Raising awareness about factory farming is a common theme here at Collective Evolution. Every single year, billions of animals are raised in heart-breaking conditions, only to be injected with antibiotics, painfully slaughtered, and in some cases, tortured.

What makes us think we have a right to do something like this? If you were taken against your will, seperated from your family/mother, tortured and killed, how would you feel? This is no different, and even most meat eaters will agree that such treatment is completely unecessary. Moreover, our daily consumption of meat has been linked to multiple diseases, and there is a large general consensus in the scientific community that a vegetarian/vegan diet best suits our health and nutritional needs.

“Studies are confirming the health benefits of meat-free eating. Nowadays, plant-based eating is recognized as not only nutritionally sufficient but also as a way to reduce the risk for many chronic illnesses.” – Harvard Medical School (source)

Many opponents of a plant-based diet like to point towards the past as a means of justifying eating meat, but fail to include the fact that when an animal was taken, it was done so out of necessity and to help the community. Not that there is a “humane” way to take another life, but some would say that when we did kill an animal, it was in as humane a fashion as possible. And it was done with respect, with understanding, and with great gratitude.

The “cave man” anology is also commonly reffered to, when the truth of the matter is that many who roamed the earth before us had a diet that was predominately, and in some cases one hundred percent, plant based. You can read more about that (and find sources) in an article we’ve previously published, HERE.

On top of that, the leading cause of rainforest destruction is our own food supply. We tear them down to make room for food crops and livestock grazing, and are doing so at an approximate rate of an entire football field’s worth of forest every single second. Every single day, close to 100 plant/animal/insect species are lost because of this practice.

Another startling fact is that the livestock business generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined. Did you know that 51 percent (or more) of global greenhouse-gas emissions are caused by animal agriculture? (Source (1)(2)(3)(4) at the bottom of THIS related article.)

“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”  – Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality

“I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now do the murder of men.” – Leonardo Da Vinci

To read more CE articles on the subject of factory farming, click HERE.

Can you handle the reality of factory farming?

Thanks to Mercy For Animals for the video.