Frequently Asked Questions about Veganism
What is a vegan?
What are the reasons to be vegan?
What is a factory farm?
How does eating dairy products harm cows?
How does eating eggs harm chickens?
What about eating fish?
Do vegans get enough protein?
What would happen to all the farmed animals if people stopped eating them?
Is a vegan diet healthy for children?
We were meant to eat animals, it's natural.
Animals eat other animas, why shouldn't we?
What's the difference between killing plants and killing animals? Where do you draw the line?
Indigenous people eat meat. Would you tell an Inuit to go vegetarian?
What about when you travel? It's way to hard to stay vegan when traveling.
I'm very athletic and need energy/protein. Aren't vegans scrawny and weak?
How can I help farmed animals?
What is a vegan?
A Vegan is someone who strives to eat, wear, and use no animal products.
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What are the reasons to be vegan?
Many people are vegan for ethical reasons-they don't wish to contribute to the suffering of animals. Every year in the U.S., about 10 billion land animals and 15 to 20 billion sea creatures are killed for food. The vast majority of pigs, cows, chickens, and turkeys sold in the U.S. are raised on factory farms, where they are tightly confined and live miserably short lives to produce meat, milk and eggs. Like we ourselves, these animals feel pain and don't want to die. Because people don't need to eat animal products to live healthily, most vegans believe it is unethical to take animals' lives needlessly and against their will.
Vegan diets are also very healthy, and are mostly low in fat and cholesterol yet high in fiber and essential vitamins and minerals. Plant foods are also naturally cholesterol-free, while meat, dairy and eggs have extremely high cholesterol content. Cholesterol buildup in the arteries is the main cause of cardiovascular disease, the number one killer in the U.S., taking more lives than the five next most common causes of death combined.* Scientific research also links over-consumption of animal products with other common (and deadly) ailments, such as cancer, diabetes and obesity. Visit www.nutritionfacts.org for more information on the health benefits of veganism.
A vegan diet uses far fewer resources (e.g., water, land, petroleum, etc.) than a meat-based diet. Animal agriculture causes over half of all human caused greenhouse gas emissions. Factory farms also pollute the air, land and water in our communities, endangering people and destroying habitats for wildlife. To learn more about the environmental impact of industrial animal agriculture, click here.
In addition, veganism can help alleviate hunger and malnutrition around the world. At any given time, there are about 20 billion farmed animals on the planet, which is more than three times the total human population. These animals eat many times the amount of food consumed by the world's human population, yet they can't produce nearly enough meat, milk and eggs to feed everyone. If people ate the plants now fed to animals, there would be more than enough food to eliminate world hunger. Learn more at A Well Fed World
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What is a Factory Farm?
About 98% of the meat, milk and eggs sold in America comes from animals raised on factory farms, also known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Factory farming has been developed over the course of the last half-century to maximize production and profit by crowding the greatest number of animals together into the smallest possible space. Animals on factory farms are treated not as living creatures, but as economic units in a mechanized production system. Illustrating this, one hog industry journal advises, "The breeding sow should be thought of, and treated as, a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine."
Some factory farms are like warehouses with cages stacked several levels high, while others cram animals together by the thousands into a single large area. Without exception, factory farms are designed to limit animals' movement, both to conserve space and so animals don't expend calories and lose weight. Severe overcrowding compounded with poor sanitation causes intense stress and spreads disease. The only way to keep animals alive under such filthy and unnatural conditions is to feed them massive amounts of antibiotics. They are also given hormones and genetically bred for rapid growth so that they can be slaughtered at a very young age, living out only a fraction of their natural life spans.
The majority of chickens, pigs, cows and other animals on factory farms don't have grass to walk on, hay to lie in or even access to the outdoors-ever. Most spend their entire lives confined indoors and only see sunlight when they are driven to a slaughterhouse.
Animals raised on factory farms live and die in fear, terror and helplessness. By going vegan, you can help end their suffering by refusing to support practices that hurt animals. To learn more about factory farming, please watch these videos.
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How does eating dairy products harm cows?
If you want to stop using the animal products which cause the most suffering, you might want to consider eliminating dairy and eggs first. The misery that female cows endure is arguably worse than that of their brothers slaughtered for beef. Dairy facilities are gigantic machine-filled building, more like a factory than a farm. During the milking process, if the machines are not properly maintained, they can send a painful electric shocks though the udder several times a day. These animals are treated harshly, with no room for sensitivity to their comfort or simple needs. All these Mom's are either pregnant or lactating, yet their babies are nowhere to be seen.
Like all mammals, female cows only lactate when pregnant. To maximize milk production, dairy cows are kept pregnant their entire short life. Each year, she will be artificially inseminated on what industry terms a "rape rack" or with the farmer's arm. A cow's natural life span is about 20 years. In this highly intensive farming, however, the stress on her body will diminish her milk output after about 3 years. She is then what the industry terms "dried up." It is more lucrative to send her to slaughter and replace her. Her body will be sold as ground beef.
To insure the highest volume of milk, the calf is taken away from her immediately after birth. Even in seemingly "humane" dairy production, to maintain a profit, cows are sent to slaughter and the calves taken away. This is also to avoid the "mother/calf" bonding. Mother cows have been known to break down the stall in an attempt to find their offspring.
Imagine for a moment being kept pregnant every year of your life, just to have every baby taken away from you and your milk pumped into machines. What happens to these millions of baby cows? A female calf will follow in her mother's hoof-prints, yet she will never know her mother or suckle her milk, being raised on a bottle formula. But what of the males?
A male calf born to a dairy cow is the wrong breed to profitably be raised for beef. His fate, unfortunately, is much worse. Veal is the soft, pale, anemic flesh of a calf. Veal calves are kept inside in a crate barely bigger than themselves. Chained at the neck, they can't even turn around. They are fed a liquid diet deficient in iron, so their muscles don't develop properly. These babies never see their 1st birthday. Many people recognize the cruelty in raising veal and will not eat it, yet are unaware of the intimate connection between the dairy and veal industries. Supporting one supports the other.
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How does eating eggs harm chickens?
Female chickens raised to lay eggs on factory farms live their entire lives in wire cages stacked upon one another. They are packed so tightly together that each hen has only a space about the size of a standard sheet of paper, not even enough room to lift her wings. Confined tightly their entire lives, the chickens often lose most of their feathers rubbing against the wire cage walls. Debeaking-in which part of the chickens' sensitive beaks are seared off with a hot blade to prevent them from pecking their cagemates to death in the overcrowded cages-is a common practice on factory farms.
Battery hens-those raised for eggs-are genetically bred so that each produces approximately 300 eggs per year-about 10 times as much as they naturally would. Yet these devoted mothers never get to raise a single chick. Upon hatching, male and female chicks are separated out. The females are raised in incubators to replace their mothers, and the males are quickly disposed of because they cannot lay eggs and wouldn't grow big enough to be raised for meat. They are usually left in garbage bags to suffocate or ground up alive for fertilizer.
When hens become "unproductive," they are either "force molted" (i.e., all food is taken away for two weeks so that they lose up to one-third of their body weight) in order to shock them into another laying cycle or sent to slaughter. Hens can live well into their twenties, yet they usually become "spent" and are slaughtered at around two years of age.
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What About Eating Fish?
Scientific studies confirm that fish have a complex nervous system and can feel physical pain.** Like mammals, fish feel pain as part of a biological survival mechanism: pain alerts fish to danger so that they can avoid it. Fish immediately begin to suffocate when pulled from the water into our atmosphere, and the sudden pressure change can rupture their swim bladder.
Industrial fishing is also environmentally devastating. Commercial fisheries locate schools of fish using satellite-tracking equipment, and cover miles of ocean with gigantic nets that trap everything in their path, killing millions of animals that are not even valued by the industry, such as sea turtles, dolphins, and sea lions. These indiscriminate clear-cutting methods have led to chronic overfishing, which has depleted fish stocks and made intensive aquaculture (breeding fish on "farms") increasingly common. Raised in overcrowded caged enclosures, farmed fish live in water infested with bacteria that forms from a surplus of excrement. When the fish are ready for market, they are dumped into large mesh cages where they suffocate to death. To learn more about fishing and our oceans, click here.
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Do vegans get enough protein?
If one animal could be freed from the factory farm for every time this question is asked a vegan, we would have no need to write this brochure. You've got to hand it to meat and dairy advertisers; they had a product to sell and that product was high in protein. They accomplished one of the greatest dupings of the public, scarring us into believing that you must have animal's protein (and lots of it) to survive, build muscle, have healthy babies and so on. It is simply not true. Plant protein is not inferior or even scarce. Plant protein is abundant and if you're eating a healthy, balanced vegan diet, you're getting plenty of it. In fact, most vegans get about one an a half times the RDA of protein.
Protein deficiency is virtually unheard of in the U.S., let alone in the vegan community. The only people in the U.S. with protein deficiencies are those with an eating disorder like anorexia/bulimia, or people who are extremely poor. Essentially, people who are not meeting their caloric requirements. If you're getting enough healthy calories, you're getting enough protein. It's that simple.
Also, there is no need to combine your amino acids by eating beans and rice in the same meal. The body “pools” them for you. The American Dietetic Association states that you can eat different amino acids at varying meals throughout the month and the body joins them together. So, there is no need to worry about protein on a vegan diet.
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What would happen to all the farmed animals if people stopped eating them?
Some meat eaters express concern that if people stopped eating meat, all the farmed animals would die of starvation or be set loose in the wild to destroy natural habitats. However, the economics of supply and demand make this scenario extremely unlikely.
Each individual who goes vegan both reduces the overall consumer demand for animal products and leaves the meat, dairy and egg industries less money to raise and slaughter animals. Industries must respond to consumer demand in order to remain profitable, so fewer and fewer animals will be raised for food as the demand for meat, dairy and eggs gradually diminishes. Animals raised for their meat are artificially bred and would not naturally reproduce in the quantity that they do on factory farms.
In addition, since the 1980s, sanctuaries have been established around the world for farmed animals. Many of the animals at these sanctuaries were rescued from factory farms and now greet visitors as ambassadors for their species. As people's concern for farm animals grows, sanctuaries will have greater support and more resources to help farmed animals. For more information and to find a farmed animal sanctuary near you, click here.
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Is a vegan diet healthy for children?
Yes. Research shows that a vegan diet can support children at any stage of life, and that vegan children are generally healthier than their meat-eating counterparts. According to the late Dr. Benjamin Spock, in the latest edition of his book Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care, "Children who grow up getting their nutrition from plant foods rather than meats ... are less likely to develop weight problems, diabetes, high blood pressure, and some forms of cancer. *** Visit www.keepkidshealthy.com/welcome/treatmentguides/veganchildren.html to learn about raising vegan kids.
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We were meant to eat animals, it's natural.
If it's so natural, I invite you to hunt your prey as other "natural carnivores" do. Use your senses, sniff out your prey, hunt with the chase, plunge your teeth into the jugular and eat the raw, bloody flesh.
Or you can go in the garden and pick a strawberry and eat its raw, juicy flesh. Which would you choose? Do you salivate and think about dinner when you see road kill? We are not carnivores. We can survive and, as we are learning, thrive on an all plant diet.
We are evolving. We now live in houses, use computers, freeze our food. Would any of this be considered "natural?" The more we learn about the abundant benefits of not eating animal products, the less "natural" they will seem.
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Animals eat other animas, why shouldn't we?
Actually, most animals on the Earth are herbivores or omnivores. The animals used for food by humans are herbivores. Carnivores are the minority of animals. We are actually, physiologically omnivores. Omnivore means option. We can survive, for a while at least, eating almost anything (our modern standard American diet proves this to be true.) It is a handy survival tool that has helped us to spread into the farthest, most inhospitable corners of the globe. Most other animals don't have a choice- we do. If we truly are the intellectually superior species, then we should act like it and cause the least amount of suffering possible to gain the greatest health for our bodies and the planet and adopt a plant-based diet.
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What's the difference between killing plants and killing animals? Where do you draw the line?
Would you prefer to mow a lawn, or hit a dog with a baseball bat? We know inherently through observation of behavior that animals have the capacity to suffer and feel pain. It is the same way we know a child feels pain. Pain is a lower brain stem function that all animals, including fish, equally posses. According to our scientific knowledge, it takes a central nervous system to feel pain. A cow or chicken or fish can suffer just as much as a dog. Unlike plants, animals scream when in pain and struggle to get away from oppression. A child knows to pet a rabbit and eat a carrot.
Some will argue that plants do feel pain. It has not been scientifically proven, but even if this were the case, a vegan diet would still cause the least suffering. If you eat animal products, you are actually killing more plants as the animals ate plants before slaughter. This wasted grain, that could be going directly to humans, is another excellent reason for veganism.
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Indigenous people eat meat. Would you tell an Inuit to go vegetarian?
No, we would not. Their climate, location and circumstances force them to eat meat to survive. But most of us are not in the Arctic. We have an abundance of plant foods to choose from.
Actually, our survival hinges on us, the first world, eating a more plant-based diet. Our livestock production spews greenhouse gasses, destroys rainforests, causes severe topsoil erosion, wastes vast amounts of water and pollutes what's left. The whole planet's survival hinges on how much we consume and destroy. A shift to a plant-based diet in the first world could vastly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reforest more than 600,000 acres of land in the U.S. alone and save the Inuit people.
Also, the majority of the world's 'indigenous' people, as in India and China for example, eat a mostly vegetarian diet.
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What about when you travel? It's way to hard to stay vegan when traveling.
Whether you are traveling in the U.S. or Internationally, you can always find vegan food. You might have to dig a little deeper to find healthy options, but if you are persistent, staying vegan while traveling can be rewarding.
In the U.S., almost every major city has a health food store and a Chinese restaurant featuring at least one veggie and rice dish. Most restaurants will create something for you if there is nothing vegan on the menu.
If you are planning a trip, do a bit of research before you go. There are excellent websites, that offer information on natural food stores and veg-friendly restaurants in an area (www.holycow.com). Some cities might surprise you and have excellent options.
Vegan treasures are hidden everywhere. Isn't that one of the joys of travel- to find unknown pleasures and experience new things? We can do all this and still remain free of animal suffering.
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I'm very athletic and need energy/protein. Aren't vegans scrawny and weak?
There have been and still are many great vegetarian and vegan athletes who have accomplished amazing feats with their bodies. You can build muscle on any protein, animal or plant. There are even world champion vegan bodybuilders!
There is no nutrient in animal products that can't be found in a superior plant source. Superior because plant foods are high in fiber, antioxidants and photochemicals, with no cholesterol or saturated fat, unlike animal products. Generally, when people are “feeling low energy” and think they need protein, they just need calories.
There is even a national organization for vegan athletes. The Organic Athletes host bike tours and other events. You can learn more at: www.organicathelete.com | www.veganbodybuilding.com | www.veganathlete.com
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How can I help farmed animals?
The best thing you can do for animals in your everyday life is to go vegan, or at least begin reducing your consumption of animal products. As a vegan, you automatically withdraw your support from industries that profit off of animal suffering and death. Factory farms will supply animal products cheaply for as long as people pay for them.
If you would like to take your compassion further, click here for more ways to take action for farm animals.
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