Northeastern Oklahoma Animal Helpers
Northeastern Oklahoma Animal Helpers
As a vegetarian and animal rights activist, I often hear comments to the effect that vegetarians are too pushy, and that it is not right to try push our beliefs on others (Although I never heard one of these people comment on how wrong it is for McDonald's to push their corporate junk food on us). After all, eating meat is a personal choice that does not affect others, right? There are many ways to answer this question. One answer is that the life of a sentient being must be (and is usually brutally) ended to produce meat. This does not satisfy many who believe not having fur, walking on two legs, being able to say "Hey, that hurts" or some other factor distinguishes us from other living beings to such an extent that we can claim a "right" to destroy the lives of "lower beings" with impunity. This article will therefore focus exclusively on the price exacted, both directly and indirectly on other humans by the continued consumption of animal products.
There are five areas where these costs will be examined: 1) Direct and indirect government subsidies provided through the use of tax monies; 2) Environmental destruction; 3) Direct and indirect subsidies provided by the "free market" system; 4) Health risks created by meat production and consumption; and 5) Opportunity and intangible costs to society.
Government subsidies can vary greatly, from direct support in the form of a monetary payment to the use of a regulation to force one party to unfairly bear the burden of another. While many of the costs discussed in this article fall into the latter, this section will deal only with direct subsidies, price supports, resource allocation and marketing subsidies.
The use of tax money to support farming operations has become commonplace. It is only reasonable to expect that those who work to produce food for our country should be compensated accordingly. While this is laudable on the level of family farms, two problems arise with these subsidies. One is that increasingly these subsidies are going to large corporations that dwarf family farms, and replace a system of agriculture that is closely tied to the land with a monolithic corporate culture that cares only about this year's profits. Second, vegetarians who are ethically opposed to the production of meat pay many of the tax dollars that are used to fund grants to these producers. The animal products industry is also given a helping hand through government price supports. For instance, the government will step in when overproduction has glutted a market and purchase the excess product, often at above market prices. The product is then usually put into the school lunch program, where children who cannot afford better are forced to eat the unhealthy excesses of the animal industry. The animal industry also gets subsidies in the form of cut-rate prices for resources. Animal operations tend to use tremendous amounts of water and fuel. A vegetarian diet consumes 1/25 of the land, 1/10 of the water, and 1/4 of the fossil fuel of a meat-based diet. Why is there not a greater price difference between these diets? Because the government uses regulations, subsidies and other measures to ensure that the animal industry receives these items at cut rate prices. For instance, grazing land should be leased to the highest bidder, but government officials work hard to try to ensure that only certain people get to bid on this land, and in fact have gone to court to prevent animal activists and environmentalists from bidding on it. That is, government bureaucrats are working hard to ensure that the U.S. government gets lower price for a public resource, while at the same time ensuring that only those who are going to inflict environmental damage will get that resource.
Marketing subsidies are another way in which the government provides a benefit to the animal industry. The USDA was first established when Abraham Lincoln was president. When it was established it had two main functions. One was to provide guidelines to eating a healthy diet. The second mission of the USDA was to promote the consumption of US agricultural products. In 1862 the conflict between these missions was slight, as most citizens faced the problems of hunger and lack of diversity in their diets, and the science of nutrition was not nearly as advanced as it is today. We now know that a conflict clearly exists between the goal of selling more of certain products and of promoting optimum health in the American population. Despite that fact, we continue to hold on to an antiquated system whereby an official who is charged with increasing sales of a certain product is at the same time charged with determining whether it is healthy. Thus, every few years we are presented with a food pyramid, or other guide to eating, that is influenced just as much by politics as it is by good science. And, at the same time that we are faced with serious health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, and obesity, we have government employees overseeing quasi-governmental programs aimed at increasing consumption of eggs, meat and whole milk products.
As discussed above, ranchers get the opportunity to use rangeland at dirt-cheap prices. The requirements for protecting this land are slight, and overgrazing is common. Cattle grazing often destroys not only the diversity of plant life on the land grazed, but also destroys the viability of streams in the vicinity.
Water pollution is a theme that runs not only through grazing operations, but is also more commonly being seen as a result of high-intensity confined animal operations. These are operations where animals, they may be pigs, chickens or veal calves, are crammed into tiny spaces to create an "efficient" factory-like operations. The animals may not even be able to turn around, and will come into contact with the humans who are raising them for only a few minutes a week. These operations produce an incredible amount of manure, far exceeding the human population.
Add to this the odor and resource use described earlier, and it becomes apparent that vegetarians, and generations to come, are being forced to bear a terrible environmental burden.
In fact, the Union of Concerned Scientists ranked meat eating as second, only behind the personal automobile, in terms of the environmental destruction it causes.
Many of the subsidies that meat eaters gain from are provided by the "free market" system. One of the clearest of these is in the area of insurance. Long ago insurers began charging different rates for smokers and nonsmokers. This was the result of the clearly different disease and mortality rates suffered by the two groups. This has never been done in the case of vegetarians and non-vegetarians, despite evidence that clearly shows that vegetarians live an average of anywhere between six and twenty years longer than meat eaters, and have far lower rates of heart disease, obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and cancer. Insurance being almost a necessity, this forces vegetarians to pay for the health results of other peoples bad habits.
There are many health risks that are created as a result of meat consumption that affect vegetarians. One of these is contamination from meat or animal sources that come into contact with vegetarians. For instance, a knife used to cut meat in a restaurant could be used at the salad bar without being properly cleaned, a child exposed to contaminated meat could use a public swimming pool, or run-off from a farm could enter a well. All of these examples come from actual cases where vegetarians contracted e. coli. All e. coli can be traced back to cow manure.
Another risk to vegetarians is the result of antibiotic resistance that is created by the overuse of antibiotics in intensive farming operations. In an effort to boost growth rates, and prevent disease, farm animals are indiscriminately fed massive doses of antibiotics. This also occurs because individualized veterinary care is viewed as inefficient. The overuse of antibiotics eventually creates supergerms that are resistant to their effects. As a result medical care becomes more difficult and expensive. And again, vegetarians pay the price for an effect caused by meat consumption.
Vegetarians also run a risk from unknown byproducts. In an effort to be more profitable, animal industries have found a market for almost everything except the "moo." This has led to the eruption of mad cow disease in Europe. Industry claims are that it has not appeared here in the United States. While the risk of catching this disease is slight, the specter of its inevitable and brutal death is not something that vegetarians should have to contemplate. Unfortunately this not the case, as the byproducts of animals may be in anything from pills to toothbrushes. And as was demonstrated by McDonald's, beef tallow may be placed into foods with the label "natural flavors" without the necessity of telling consumers the actual source of the flavor. Lax regulations, and the nonexistence of labeling requirements for animal derived products, mean that vegetarians could easily and unwittingly be exposed to mad cow disease.
Many people labor under the false assumption that the consumption of animals results in a net increase in the amount of food available for humans. While this may have been true in some instances, for example when hunted animals are a supplement to farmed crops, this does not describe the modern food production system. Most animal derived foods in the United States are produced by feeding grains (often mixed with rendered animals) to animals in high intensity confined feeding operations. Since animals must exert a certain amount of energy just to live, and inefficiencies cannot be avoided, the result is that the production of a pound of beef typically requires anywhere from 11 to 17 pounds of grain. Now, world hunger is a complex problem caused by multifarious political and social factors, so I am not saying that it can be solved by the adoption of a vegetarian diet. But what is true is that the adoption of a vegetarian diet by a majority of people in this country would free up resources that would go a long way towards feeding the hungry of the world.
Other costs to society may not be so well defined, but they exist nonetheless. An example of this is the loss of compassion. This is the result of instilling our children with the belief that the brutal killing of an animal is acceptable as long as you derive some sort of momentary pleasure from it.
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