"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated." -Mahandas Gandhi

A symposium of scientists predicted in 1995 that energy shortages, exhausted land, scarce water and a doubling population will impose more of a plant-based diet onto America's dinner tables by 2050. They acknowledged that this diet, borne of scarcity, would "actually be a healthier one."

The entire life of a captive 'food animal' is an unnatural one of artificial breeding, vicious castration and/or hormone stimulation, feeding of an abnormal diet for fattening purposes, and eventually long rides in intense discomfort to the ultimate end. The holding pens, the electric prods and tail twisting, the abject terror and fright, all these are still very much a part of the most 'modern' animal raising, shipping, and slaughtering. To accept all this and only oppose the callous brutality of the last few seconds of the animal's life, is to distort the word 'humane'."

The truth of animal slaughter is not at all pleasant-commercial slaughterhouses are like visions of hell. Screaming animals are stunned by hammer blows, electric shock, or concussion guns. They are hoisted into the air by their feet and moved through the factories of death on mechanized conveyor systems. Still alive, their throats are sliced and their flesh is cut off while they bleed to death. Why isn't the mutilation and slaughter of farm animals governed by the same stipulations intended for the welfare of pets and even the laboratory rat?

An early '90s EPA report found that 95 percent of human exposure to dioxin, a known carcinogen, comes from consuming red meat, fish and dairy products. Later, chicken and eggs were added to the list. Dioxin builds cumulatively in fatty tissue. The only way to flush it out is through rigorous fasting or via lactation. When a batch of dioxin-contaminated soybean feed entered the food chain in 1997, the FDA set limits on concentration at one part per trillion. If all animal foods were held to this standard, it is likely that many would not be cleared for human consumption.

When the Clean Water Act went into effect in 1972, it was decided that agriculture, specifically, should be exempt. According to the EPA, of the 60 percent of rivers and streams considered "impaired," agricultural runoff is identified as the primary pollution source. Incredibly, five tons of solid manure--not including dead animals, used bedding and residual organic material--is produced annually for every U.S. citizen.

Chicken

Egg laying is an extremely private matter for a hen. A hen will normally seek a secluded place to lay. But the egg industry, which thwarts this and every other instinct embodied in the hen, keeps her crammed for her entire life inside a small wire cage with four to eight other cellmates. Imprisoned here, her body will be robbed of potential offspring she will never see.

Nearly all commercial chickens die during bleed-out after a circular blade severs their necks. They are not humanely rendered unconscious by the electrified bath in which their heads are first plunged. Chicken processors keep voltages there only high enough to immobilize any inconvenient flailing. Many birds miss both the low-voltage stunning and throat slitting. Every day 30,000 to 60,000 broiler chickens die in the scald tank that follows the bleed-out chamber.

The largest egg producer in the midwest--Buckeye Egg Farm--houses 7.1 million hens, who produce 4.5 million eggs every day out of two factories. The company, which was fined nearly $2 million for labor and environmental violations in 1997, actually plans to increase production. With four new facilities in the works, the total number of hens will come to 15 million within a 20-mile radius.

Legally, the term "free-range" is virtually meaningless. The federal government has only the vague requirement that the animals from which such meat is derived have access to the outdoors. This could mean one small opening for thousands of birds. There is nothing to prevent an animal so designated from being mutilated, crowded, drugged, transported and slaughtered just like any other factory-farmed animal. In March 1998, Consumer Reports found free-range poultry actually more contaminated with salmonella and campylobacter than ordinary poultry.

Every year, the U.S. poultry industry alone produces six billion pounds of manure and uses up to 100 million gallons of water per day.

What's the Beef?

Cattle disrupt ecosystems over half the world's land mass. In the last half century, alone, more than 60 percent of the world's rangelands have been damaged by overgrazing, the most pervasive cause of desertification. An article in the November 8 issue of TIME Magazine states that "In the U.S., livestock now produce 140 times as much waste as people do . . . from Indonesia to the Amazon, tropical rain forest is being burned down to make room for more and more cattle. Agriculture is the world's biggest cause of deforestation, and increasing demand for meat is the biggest force in the expansion of agriculture."

The European Union has refused to lift the ban on US hormone-fed beef (which constitutes 95% of the product) despite our threats and sanctions. The president of France recently sided with French farmers who trashed McDonald's outlets in protest.

Meat is the most inefficient form of food to produce. One fact for those who are not familiar with the waste required to produce meat: It takes 10,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of steak (for feed, washing, etc.). On average, you need 16 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of feedlot beef, 6 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of pork, 3 pounds of grain to produce one pound of chicken and 5.3 pounds of fish meal to produce 1 pound of farmed fish. That could pose quite a threat to the dwindling and endangered water supplies. Meat production takes abundance, then reduces it to scarcity.

When we calculate the cost of livestock production, topsoil degradation should be part of the equation. Huge amounts of land are required to supply feed grains, forages and pastures. About 54 percent of U.S. pasture land is overgrazed; erosion is the result. About 90 percent of U.S. cropland is losing soil to wind and water erosion at 13 times the sustainable rate.

Half of every butchered cow and a third of every butchered pig becomes either by-product material or waste. In addition, 920 million animals die on U.S. factory farms before reaching slaughter. What's an industry to do with all this death and gore? Call the renderer, straightaway! Recycling, they call it. Lips are exported to Mexico for taco filling; horns are made into gelatin; other parts are fashioned into everything from drugs to aphrodisiacs. Don't forget cosmetics. The rest is minced, pulverized and boiled down for more products. Some is dried to a powder to be mixed into animal feed.

Fish

Many vegetarians eschew beef and chicken but still eat fish. Hmmmm...The by-catch of fish is huge, so huge that fishing ships are creating a new ecosystem: entire flocks follow them to consume the tons of discards. For every pound of fish caught, five pounds are discarded. The reason for this is that boats only get licenses for a certain kind of fish (halibut, tuna, cod, etc.) so after they pull up a catch, they sort through the fish and toss the ones that they don't have a license for. By the time they do this, the unwanted fish are dead. Boats also have licenses for a certain amount of fish, so they want to get the biggest ones they can, and thus they toss the little guys, who are dead by the time they get tossed. You can probably foresee a problem here: if they kill the young ones, as well as keeping the big ones, the population of the species is likely to drop, since reproduction is likely to decrease as those young would-be's don't come of age (since they're dead!). So, eating commercial fish is problematic if we hope to have fish in our oceans in the future.

Fishing can do a lot more than just make a species extinct; it can strip an ecosystem of a vital component. Oyster beds, for instance, function like giant, natural water-filtration systems in the Chesapeake Bay. Once abundant, oyster harvests have dwindled to 1 percent of 19th-century numbers. Today it takes more than a year for the mollusks to filter the water in the bay. A hundred years ago the process would have taken place in a week.

More than 100 species of marine fish were listed by the World Conservation Union as threatened or endangered in 1996. Once-common species such as cod and halibut are being driven to commercial extinction. Fishers, using modern techniques such as sonar, drift nets, bottom-fishing super trawlers, longlines and floating refrigerated fish-packing factories are, ultimately, not only putting themselves out of business but rapidly destroying ocean ecosystems. The seemingly endless frontier that once was the ocean no longer exists. Early in 1998, 1,600 scientists from around the world declared that the oceans were in peril. They warned that swift action was imperative to prevent irreversible environmental degradation.