of what we’re talking about. because it’s really difficult for us towrap our heads around incredibly large numbers, we're going to do a quick comparison. i want to makea note that when i use the terms million, billion and trillion, i’m referring to the short scale system, which differs from the long scale. one million seconds is 12 days. but a billion seconds is 31 years. and a trillion seconds is 31,688 years. so now that we’ve got a bit of a scale towork with, here are some figures: we're going to see what they apply to. the number of people who’ve died in allwars in human history is one billion.
and the number of chickens killed in the united states in 2013 alone is 8.6 billion. the number of people starving in the worldis 795 million. and the number of people we could feed withthe food that we are currently growing is 10 billion. we’re going to talk more about where that's going soon. the number of liters of water for frackingin the united states - that’s the water-based form of drilling that is very controversial with environmentalists - is 265-530 billion. the number of liters for animal agriculturein america alone is 129-288 trillion. remembering the scale - that is a huge difference. and we will be looking at global numbers as well. the percentage of all greenhouse gas emissions from global transport;
that's every car, train, automobiles is 13%. so of course the percentage of global greenhousegas emissions from animal agriculture is 51%. the number of humans that have ever existedin the entire history of our species is 107.6 billion. leaving the number of fish we kill globallyevery year at 2.8 trillion. as we can see, the impact of what we put inour mouths reaches far beyond our stomachs. as a species we are killing the planet, trillions of other beings, and ourselves. while eating animals may not be the cause of all of the evils in the world, it is certainly the most preventable and one that revolves around individual choice. that’s an incredible opportunity for everysingle person to take their own action.
you don’t need to form a union, you don’tneed to petition the government. you just stop eating animals, and stop using them. it’s perhaps the single most impactful decision that one person can make. this is why it’s so vital to know the truth. so that you can make decisions with facts, not preconceptions or cultural half-truths. we all have them. and i’m not here to take away culture, or take away religion, or political affiliation. veganism isn’t about changing who you are, it's about changing what you do. vegans come from as many backgrounds, races, creeds, cultures, socio-economic statuses, and religions as non-vegans.
all that unites us as a group is the refusal to participate in exploitation. i’m not saying this as a badge of superiority.like most people in this world, most vegans were raised in families and cultures whereeating animals is the social norm. many cultures have very strong ties to the meat, dairy and egg dishes of their region. we are taught that it’s just a part of life, that we have tokill animals to survive, that we need the nutrition from their flesh and their secretions. we’re taught that they were put here for us. maybe we’re taught that they don’t feel, or that they're stupid. undoing a life-long belief is no easy task.but in order to make a decision, in order to look ourselves in the mirror and ask ifwe are living the values that we purport to have,
we must know the truth. we must educate ourselvesabout what is really going on, not rely on what we’ve been told. we must make decisionsbased on facts, not fantasy. so let’s dive into some facts. i’ll startwith the environmental aspects of animal agriculture. i have a video on my channel that goes througha lot of numbers and figures. in short, we cannot sustain the way we areeating. despite what we learn from environmental protection agencies, shorter showers, recyclingpaper, and riding our bikes instead of driving is not going to save the planet. animal agriculture is the leading cause ofclimate change. as we saw, it’s responsible for up to 51 percent of ghg emissions comparedto the 13 percent of all global transportation.
it uses a third of the earth’s fresh water,up to 45 percent of the earth’s land, is responsible for 91 percent of amazon rainforestdestructionâ with 40-80 ares [1-2 acres] cleared every second. it is also a leading cause ofspecies extinction, ocean dead zones, and habitat destruction. the efforts we make to recycle paper, take shortershowers are rather insignificant in comparison. accounting for variation in production system,the global average water footprint for a single kilogram of beef is 15,415 liters/kg. if weadd in emissions, this one animal product alone is an environmental disaster. althoughbeef accounts for only about 30% of the industrial world’s meat consumption, it contributes78% of meat’s ghg emissions.
methane, for example, which is produced bycows in alarming quantities, is 25-100 times more destructive than carbon dioxide and has86 times the global warming power. additionally, livestock as a whole is responsiblefor 65 percent of all emissions of nitrous oxide. that's a greenhouse gas that is 296 timesmore destructive than carbon dioxide and which stays in the atmosphere for 150 years. it’s not just cows, though, that have suchan adverse effect on the environment. they are certainly one of the greatest offendersof animal agriculture, but by no means the only one. pig farming creates what are called lagoons.they are lakes of stagnant feces and urine. the ammonia emissions from these lagoons createswhat’s called fine particle pollution in the air.
it poses a serious health threat toneighboring communities, including decreased lung function, cardiovascular ailments and even premature death. the waste contains disease-causing pathogens, increases antibiotic resistance,and can seep into the ground water and contaminate local supplies.[see further citations in thelinked review] if we look again at water usage, a single kg of eggshas a global average water footprint of 3,265 liters/kg, meaning a single 60 gram egg takes about 200 liters to produce. the average footprint for milk is 1,020 liters/kg, anddairy cattle account for 19% of the total water footprint of all animal production in theworld . layer hens account for 7% of this footprint, and beef cattle account for a full third.
we can see here that, without fail, thoseproducts with the smallest water footprints based on weight are plant-based. but weightdoesn’t necessarily mean sustenance. still, global averages show that “when viewed froma caloric standpoint, the water footprint of animal products is larger than for cropproducts†with “the average water footprint per calorie for beef [being] twenty timeslarger than for cereals and starchy roots.†and with protein being the greatest nutritionconcern for people considering veganism, it’s worth noting that “the water footprintper gram of protein for milk, eggs and chicken is 1.5 times larger than for pulsesâ€with beef’s being 6 times larger, which led to the conclusion that “it is more efficientto obtain calories, protein and fat through
plant crop products than animal products.†but we don’t really need studies to tellus that eating animals requires more energy and creates more waste than eating plants.how can it not? eating animals is incredibly inefficient.we are filtering our nutrients, our water, our resources, through someone else’s body.globally, we’re feeding close to 40% of our grain to our food animals. how can thatnot be worse for the environment than simply eating the plants ourselves? the united statesalone could feed 800 million people with the grain that we're feeding to our livestock. that’s morethan the estimated 795 million people going hungry in the world today. 98% of the massivewater footprint that we just learned about
with animal agriculture, goes to feeding crops to the animals that we eat. i’m not suggesting that a global shift toveganism will automatically result in the proper redistribution of our crops, but it’s the only way that we can have the food to feed everyone, especially if wedon’t want factory farming and industrial agriculture. when it comes to this environmental and resourcetoll, many people point to small farms, sustainable practices, like grass fed beef, or free-range eggs. the thing is, we don’t have the land. there’ssimply no land for the number of animals that we eat every year. the amount of land thatit takes to produce 37,000 pounds [16,782 kg] of plant food will only yield 375pounds [170kg] of meat.
the land required to feed 1 vegan for 1 yearis 0.07 hectares [1/6th acre]. it takes 3 times as much for a vegetarian, someonewho consumes dairy and eggs but no meat, and 18 times as much for meat-eaters. you can grow 15 times more protein on anygiven area of land with plants versus animals. on top of all of that, studies show that pasture-raised cows emit 40-60% more greenhouse gases than grain-fed. i could talk about the environmental costof animal agriculture all day and we would just be scratching the surface. i did want to speak briefly to fishing andocean health before moving on. i published
a 17-minute video report encompassing themost recent research on the state of our oceans, so i’ll try to summarize some of the main takeaways. whether you eat fish and marine life or not,this matter impacts all of us. the ocean, or rather the phytoplankton in the ocean,provides somewhere between 50 and 80% of our oxygen and the oceans ecosystems store carbon in massive quantities. since we tend to go for the biggest fish first,only 10% of predatory fish species remain, which could leave the unchecked species tofeed on the ocean’s vegetation releasing the stored carbon. releasing just 1% of thisstored carbon will be equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissionsof australia.
we pull 90-100 million tonnes of fish fromthe oceans each year, with some sources even estimating 150 million tonnes. there is noway for marine populations to repopulate themselves. our industrial fishing methods are incrediblyinefficient, with some operations throwing 98% of their catches overboard, dead, becausethey weren’t the intended species. as i said earlier, land-based animal agricultureis the leading cause of ocean dead zones, which are areas in the ocean starved of oxygensuch that marine life suffocates and dies. and people think veganism is extreme? whenhumanity is decimating habitats, consuming land and resources, polluting the oceans,destroying the rainforest, driving species after species into extinction, feeding plantsthat we could eat to animals and feeding
animals to other animals that aren’t supposedto eat animals, all so that we can eventually eat the animals ourselves, all the time leavingan astronomical wake of destruction behind us. but of course as a consumer, we don’t see the trail. we see the pretty packages and the sleek advertising. we find comfort in the fact that most people eat the way that we do; that most people don’t seem to be concerned. and we continue to believe that this is the way it’s supposed to be. but here’s a takeaway from the environmental reasoning for veganism: we have reached a point beyond personal choice, beyond “you eat how you want to eat
and i’ll eat how i want to eat.†this is a global crisisand it’s not about you and it's not about me anymore. we say that children are our future, but what future can they have when we're eating the planet to death? the world cannot sustain meat, dairy and egg production. it simply can’t. we’ve seen that grass-fed beef consumesmore land and produces more ghg than industrial and factory farms. but a lesser-discussed aspectof this idyllic farming method is consumer cost. a study that interviewed dairy farmers inthe north of portugal asked them to comment upon a picture of pasture raised cows andcows living indoors. the farmers agreed that
the pasture dairy cows were ideal but notfeasible. some stated that they wouldn’t have the land, as we discussed, whileothers brought up the point that while consumers would prefer pasture-raised, they wouldn’twant to pay the extra cost. one quote from a farmer sums it up perfectly. he said thatit “isn’t about telling people ‘what is it that you want?’ it's about ‘howmuch are you willing to pay?’’ consumers want their animal products to behumane, they want them to be environmentally friendly and they want them to be affordable.but this is not possible. and farmers’ primary motivation, just like the larger agribusiness, is money. industrial agriculture and factory farming are taking over for a reason.
intensive farming makes production faster, larger and cheaper. it also by default, makes the livesand deaths of the animals even more horrific. however, i would like to emphasize that froman ethical perspective, the type of farming - whether small and family run, or industrialfactory farm - is not important. for the cow, the pig, the chicken, duck, turkey, for thelamb or sheep, they don’t know the name of the company or person enslaving them. theydon’t know what size the farm is or what country. they are just as robbed of theirrights and their lives regardless of the location, or the farm size, or the country. let’s go over some of the industry standardsfor animals. some of the details may vary
from country to country even location to location,but not as much as you may think. farm animals are usually labeled, or marked in some way so that farmers can keep track and clearly mark ownership. they may be branded with hot irons or havetheir skin frozen off. they may be tattooed and tagged or even have electronic transpondersinjected under their skin, or strapped to their neck or ankle. the important thing isthat they are clearly property. and they are treated as such. we breed and manipulate their genetics to grow bigger and faster, until every animal that we eat is still a baby.
if their bodies don’t conform to their owner’sdesire, they are altered at will. baby pigs have their teeth cut out, their ears notched,their tails cut off and their testicles ripped out, all without anesthetic. chickens, turkeysand other birds in the meat and egg industries have their sensitive beaks cut or seared off.cows have their horns cut or burned off and are also castrated without anesthetic. we say this is for their own good becauseif we don’t clip their teeth or cut their beaks or slice off their tails, they’llattack and chew on each other. of course we fail to mention that these behaviors are a stress response to overly confined, insanity-inducing conditions. if we didn’t put them in theseconditions, they wouldn’t react the way they do.
one of the most heartbreaking industries is dairy. most of us grow up thinking that cows are made to be milked. we may even think that they have a constant supply. an anomaly among mammals. but cows are just like us.the carry their baby for 9 months, just like we do. they lactate to feed their baby, justlike we do, and then they stop, just like we do. so to get a cow’s milk, cows have to be repeatedlyinseminated, which is a nice word for raped. the restraining apparatus used to secure thecows is literally referred to within the dairy industry, at least in america, as a “raperack.†so this isn’t a term that's dreamed up by vegans activists. once a cow gives birth,her baby is taken away from her,
and if he is a male, he is sent to a veal farm. he is tied down unable to move or locked ina cage where he cannot turn around before being slaughtered when only a few weeks old. veal wouldn’t exist without dairy. every cup of yogurt, every scoop of ice cream, every bite of cheese is tied to the death of these baby calves. and mother cows experience a horrific agonyall their own. cows bond intensely with their calves and mothers will cry for days when they aretaken. a former cattle rancher turned vegan when she witnessed her mother cows chasing the trailer as it took their children away. she says they cried for days, and only stopped when they lost their voices.
this is not anthropomorphizing. this is a mother’s grief and it’s utterlyheartbreaking to watch. after being forced into pregnancy after pregnancy,having their children violently taken away and getting infections from frequent milkings,the mothers of the dairy industry, their bodies finally give out when they're around 4 or 5 years old and are termed “spent.†allowed to live free of this exploitation, cows can live for over 20 years. but when their bodies give out decades before their time, dairy cows are slaughtered for cheap meat and pet food. on a lighter note, it’s rather absurd whenyou think about it. what made a human one
day decide that it was time to return to nursing?and why did they choose a cow? with all the mammals, they decided that a 700+kg animal was the one to nestle up to? it's a bizarre concept when you look at it from outside of our social customs. but this is what humans have done. we’vemade commodities and products out of individuals. when we’ve sufficiently altered them to fit our needs, we shove them in cramped cages or sheds. we deprive them of sunlight. wemanipulate temperature and light cycles so they lay more eggs, or we keep them confinedand unable to move so their flesh is more tender. and if they don’t serve a purpose or make a profit, we throw them away like garbage. nowhere is this more evident than in the eggindustry. chickens bred for laying eggs are
different than those bred for their flesh.this is another human-created specialization. because of this, the egg industry producesmillions if not a billion unwanted male baby chicks every year. males can’t lay eggsso they’re of no use. to “dispose of,†as they say, these babychicks, they are either painfully gassed, slowly suffocated in plastic bags, or they are ground up alive. we’re talking about the cute, fluffy little baby chicks. this is common practice in the industry andthe european union specifies maceration, meaning the live grinding, as the method of dispatching of chicks. they have to be less than 72 hours old - not even three days of life.
now as far as i can tell, the derovo group is thelargest egg producer in portugal. the pombal factory processes about 1.8 million eggs/day, and the mieres factory has a 3 million egg/day capacity. egg-laying hens are often kept in batterycages with barely enough room to move. we've bred them to produce eggs at an unnatural quantity and we alter their environment to promote even higher production. hens lose vital nutrientsevery time their body makes an egg. these high production numbers, coupled with the cramped and filthy conditions, leads to early mortality rates.
but luckily, all of the female chickswhose brothers were thrown into the grinders are there to take their mothers’ place. of course nowadays we have free-range andcage-free facilities. but in truth, they aren’t much better. birds are crammed into shedsrather than tiny cages. the council of the european union set a directivein 1999 that banned all “barren battery cages" to be replaced by “colony†cages, by 2012. in 2012, france, and eight other countries,including portugal, told the european commission that their farmers would not be ready to fullyimplement the new rules. another four countries, said they were unlikely to be ready.
the new regulation allows 750 cm2 of areaper hen compared to 550 cm2 in conventional battery cages. they had over 12 years to add 200 square centimeters. humane regulation doesn’t equal humane conditions.not only because of the industry’s noncompliance, but because there is no way to keep someonecaptive against their will in a kind manner. there is no way to take what isn’t ours humanely. and there is certainly no way to humanely slaughter. even the welfare of animals in the industryis in the interest of humans. the portuguese dairy farmers in the study i mentioned did express that animal welfare was important. however, this was “often expressed in termssuch as animals which are not faring well
are not producing well. the importance ofgood animal health and welfare was also mentioned in the context of the farmer’s own situation,with reference to the fact that problems with animal health and animal welfare make the farmer’s life difficult.†as the farmers said, while they recognizethat pasture raising their herds is a more ideal environment, they cannot do so and makea profit. and profit is always above the safety, comfort, and even the very lives of these animals. this is what happens when we make products out of living beings. money takes priority over life. you may be thinking that sure, large-scaleanimal agriculture is a problem. and no one wants animals to suffer the way they do inall the undercover videos that we see.
but that's in america, right? or china. or some far awayland. it’s not here. here we have higher standards. better regulations. well, we're going to takea look at the regulations. we’ve already gone over the laying hen accommodations. the eu also has stipulations for slaughter and supplemental studies, like the one thatfound that over 2.1 million of the 25 million cows slaughtered in the eu in 2012 were killedwithout any form of stunning. if you read enough of the council regulationsfrom the eu, there’s a level of absurdity with how much time, energy, detail, government money, and paperwork goes into finding just the right way to kill. and you only have to make it to the end ofa paragraph before you find exclusions.
very often poultry, rabbits and hares are excluded.if you’re killing an animal yourself for private consumption, or a cultural event,or a tradition, there are exclusions. fish aren’t even considered. reptiles and amphibiansare excluded. if it’s a religious killing, no stunning is required and regulations arerelaxed. if the slaughterhouse is a small operation, it’s not required to have ananimal welfare officer. the document recognizes the need to phaseout the use of carbon dioxide for pigs and waterbath stunners for poultry, but it doesn'tinclude this because they found that the "impact assessment revealed that such recommendations were not economically viable at present in the eu.â€
again, money prevails. you can pour through this document for allof the legal speak on how to make taking the life of a living being acceptable. i mean, it really is absurd when we step back and you think about it. do we have manuals on how to humanely rape? or how to compassionately kidnap? or how to ethically rob? of course not becausethose are oxymorons. they cannot coexist. but when it comes to killing animals, we willbend over backwards and create massive paper trails of regulations to feel good about whatwe are doing. again, i must ask, is veganism really theextreme choice here?
incredibly the regulation states that, “thereis sufficient scientific evidence to demonstrate that vertebrate animals are sentient beings.â€and that, “many killing methods are painful for animals. killing may induce pain,distress, fear or other forms of suffering in animals even under the best availabletechnical conditions.†and later “other stunning methods may notlead to death and the animals may recover their consciousness or sensibility during thesubsequent painful procedures.†they are quick to add that stunning methods,which do not result in instantaneous death will be “hereinafter referred to as simplestunning.†which is a lovely euphemism. now i’m not trying to pick on portugal or the european union.
my country has nothing to be proud of. we are just as cruel and justas convoluted in our attempts at justification. we just do it on a much larger scale. america provides many countries with an easy dismissal when confronted with undercover footage. i’ve heard “that only happens in america†more times than i can count. but i’ll tell you something. americans do the exact same thing. pointing the finger is a defensive tactic thatcrosses cultures and creeds. it unites us in our humanity, in a way. it’s either an isolated incident, or insome other country, or from decades ago before
there were better regulations. it’s never what is happening right now in our own backyards. i’m going to play a video now. portions of the footage, where the location is known, will be labeled as such. but it doesn’t mean that the same thing isn’t happening in other parts of the world. i trimmed down hours of footage into a 4-minute clip. i apologize that parts of the video will below resolution as that was how the footage was presented. it will not be pleasant, buti’d implore you to watch anyway. you can't make an informed decision without having all of the facts. if you feel you must turn away, i’d simply ask you to think on the question:
“if i can’t watch process, do i have a right to eat the product?†in my years of being vegan and speaking withmany, many non-vegans, i have yet to ever hear one reason that even comes close to justifyingputting sentient beings through what we just saw. not one. you cannot watch that and say that the animalswe kill for food don’t know any better. that they die peacefully and humanely. theycan sense the fear. they can smell the blood. and they fight. they fight to the end. and you can’t say that it’s happening in some far away place because it’s happening all over the world. the co2 chambers that you saw- those were the medieval devices lowering
pigs to an extraordinarily painful death ofburning from the inside out – that is seen as the most humane method of slaughtering pigs. and it is used here in portugal. the pig we saw in the traditional backyardslaughter here in portugal, wanted to live just as badly as those in the factory farms. our traditions do not alleviate their suffering. and our customs do not dictate the value of someone else's life. traditions can be wrong.and customs can be cruel. there are many atrocities in the history of humanity that we now look upon with disgust
and disbelief at what used to be commonplace. whether it’s bullfighting, or the circus,animals are not here to be enslaved, abused and tortured for our entertainment. the most absurd thing of all of this is that we don’teven need to eat animals. we benefit in every conceivable way from not eating them. i didn’t get into depth in the health aspects of veganism, but you can find resources on the page i’llbe leaving you with, along with citations to all of the studies and statistics that i’ve referenced. the good news is that being vegan doesn’t meangiving up taste or even giving up your favorite foods.
these days there exist vegan alternatives to virtually every meat, cheese, dairy creation, even eggs. and you can find recipes onlinefor making your own versions if the readymade alternatives aren’t available in your areaor are too expensive. veganism is the most powerful tool we havefor saving our planet, for improving our health when we eat health-consciously, and for regainingour compassion- for becoming the people we believe ourselves to be: good people. and good people don’t destroy the planet,leaving our children futureless. good people don’t kill newborn babies in grinders. good people don’t tear day old babies away from their mothers.
good people don’t torture, rape,and murder. and yet “good people†everywhere are doing all of these things with every bite. our treatment of animals is a global issue.cruelty knows no culture. it respects no country’s borders. but neither does compassion. we have the power to stop all of this. that’s the beauty of veganism. it happens on an individual basis. you are the change. you decide what goes into your body. you decide whether you want to continue consuming death, terror, and heartbreak.
you have the information at you feet. the responsibility now lies in your hands. you decide. and my hope is that you’ll decide to go vegan. thank you. [applause] subtitles by the amara.org community